Methods for testing existing or commercial software?

Question

First of all ,sorry if post in wrong room, i confuse should write question in SQA room or academia room. But actually i think member in SQA have more experience about this, and will help.

I have to review a web application called Trello . And should evaluate whether Trello is appropriate with DSDM Framework in Agile software development methods. Previously my lecturer said that the review i have made only like 'how to use trello for team who use DSDM framework'. He said that i have to evaluate or review Trello using a method.

But the only thing i know about software testing is blackbox or whitebox testing, and it do by the team who involve the project (please correct me if i'm wrong).

So, is there any methods for testing software suitability for specific sotfware development method?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I think you might have got yourself a bit confused here.

You're not really testing the software's suitability, you're evaluating it - that is, you're looking at how well the process and workflow the software imposes meshes with the development framework. It's not so much a pass/fail thing as whether this tool is a good choice with this methodology.

For that, you want to look at things like:

• workflow - what's the typical workflow for the methodology? Does that fit with the software workflow without any adjustment, or do you have to go into heavy procedural or programming customization?
• state mapping - do the various states/stages in the software map well to the states/stages in the methodology? Do you need to insert extra steps in the software to map to the methodology, or do you need to skip steps? Is it easy/difficult to adapt to any differences?
• roles - does the software support the roles the methodology requires? How closely and how well?

What you're doing here is (approximately) treating your methodology as your specification, and evaluating how much of your "specification" the application can support. If you split the methodology into core and optional aspects, you can give a more effective evaluation (for example, if the application supports all core aspects of the methodology and half the optional aspects it's a better match than something that supports all the optional aspects but not all the core).