Summary

It doesn't matter what weight your project is; you need a test inventory. It will help you at every stage of the test effort. In this chapter, I have shown you two examples of preliminary test inventories. We learned a great deal just assembling the preliminary test inventories. Neither one has a single test attached to it yet, and still it is valuable from the very beginning.

When you are building your test inventory, start with the requirements. Even if you don't have formal requirements, you can list what the product is supposed to do.

Be sure you identify and list the environments that you will have to test. In the heavyweight example, we needed to do a lot of planning to integrate the various projects in their test systems. But once there, the systems were fairly static. For example, we didn't need to test one application against four different RDBMS products. If you are working on a lightweight project, like a Web-based application, you will be more concerned with listing how many RDBMS products you need to test against. Remember, the number of possible combinations of hardware and software, users, and configurations often is larger than all other tests combined.

The product of the interview process is a mature, prioritized test inventory that includes the entire system. Ideally, it is built with the input of all the participants. The way you plan and conduct your interviews is a very important step in building a good inventory and getting an accurate prioritization of the items on it. The test inventory and its prioritized test items are used to build cost, sizing, and scheduling estimates during the planning phases. During the test effort, the test inventory becomes the test repository and test metrics database.

Expect some surprises and be ready to act on what you learn. It could give you the opportunity to add value early in the planning stages of the test effort-long before any testing is being done.

And finally, remember, integration is a matter of timing. Planning is probably not as useful as planning and rehearsing.

In Chapter 8, I show you the tools I use to construct my test inventories and automate my metrics calculation. As you will see, you probably already have these tools.