TL;DR

The most important content for skilful tester tool belt is not programming skill, but knowledge and practice of various test techniques. This post explains domain testing test technique that is aligned with Black Box Software Testing Foundations course (BBST) created by Rebecca Fiedler, Cem Kaner and James Bach.

Example on Google Calendar

For every variable or combination of variables, consider the set of possible values.

Variables for basic option:

• name
• type
• time
• guests
• description
• calendar

For this example, we will determine set of possible values for name. This is string, possible values are determined using following string variables:

• length
• character

String could have any length, from 0 to maximal allowed length. Character could be any from UTF8 character set, which is 1,112,064.

Reduce the set by partitioning into subsets. Pick  a few high-risk representatives of each subset.

Length subset:

0 length –> min length –> n length –> max length –> above max length.

How to determine min and max values? You can use counterstrings, where string length is encoded into string. For example, this string has length 25:

2*4*6*8*11*14*17*20*23*26

If name string gets truncated, you could easily determine truncated length.

Character subset:

All ascii characters + one, two, three, four byte UTF8 character. Example is 🙂

Explanation

Using domain testing you can easily tell your tester story. You will know when to stop testing, in Google calendar example we should define and reduce value set for all variables, we can explore variables from additional set, we should consider variables combination value set, e.g. value set for type and time.

Do you still think that testing is boring activity?