relating to all
the applications to be cared for, from wherever the organization hid them and then spend the time
assembling what can be found. Let him use a notation like the one in section A.4 in Appendix A and
section 8.2.1. Ask the operators of the legacy system, talk to the trainers, find out if anyone recentlyretired
could be recalled to help. If the system is important enough to be front-ended by the web it must
have had some real users recently. Be prepared to have him model the interface as well since this may
considerably clear his thinking (and everyone else??™s). One upshot of this rigor is that you may well
discover problems which have been known of and ignored for years.
Do not accept any suggestions that testers can discover what they need from the source code. The
developers who will be subjecting the source to unit tests etc. (won??™t they?) will doubtless find the
source code valuable. You need to test what it does for users. When hidden behind a browser this may
be most unclear.
5.5.7 Scripting Language Risks
Scripting languages such as Perl, PHP, TcL, ASP, Jscript, VBScript, and Cold Fusion are the duct tape of
the internet. They are powerful, agile, and essential. It is unwise to expect testers to have to examine any
but the least-complex of scripts to determine the logic of some event (the least-complex scripts will
possibly be bug-free). It is essential that such scripts be designed and unit-tested.
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