Introduction

The purpose of the Test workflow is to verify and validate the quality and correctness of your system. The main activities focus on the validation of your requirements, design, and implementation models. By testing early in the lifecycle in the Unified Process (you test during every iteration of the Construction phase), you help reduce the risk of project failure by identifying potential problem areas to be addressed. You also help to reduce overall development costs because experience shows that the earlier you detect an error, the less expensive it is to fix. Finally, your efforts during the Test workflow help to provide input into your project viability assessment, an important activity of the Project Management workflow (Chapter 2).

Test early and test often.

Figure 6.1 depicts the solution to the Test In The Small process pattern (Ambler, 1998b), comprised of techniques of the Full Lifecycle Object-Oriented Testing (FLOOT) methodology described in Chapter 5. Testing in the small focuses on the validation of your project artifacts while you are developing them: the testing of your models, documents, and source code. Testing in the large (the validation of your system once it is ready to be deployed to your user community) is covered in Volume 4 in this series. The importance of the Test In The Small process pattern is that it indicates there is a wide variety of testing techniques that you can apply to validate your work during the Construction phase. Table 6.1 summarizes the FLOOT techniques for validating...