RE: Comments on Microsoft Chapter 4 Tests

> Melinda Grant wrote:
> Arron said:
> > We should avoid using any of the
> > special words (MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT,
> > SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, MAY and OPTIONAL) in pass
> > conditions. These all have special meanings and should be
> > used sparingly and only when it is really appropriate.
>
> My take is that the 'may', 'should', or 'must' is now encoded in the
> meta flags, so so long as the test provides a good description of what
> the tester should see, it seems ok to me.  (Before we added the flags,
> I raised the same issue...)
>
I agree the flags are really important but we need to avoid using the reserved words unless the case actually is a specific case that is a 'may', 'should', 'must', etc... case.

> > "Test passes if"
> > was our standard and clearly tells anybody when the test passes.
>
> That works fine for simple tests (and we try to make them all simple),
> but for some tests the "Test passes if" statement would be too
> unwieldy.  For those I've adopted the practice of just describing the
> various pass conditions, e.g.: "This sentence is at the top of the
> third page".
>
There are always a few exceptions and in certain cases if might make sense (like paged media) but in general all cases should have some consistency. I would assume that most of the paged media cases follow a similar pattern throughout?

--
Thanks,
Arron Eicholz

Received on Thursday, 19 March 2009 18:34:10 UTC