Use Cases, Live Data, and Decision Tables
Rex Black · 2016
This chapter presents some additional techniques for black-box testing, which share in common a focus on testing the internal business logic of the system and how it handles realistic situations in which it must operate. The number of specific use cases or scenarios for complex applications may be infinite or very close to infinite. The potential number of configurations of the earth's crust is inconceivably enormous. When planning to use customer data, customer workflows, and typical values for testing, be sure to remember one important caveat. Most natural processes and behaviors follow a statistical distribution, often the normal distribution. The business rules can often be described or implemented through decision tables. For example, an e-commerce system has business rules that decide how to process an order. The decision looks at conditions like the size of the order, the inventory of the item order, the state or country to which the order will be shipped, and so forth. Business rules can be described in flow charts or as decision tables. Users can translate a flow chart representation into a decision table as a first step in creating tests. These tests follow directly from the decision tables.