6.6 Error Handling

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In this domain of testing, there are three key factors to consider: prevention, detection, and recovery. Taking adequate steps to prevent errors will certainly help ensure that you have a happy user community, but how do you prevent errors if they cannot be detected by the program before the user suffers the consequences? Have you and your team taken the time to investigate and account for every possible keystroke, input, and data type that a user could enter? Really think about this while you are still in the design phase and again during the initial development of the test plans, because it can come back to haunt you for many, many build and retest iterations. Finally, if an error does occur, what can be done to get the program back to the state of usability it was in before the error occurred?

Most of the errors found in this domain are the result of inadequate design, poor programming practices, and poor testing. Poor programming practices include coding only the method of achieving the desired results without accounting for user error, mistakes in input, validation errors, and so on. All programmers know how to develop data validation checks and usually try to put them off until they get the code working. Making data validation a requirement bumps the priority of doing this work up a notch on the list of things the programmer has to do. Poor testing is epitomized by Test Teams failing to account for these types of factors in the design and construction of the product test plans and test cases.

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