Scenario Driven Testing

Software testing has traditionally focused on evaluating the functionality of implemented modules against feature specifications. This approach assumes that customer requirements and usage scenarios are accurately translated into specifications and that individual modules implemented using the feature specifications would work seamlessly and coherently to solve business problems meant to be addressed by the software under test. To ensure software built would help customers solve their business problems as intended, test teams have to go beyond traditional feature driven testing approach and test software for quality and completeness with respect to targeted customer scenarios. For this, test teams have to adopt scenario driven test methodology which involves understanding the targeted customer scenarios and use them along with feature specifications for the intended software solution to translate them into test specifications, prioritization of test work items and use them throughout project for shared understanding of tradeoffs and making decisions. In this short paper, we describe scenario driven testing and share how it was applied to test a feature-set developed for a successful product line at Microsoft®.