SCENARIO TESTING

Scenario testing is a software testing activity that uses scenario tests, or simply scenarios, which are based on a hypothetical story to help a person think through a complex problem or system. They can be as simple as a diagram for a testing environment or they could be a description written in prose. The ideal scenario has four key characteristics. It is a story that is motivating, credible, complex, and easy to evaluate. These tests are usually different from test cases in that test cases are single steps and scenarios cover a number of steps. Test suites and scenarios can be used in concert for complete system testing.

Scenario tests are realistic, credible and motivating to stakeholders, challenging for the program and easy to evaluate for the tester. They provide meaningful combinations of functions and variables rather than the more artificial combinations you get with domain testing or combinatorial test design.

During Diagnostic Profiling, a user defines a number of tests that may be applied to the design in run-time.

The definition of these tests become an intrinsic part of the Diagnostic Knowledge Base. Several different test scenarios may be applicable to run-time environments. One of the main purposes of the Maintenance Simulator is to evaluate test effectiveness of various test scenarios.

Simple scenario elements include:

    * the scenario information line, this is text enclosed in double quotes which is printed to the journal file.  It may then be picked up by a report writer or written to a database.
      
    * The test case name, with an optional list of invocable components which gives the user the flexibility to select only certain tests from a group of tests

    * A referenced scenario name, so we can call another scenario from within a scenario.
   
    * Include file name, which contains the test case names and the scenario information lines to they don't have to be entered into every scenario file, and a single change will update all our scenarios.

List of scenario directives:

Scenario directives effect the way in which the simple elements are processed by the test case controller. 

A directive may have the simple element attached to it, or alternatively if an element is not attached to it subsequent elements will be processed within the scope of the directive until a matching end directive is reached.

Directives may be grouped together, in which case elements are processed within the scope of all the directives in the group. Certain directives can appear within the scope of other directives, but others may not (for example a repeat directive cannot fall within the scope of a random directive, that does not make sense).

■	Load Testing
■	Stress Testing
■	Domain Testing
■	Exploratory Testing
■	Recovery Testing
■	User Acceptance Testing
■	Alpha Testing
■	Beta Testing
■	Unit Testing
■	Static & Dynamic Analysis Testing
■	Functional Testing
■	Ad-hoc Testing
■	Volume Testing

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Scenario Testing