Back when our parents were in school, the curriculum was described in general terms as the 3 R’s; Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic. It popped into my head today on the way to the train that we in testing also have a group of letters to guide our thinking only our letter is C.

  • Context – Context is king in testing. What might be a bug in one context might not be in another. If you do not know what context you are operating in, do your best to figure it out. You might successfully complete your testing mission not knowing your context, but the odds arof it are much smaller than if you did. Some people, intentionally or otherwise, may imply that context comes into play when doing Exploratory Testing but it affects every type of testing including mind-numbing, brain-off, rote script execution.
  • Consistency – Consistency is another big item a tester needs to be aware of. Pradeep lists a number of different types of consistency to watch for:
    • With image the company or stake holders have been projecting about the product or the company
    • With similar product(s)
    • Within the product
    • With statutes / laws / standards
    • With user expectations
    • With history
  • Correctness – Out of the three items, Correctness is likely the easiest to handle. This is where you verify that the application does what it is supposed to ina proper manner. In other words, classical software testing. But of course you need to know your Context first.