Page - 212 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

212 H. van Loenhoud In this approach, test cases are not derived from specifications, but from an iteratively growing set of real-life examples of inputs and outputs from the work processes that the system is intended to support. Specification by Example will yield tests for all requirements, conscious, unconscious, and subconscious alike, and may, in the long run, be more time-efficient than the techniques mentioned earlier. An additional benefit of Specification by Example and similar approaches likeBehavior-DrivenDevelopment(see[7]) is that theresultingsetofexamples/test cases ultimately forms a complete and up-to-date summary of the system and its behavior, theso-called“livingdocumentation.” YetanotherapproachthatdeservesmentioninghereisDesignThinking(e.g., see [8]).Several variantsof Design Thinkingexist, but they all focuson understanding the trueneedsof theusersbyintroducinghuman-centeredtechniqueslikePersona’s and Empathy Mapping. Especially the exploration of the “pains” and “gains” of differentusergroupscanhelpthetester identifypreviouslyundetectedsubconscious requirements. A common technique from most Design Thinking variants is prototyping. Prototyping offers future users the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with early versions of a new system and to provide feedback on its behavior, thus easily uncoveringsubconscious requirements. Especially the so-called low-fidelity prototypes like UI-sketches, storyboards, and customer journeys are very useful in thisrespect.LikeSpecificationbyExample,DesignThinkingis infactawhole-team effort, involvinganalysts, designers,developers,and testers. 4 WhatAbout the Future? One might hope that by the growing professionalism and maturity of IT analysis and design, the tester’s problems with subconscious requirements will gradually disappear, as nowadays most product owners, business analysts, and requirements engineers learnabout techniques toelicit andcommunicate them. However, trends in IT work in the opposite way. To illustrate these trends, the CynefinFramework(see Fig.2) isveryuseful. The Cynefin framework [9] is a conceptual framework used to aid decision- making as a “sense-making device.” It was created in 1999 by Dave Snowden workingforIBM.Cynefindrawsonresearchintosystemstheory,complexitytheory, network theory, and learning theories and offers five decision-making contexts or “domains”: • Obvious • Complicated • Complex • Chaotic • Disordered