Case Studies

They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . . Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently.

— Mariann Simms

Why Case Studies?

Two case studies are provided in the appendices of this book. Appendix A describes "Brown & Donaldson," an online brokerage firm. Appendix B describes the "Stateless University Registration System." Examples from these case studies are used to illustrate the test case design techniques described in this book. In addition, some of the book's exercises are based on the case studies. The following sections briefly describe the case studies. Read the detailed information in Appendix A and B when required.

Brown Donaldson

Brown & Donaldson (B&D) is a fictitious online brokerage firm that you can use to practice the test design techniques presented in this book. B&D was originally created for Software Quality Engineering's Web/eBusiness Testing course (for more details see http://www.sqe.com).

Screen shots of various pages are included in Appendix A. Reference will be made to some of these throughout the book. The actual B&D Web site is found at http://bdonline.sqe.com. Any resemblance to any actual online brokerage Web site is purely coincidental.

You can actually try the B&D Web site. First-time users will need to create a BDonline account. This account is not real—any transactions requested or executed via this account will not occur in the real world, only in the fictitious world of B&D. Once you have created an account, you will bypass this step and login with your username and password. While creating a new account you will be asked to supply an authorization code. The authorization code is eight 1s.

This Web site also contains a number of downloadable documents from the B&D case study, which can be used to assist you in developing test plans for your own Web projects.

Stateless University Registration System

Every state has a state university. This case study describes an online student registration system for the fictitious Stateless University. Please do not attempt to cash out your stocks from Brown & Donaldson to enroll at Stateless U.

The document in Appendix B describes the planned user interface for the Stateless University Registration System (SURS). It defines the user interface screens in the order in which they are typically used. It starts with the login screen. Then it provides the data base set-up fields, the addition/change/deletion of students, the addition/change/deletion of courses, and the addition/change/deletion of class sections. The final data entry screen provides the selection of specific course sections for each student. Additional administrative functions are also defined.