Good Test Plans

This isn’t a ruby question specifically but I’m sure you guys have some
good ideas. I need a good test plan template. I am currently using an
open office spreadsheet that is set up for a test plan, but I hate it.
Is there a good template out there for download? The spreadsheet I’m
using is terrible to work with. What are you using?

Charlie B.
Programmer
Castle Branch Inc.

Charlie B. wrote:

This isn’t a ruby question specifically but I’m sure you guys have some
good ideas. I need a good test plan template. I am currently using an
open office spreadsheet that is set up for a test plan, but I hate it.
Is there a good template out there for download? The spreadsheet I’m
using is terrible to work with. What are you using?

Make it executable!

For functional/acceptance testing, I would investiate Fit, Fitnesse or
Systir. For web based apps, Watir or Selenium are possibilities. The
key is to make the test spec readable to users and executable on the
machine.

For unit tests, that means Test::Unit (or your language’s equivalent).
However, if you are writing test plans for unit tests, I would suggest
that you would gain more benefit by moving to a more test driven
approach.


– Jim W.

The test plans are for a massive curses application (over 200,000 lines
of code). Most of the code is very old and not very testable. Most of
the code doesn’t even use sub routines (perl). I’m not sure that it is
feasible to modify all the code to make unit tests possible. It would
just take too long and I’m not in a position to make that decision. I’m
just trying to get a good test plan ready so that the application can be
tested by QC.

Start from functional tests.

Make sure you have control on the data that is fed to the system and
on its configuration.

Then run the system and automatically save the results to file.
Next time you make a change to the code you can run the system with
the controlled configuration and data set and check that the new
output are still equal to the old outputs.

While this will not tell you where the error is, it can give you the
confidence that the code has not been broken.

After you have this under control you can start refactoring with this
safety net and proceed isolating and testing smaller and smaller
chucks of code… down to unit tests.

I have produced a Vba framework that helps me doing this with excel
and it works quite well.

I think Expect can be used with curses applications. Originally Expect
was embedded in TCL, but versions have been embedded in other languages
such as Python. Maybe someone has done a Ruby port.

Bret

zdennis wrote:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/rexpect

I couldn’t tell from the webpage(s): Can this be used with [Ruby] curses
apps?

Pistos

Bret P. wrote:

I think Expect can be used with curses applications. Originally Expect
was embedded in TCL, but versions have been embedded in other languages
such as Python. Maybe someone has done a Ruby port.

http://rubyforge.org/projects/rexpect

Zach