It's All About The User: Product Lifecycle - Review and Maintenance

As you continue testing the now theoretically-complete feature, track the characteristics of the bugs you find. You'll also start getting bugs from users; track these as well. Examine each of these bugs in terms of user actions: many of the bugs will fit nicely into the user actions you've defined, but other bugs will suggest new actions. Remember that Test code is just like any other code: you write it based on your initial understanding of the problem; as the arrival of new information changes your understanding of the problem it is tremendously helpful to morph that code to be in sync with your new understanding.

Also useful at this point - throughout the process, actually, but especially here - is to perform a mini-retrospective of the process. What went so well you want to be sure to continue doing it? What went so poorly you want to be sure to never do it again? What changes would you like to try? Look at the changes your user actions went through. If those changes were a reaction to changes in application functionality, how could you have foreseen the changes? Was the specification unclear? Or did the feature team have an insufficient understanding of what your customer needed? If you simply missed an entire user action, why did you miss it and how can you be more likely to identify it next time? If you look at what went wrong, identify changes that seem likely to ameliorate those problems, implement the changes, and then repeat the cycle, you can't help but get better.

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink