Overview

The purpose of the Test workflow is to verify and validate the quality and correctness of your system. During the Elaboration phase, your goals are to stress test the technical prototype, to inspect and/or review your key artifacts (requirements model, design model, software architecture document), and to provide your test results as input into your project viability assessment at the end of the phase.

There are several important best practices that you should apply with respect to the test workflow. First, recognize that if you can build something, you can test it; you can inspect requirements, review your models, test your source code. In fact, I would go so far as to claim that if something isn t worth testing, then it likely isn t worth developing. Second, recognize that silence isn t golden, that your goal is to identify potential defects, not to cover them up. To be successful at testing you need to have the right attitude: that it is good to test and that it is even better to find defects.

If it isn t worth testing, then it isn t worth creating.

Third, you want to test often and test early. There are two reasons for this: a) we make most of our mistakes early in the life of a project, and b) the cost of fixing defects increases exponentially the later they are found. Technical people are very good at technical things such as design and coding that is why they...