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Learn how to identify & evaluate Parameter candidates in your systems under test and how to optimally include them in your DesignWise plansTest Case Designer models.

When test designers testes struggle to use DesignWiseTCD, the most common reason is identifying what factors & ideas should be included in the “Parameters” screen. To help address this challenge, this article describes several categories of variables that are often useful to include in software tests.

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Variables for software tests can be described in these general categories. It is important to remember that when you’re entering variables into the “Parameters” screen, you should include test inputs only. You should not include outcomes or expected results (as a general rule; we will talk about exceptions in the “Test Design Principles” category of articles“How to handle Expected Results” article).

Environmental Variations

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Deciding whether to include a specific test idea often comes down to a judgment call by the test designer using DesignWiseTCD.

INCLUDE – If you have reason to believe that including a test input is likely to matter and it would not take much extra time to vary that idea in each of the tests in your test set, then include it. An example: if you’re testing a transactional web application and prior releases have had quite a few defects associated with the IE10 browser, include “Browser Type” as a Parameter and “IE10” as one of your Values.

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EXCLUDE – Conversely, if you suspect that a particular test idea is not going to make any difference and that variation would take considerable time to include in each of your tests, then do not enter those into the “Inputs” “Parameters” screen of DesignWiseTCD. An example: as pointed out by James Bach, defects have been triggered by blocked cooling vents above servers on extremely rare occasions . This caused a server to overheat. Even so, it would rarely be sensible to invest the time necessary to test out multiple test scenarios with overheated servers on a given set of tests.

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Your ability to make judgment calls will increase as you gain experience. When you’re experimenting, don’t be afraid to add a few more test ideas into the scope of your test sets than you’re used to. You will notice that when you design tests with DesignWiseTCD, you can include more test ideas in the scope of your tests than you’re used to including. That’s because:

• You will often find surprising defects when you add variation to your tests, yet adding the variation to your tests often hardly takes any time at all.
•  Adding a Parameter with a few Values takes only a few seconds on the “Inputs” “Parameters” screen of DesignWiseTCD.
•  Finally, unlike when you select and document tests by hand, generating the tests with the newly-added test ideas won’t add noticeably more test documentation time; the tests generated by DesignWise TCD will all automatically include that test idea.
•  Provided you keep the number of Values per Parameter small, you usually won’t increase the number of tests that DesignWise TCD will generate.