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At the risk of stating the obvious, you’ll need to use your judgment here; not all of these categories will be necessary (or even useful!) to include in all of your sets of tests.

An overview of variation ideas

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 “How to handle Expected Results” article).

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Hardware configuration inputs could include:

• Manufacturer: Dell, Lenovo, Apple
• Processor: Intel, AMD
• Age: manufactured within last 2 years, manufactured 2 or more years ago

Software configuration inputs could include:

• Operating System: Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Mac OS
• Browser: IE10, IE11, Firefox, Chrome, Safari
• Java settings: JavaScript enabled, JavaScript disabled
• Cookies: cookies enabled, cookies disabled

Channel inputs could include:

• Channel: typical web transaction, typical web transaction, phone call center (Note: double-weighting ‘typical web transaction’ will make it show up twice as often as ‘phone call center’)

Additional Environmental Variations involve file types and storage locations

• Flight schedule information for flights is stored: Database Huey, Database Dooey, Database Louie
• Frequent Flier Mileage data stored in: United database, (Frontier Airlines database; not yet transferred into post-merger database), N/A

User Variations

User Variations relate to how different people might navigate through the System Under Test based on their particular habits as computer users. They can also include, as in the case of an “Admin User” with special rights, the particular features of the system that they have available to them based on the kind of user that they are.

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