??? Test specification and management tool. (Otherwise you will not be able to specify tests unambiguously
nor show that some bug has been fixed. It will be impossible to specify regression tests,
and lots of clever test ideas will be lost because there will be no way to trap them.)
??? Separation from the development environment so that your test environment is as much like the
end users??™ as possible. (Otherwise you??™ll have ??” for example ??” the same clutter of unused .dlls
etc. that the developers have, which masks from them the bugs suffered by the users who don??™t
have the same .dlls. When you are system testing it must be impossible for anyone other than
7 Dear reader, you think this is obvious? True. No one would be so silly? False.
Test Planning and Management 61
yourselves to affect the test environment. Thus it must be impossible for developers to terminate
testing of a client/server release by simply changing the server software.)
??? Reasonable time to test in. If you are having releases of software for system testing in less than
every two weeks, then something is seriously wrong with your test-and-build cycle. The usual
excuse is ???we need to know if the fixes we have applied work.??? The answer to that is either ???test:
them yourself, and don??™t hand them over to us until you are sure that they do??? (this makes people
very cross because they thought that was your job) or if they want you to test fixes (as opposed
to systems) then you will either need an extra member of staff to work with a developer team or
you will need to reorganize how you work.
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