True or False: All software must undergo some level of compatibility testing.
A1:
False. There will be a few rare, standalone, proprietary first versions of software out there that don't interact with anything. For the other 99 percent of the world, though, some level of compatibility testing will be necessary.
2:
True or False: Compatibility is a product feature and can have different levels of compliance.
A2:
True. The level of compatibility that your software has is based on your customers' needs. It may be perfectly fine for a word processor to not be compatible with a competitor's file format or for a new operating system to not support a certain class of gaming software. As a tester, you should provide input to these decisions by determining how much work would be involved in checking that compatibility.
3:
If you're assigned to test compatibility of your product's data file formats, how would you approach the task?
A3:
Research whether your program follows existing standards for its files. If so, test that it meets those standards. Equivalence partition the possible programs that would read and write your program's files. Design test documents with representative samples of the types of data that your program can save and load. Test the transfer of these files between your program and the other programs.
4:
How can you test forward compatibility?
A4:
Testing forward compatibility is toughafter all, how can you test against something that doesn't exist yet? The answer is to make sure that what you're testing is thoroughly and carefully defined to the point that it could be deemed a standard. That standard then becomes the means for assuring that what you're testing is forward compatible.
