Testing prototype software applications, that are going to be demonstrated to potential customers, presents some interesting challenges to the tester. You know that the software application isn’t supposed to be a fully working application and you expect it to contain numerous defects. It’s also common with prototypes for there to be very little in the way of well defined requirements. Yet somehow we’re expected to work with the development team to produce something that is going to be good enough to convince a customer to invest in this software product. This isn’t a time to work against the software development team but it is a time for the software testing team to work closely with development as a single team to deliver a product that may keep you employed over the next 12 months.
Gathering requirements is one challenge. Deciding which areas of functionality are likely to be demonstrated is another. Working out the restrictions on the amount of test data you need is yet another. Many many aspects of testing are turned on their head when you are testing prototypes. After all you’re working towards delivering a product that, in many ways, isn’t supposed to work.
There are no easy answers on how best to approach this but I would recommend you consider the following carefully:
Talk – if requirements are limited or non-existent then you have no choice but to talk to all the stake holders. If you have contacts in the customers company then talk to them and find out about what they expect. Talk to the developers and see how they’ve interpreted the requirements. Talk to sales, or who ever is planning to stand up and run the demonstration. In this scenario it is usually the tester who pulls together the available information from all the interested parties, and as a result, ends up pulling the whole team together to deliver a great demo product.
Use your judgment – if you’ve spent any amount of time in software testing then you probably already have a good feel for what is important and what is not important in a software application. Use this judgment to to help you focus on testing only the parts of the application that matter. Extensive field validation testing doesn’t matter in a demonstration if the person running the demo knows exactly what he/she is going to enter in that field!
Stand back – use your imagination and put yourself in the position of the potential customer that this prototype will be demonstrated to. If they are senior management (no disrespect meant to senior managers here) then concentrate on testing aspects that support the look and feel of the application. If they are real tech’ies then think more about testing and demonstrating areas of the application that are likely to stimulate the most interest.
Focus on the interesting bits – I did a demo to a newly appointed board member from Sun Microsystems some years back. I won’t go into the detail but the demo revolved around a number of Solaris command prompt shells. At the end of the demo this board member’s first comment was “this would look much better with a graphical interface”. The room went silent. He completely missed the technology behind the application we demonstrated that day. It went to prove though, that in most peoples eyes, what looks good is what matters. Presentation is everything. Make sure you focus on the best looking bits.
There are no hard and fast rules for working on projects that aim to deliver a product for a demonstration. If there’s one bit of advice I’d give here though it’s learn to put yourself in the shoes of the person you are going to demonstrate this too. Use your imagination to work out what is important and use your instinct to help direct the rest of the team to focus on what matters. And don’t forget that 99% of the time people will focus on what it looks like, and nothing else.