I found that some types of test tend to be limited to exactly what they are, whereas others (as you’ve identified) are open to your own interpretation, which is of course based on the general outline of that technique. Take orthogonal array tests as an example; an orthogonal array is by definition a specific technique, thus to apply it to a pice of software as a quick functionality test means simply that. On the other end of the scale though if someone says “boundary test” that’s open to the tester’s own view of what “boundaries” they are going to test.

Definitely a great article, thanks for sharing!

Dave

I’m not sure Steve’s article is trying to sway testers from doing the commonly used “boundary testing”, instead he is challenging testers to use critical thinking. All to often in my testing experience we get wrapped up in only testing at the boundaries, because that’s what we think we have to do. I think sometimes testers lose their autonomy and start to just repeat learned behaviors.

Steve:
I really liked this article. I can ask the same question of “What’s in a name?” to “System Testing”. I work in a System Testing group which to us is defined as “Black box testing after the unit testing phase in the SDLC”.

What we actually are is the only IT Testing group in our company, so when I recommended that we start to consider white-box testing I was met with protests from the managers that “That isn’t what we are!”

I think it is always important to evaluate what you are and not let nomenclature define you.

Firstly, i’d like to commend you on your thoughts. Yes, i do agree that often definitions cannot be hard and fast, because they may not always be valid.

However, if I look at the boundary value analysis concept, and this is but my view and opinion based on the little i have picked up so far, I would say that the concept per se seems to be a valid concept. I think the question we need to ask, is why are there issues at the boundaries?Why? From my understanding, and please correct me if i’m wrong, i believe it is a mechanism to check whether the developer has used the correct logics in his program. By logics i mean the conditional statements in a program. Those requirements that specify a range, sometimes inclusive or sometimes exclusive of the end points.

For example:
The student’s age should be greater than 18 and less than 22.
For an ‘A’, the final mark should greater than and equal to 75.
etc.

Often what happens, when we program these statement/conditions, we may make a mistake. And the little tests we do as developers, may not catch the error(s). Therefore, the boundary value analysis would be quite instrumental in us finding the error(s), since it hits at the heart of these conditional statements.

Please let me know what you think.
Thanks.
Regards,

“Good question. It is for historical reasons. In what we sometimes refer to as the western world, we have had two calendars in modern time: the Julian and the Gregorian calendars. These calendars were a number of days apart (depending on which century you look at), so when a culture that used the Julian calendar moved to the Gregorian calendar, they dropped from 10 to 13 days. Great Britain made this shift in 1752 (1752-09-02 were followed by 1752-09-14). An educated guess why Sybase selected 1753 as earliest date is that if you were to store an earlier date than 1753, you would also have to know which country and also handle this 10-13 day jump. So they decided to not allow dates earlier than 1753. Note, however that other countries did the shift later than 1752. Turkey, for instance, did it as late as 1927.
Being Swedish, I find it a bit amusing that Sweden had the weirdest implementation. They decided to skip the leap day over a period of 40 years (from 1700 to 1740), and Sweden would be in sync with the Gregorian calendar after 1740 (but meanwhile not in sync with anyone). However, in 1704 and 1708 the leap day wasn’t skipped for some reason, so in 1712 which was a leap year, they inserted yet an extra day (imagine being born in Feb 30!) and then did the shift over a day like everyone else, in 1753.”

This was taken from: http://www.karaszi.com/SQLServer/info_datetime.asp#Why1753, by Tibor Karaszi

Which reveals that the date range is 1753-9999, which to me raises the question of why 1753? is it something to do with historical data? or is it just a line in the sand?