What questions do you usually ask?

[Simon]

What questions do you ask to illicit more information about the thing you are going to test?

We’ve all got them. A classic list of questions that we always tend to ask when we’re about to test something. Questions we ask inside our own head or indeed to another person such as a tester, designer, developer, business analyst, product owner, stakeholder, customer etc.

Here are some examples to get started:

• What config is required to test this?
• Is there anything that doesn’t work that has already been found?
• How should the tests be prioritised?
• Are there any scenarios that have to be absolutely working or is there a bit of leeway?
  What test data set-up is required?
• How do we expect the user to use this?
• What type of users are we catering for?
• What’s the quickest way I can break this?
• What set-up are we expecting the user to be using?
• Is there anything else that I need to know about that hasn’t already been mentioned?
  How has this been tested?
• Are there any ambiguities in the requirements?
• How could this go wrong? and how likely is that to happen? and how easy would that be to discover?

[Daragh]

Hi Simon,

There is an interesting webinar by Karen N. Johnson entitled: The Art of Asking Questions which might be of use to you.

The following members were at the webinar: Alt, Dave Mitchell, Melissa Bingham, Richard Forjoe, Neil Studd and Nithin Shenoy. Do any of you guys have any feedback for Simon?

[Frank Pedersen]

Nice list of questions.
Just scanning through it, I can think of two questions I feel are good to ask as well:

• Are there any external dependencies we need to take into consideration ?
• What are the error states / messages?

[Jesper]

What risks causes you not to sleep at nigth – for this project, that is 🙂
Then if I can we can work from known pain points, to unknown pain points… using Rumsfeldt[1], Cynefin og even johari window. I search for what unknown to test

1: http://jlottosen.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/rumsfeld_rectangle/

[Archana]

I also ask things like

– When and how often there is a change in the code?

– When there is a change in the code, what parts are most likely to be affected

– Architecture and hardware details are also important in some kinds of testing like performance

-Any 3rd party interfaces

– Points of contact for various issues / queries / support

[Author]

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