| 1: | What's the difference between a component and a peripheral? |
| A1: | Generally, a component is a hardware device internal to a PC. A peripheral is external to the PC. The lines can become blurry, though, depending on the type of hardware. |
| 2: | How can you tell if a bug you find is a general problem or a specific configuration problem? |
| A2: | Rerun the exact same steps that revealed the bug on several different configurations. If the problem doesn't occur on those, it's very likely a configuration bug. If it occurs on the different configurations, it's likely a general problem. Be careful, though. It could be a configuration problem across an entire equivalence class. For example, it's possible that the bug shows up only on laser printers, but not inkjet printers. |
| 3: | How could you guarantee that your software would never have a configuration problem? |
| A3: | This is sort of a trick question. You'd need to ship the hardware and software together as one package, the software would only work on that hardware, and the hardware would have to be completely sealed, not having a single interface to the outside world. |
| 4: | Some companies purchase generic hardware and put their names on it, selling it as their own. You'll often see this on lower-priced peripherals sold in computer superstores. The same "cloned" peripheral might be sold under different names in different stores. True or False: Only one version of a cloned sound card needs to be considered when selecting the configurations to test. |
| A4: | It depends. Typically, a cloned hardware device is mechanically and electrically identical to its brothers and sisters. Often they are 100 percent functionally equivalent, but sometimes the firmware or device drivers are different, allowing one device to support additional or different features than the others. In the case of this sound card, you would need to research how different or similar the sounds cards are that you plan to test before deciding on your equivalence classes. |
| 5: | In addition to age and popularity, what other criteria might you use to equivalence partition hardware for configuration testing? |
| A5: | Region or country is a possibility as some hardware devices such as DVD players only work with DVDs in their geographic region. Another might be consumer or business. Some hardware is specific to one, but not the other. Think of others that might apply to your software. |
| 6: | Is it acceptable to release a software product that has configuration bugs? |
| A6: | Yes, probably. You'll never be able to fix all of them. As in all testing, the process is risk based. You and your team will need to decide what you can fix and what you can't. Leaving in an obscure bug that only appears with a rare piece of hardware is an easy decision. Others won't be as easy. |
