Step 1.b Goal of the Evaluation - Design support evaluation vs. conformance evaluation?

Hi everyone,
as promised in the telco, here is a thought on the current section "Goal of the Evaluation".

Currently we have:
1. Basic Report
2. Detailed Report
3. In-Depth Analysis Report

For me, 2 and 3 have always looked a bit similar as there is no clear line between specifiying issues on pages and giving advice as to improvements (often, you cannot not easily specify remedies in detail because as testers we are often not familiar with the details of the development environment).

In the discussion it struck me that we seemed to have a (largely?) shared notion that our evaluation work usually falls into one of 2 categories:

1. Design support evaluation: Take an (often unfinished) new design and find as many issues as you can to help designers address & correct them (often in preparation for a future conformance evaluation/ conformance claim)
2: Conformance evaluation: Check the finished site to see if it actually meets the success criteria (this may take the form of laying the grounds for a conformance claim, or challenging a conformance claim if a site is evaluated independently, say, by some organisation wanting to put an offender on the spot).

Most of our work falls into one of these two categories, and you won't be surprised that we sell design support tests (one tester) as preparation for final tests (in our case, two independent testers). (And I should mention that our testing scheme currently does not follow the 100% pass-or-fail conformance approach.)

There is actually a third use case, which is checking old sites known to have issues *before* an organisation starts with a re-design - so they see the scope of problems the re-design will need to address (and also be aware that there may be areas which they *cannot* easily address and determine how to deal with those areas).

Sorry again to raise this point somewhat belatedly. Hope this will trigger a useful discussion.
Best,
Detlev


--
Detlev Fischer
testkreis c/o feld.wald.wiese
Thedestr. 2, 22767 Hamburg

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Received on Thursday, 30 May 2013 15:16:25 UTC