Fivefold Testing System.

Fivefold testing System.

This blog post is about five fold testing dimensions that can be used by a tester to get the required Information from the product under test. This post is very brief and limited to non description of the terms that Are mentioned. Each of these dimensions can be isolated and used or used in combination with other dimensions to find failure Behaviours.

There are five dimensions in this system-Tester, coverage, potential problems, activity based dimension and evaluation based dimension. Each of this  one, has its own context and meaning associated. Tester dimension is related to information about the person who is performing testing. Coverage is about identifying areas to be tested. Potential problems are related to risk areas that are relevant to system under test. Activity based dimension relates to information about how a tester test his app.Finally,evaluation is about knowledge base related to make judgement about information we receive from the product. Each of these dimensions has many techniques linked with it.

People based testing is about information on who does testing. Some common techniques used in this dimension  can be user based, subject matter expert, customer, test team; external user .Coverage based dimension is used to focus on identifying areas to be tested. For instance, popular ones in this dimension could be spec based, requirement based, configuration, logic, state transition, combination, domain, function, menus, constraint based.

Problem based dimension is used to identify risk areas in the product/service. It could be very useful to find out risk Areas  related  to computation,storage,input,output,security.There can be many more relevant techniques associated with this dimension. Activity based dimension is concerned about how the tester tests. For instance this dimension deals with techniques like (to name a few)explore,scripted,manual,regression,load,performance ,scenarios,smoke test.

Evaluation based techniques can be used as a knowledge base to judge about testing. Some techniques that can be used like self-verifying data, oracles, and heuristic oracles, specifications, saved results .There are various artifacts that can be helpful in applying these dimensions to our app. Some of the important ones that are used are test matrix, all pairs, and trace matrix.

Finding right balance from this dimensions is a easy task provided we start doing it.However,this blog post gives a very simplistic view point of the five fold testing system.