Abstract

In software industry the greatest amount of expenditure is in maintaining software developed poorly or specifications not met properly, this result in failures, budget overruns and unmet timelines. Software testing, if carried out properly, could actually resolve or mitigate these issues. However, in many cases the testing methodologies as well as the testing tools consider testing as a post development effort, which is conducted in isolation of the analysis and worse still, development itself. The efficacy of the testing as a guard against software and project failure is therefore not always realized, partly because of the absence of a tool based support for test cases, a tool which could be simple and yet effective. We propose that contexts should be considered for testing and as such testing should not be considered as an isolated activity, but an umbrella or integrated activity, intrinsically linked and uses the output from different phases of software development lifecycle. For instance, the fact that context for testing is present in the test case would only make the testing easy and will help in creating a role for non testing teams including the users to participate in the success of the tests and a better product. We use Context Maps to create Context Maps Test Cases (CMTC), for User Acceptance Testing in small customization projects to test defect fixes and enhancements in already developed software. CMTC helped in contriving the test case artifacts like test data, expected and actual output not just by testing team on the basis of documents, but also provide a role or channel for the end users as well as other stakeholders to share their thoughts, as to what constitute the best data to test the product with