Hidden requirements

credit: http://www.quizzle.com/
This post have spent some time in draft state in my Blogger. Time to reveal it. Aleksis wrote about software quality. I strongly agree with those statements and definitions that come from the context driven school of testing. It also speaks about software tester customers. Here I would like to add requirement sources for which we are testing applications. This is based on my software testing experience since 2003.

It is important to identify all your customers because it will be much easier for you to estimate amount of work and to create your commitments. You probably have some type of product solution. He wants to know when the testing will be finished. And his only requirement is that he/she do not want any problems to happen.

Technical solution has its own requirements. His requirements are concrete and those create actual deliverables. Using his input you will know amount of testing work created by those requirements. Those requirements are very often add on to any list of requirements that you already have. Do not forget to communicate those to product solution customer!

Product itself is your customer. If you create Apple store application, be sure that application conforms to all Apple store requirements. Same goes for Google Play store.

Product analyst is customer that is never forgotten by software tester. He usually has feature requirement list.

It is important to state that those customers will never have all their requirements in the written form. And that is fine, as a software tester, it is your responsibility to gather and note down all those hidden requirements.

These were customers from my software testing context. It is important that you create your customer list for your project context. And you must be proactive in order to do so.

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