Where supportability and testability fit in the Quality Criteria dimension of the Heuristic Test Strategy Model.

As a CMMI® Level 5 company, Motorola Global Software Group is heavily involved in software verification and validation activities. Shalini Aiyaroo, senior software engineer at Motorola, shows how tracking specific testing metrics can serve as key indicators of the health of testing and how these metrics can be used to improve testing. To improve your testing practices, find out how to track and measure phase screening effectiveness, fault density, and test execution productivity. Shalini Aiyaroo describes their use of Software Reliability Engineering (SRE) and fault prediction models to measure test effectiveness and take corrective actions. By performing orthogonal defect classification (ODC) and escaped defect analysis, the group has found ways to improve test coverage. CMMI® is a registered trademark of Carnegie Mellon University.

As part of developing software requirements, many project teams employ use cases to describe the human interactions with a system. Testers can use the same documents to optimize test case design. Learn the basics of use case writing and what you need to do to turn a use case into a test scenario. Find out how to extract test conditions and equivalence classes from use cases, build a test case matrix, and apply orthogonal array techniques to reduce the number of test cases needed. Take away not only a test case template that Vanguard has used successfully but also examples of a test case matrix created from use cases.

A behavior specification is a valuable engineering artifact for the design, review, and testing of embedded software. It is a black-box model defining all interactions between system and environment and the conditional state-based causal relationships among them. Based on work by IEEE working group P1175, Dwayne Knirk describes a new reference model for specifying the behavior of computing systems. An embedded software control application is used to illustrate the application of this model. Dwayne provides an overview of the application and shows specification examples from the requirements document. He focuses on how the specification was initially developed, analyzed for completeness and consistency, used for generating test cases, and valued by the entire development and test team throughout the project.