FEATURE A Case Study in
At a Glance:
• Shortening time-to-market
consistently, release-after-
release, will only be achieved
by embracing effective quality
practices. Here is how one
company succeeded!
Introduction
Spurred by business' motivation to
decrease time-to-market in order to maxi-
mize savings or revenue opportunity,
Extreme Programming (XP) approaches
have gained significant attention recently.
In this quest, without quality practices that
keep pace, new releases deliver defects to
customers just as quickly!
Egreetings was not engaged in XP. I've
referred to these practices as "extreme"
because they afforded "continuous"
acceptance testing, and provided a struc-
ture that spurred continuous dialog among
customer, developer, and tester.
Consistently, developers had both require-
ments and tests available to them before
they began to code.
Here's how advanced quality practices
evolved and succeeded at Egreetings.com,
a top 50 website.
1 CMM is a product of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) established by Carnegie Mellon University. It provides a maturity
model that describes an organization’s ability to achieve software launch and quality goals predictably.
6 Journal of Software Testing Professionals
Extreme
Acceptance
Testing
by James A. Cantor and Liz Derr
Evolution Began in a Chaotic
Environment against Ambitious
Business Plans
Egreetings' application was based in CGI-
BIN technology. This legacy application
was nearing the limits of its capacity to
handle high traffic volume. Its ability to
accept modifications and enhancements
was almost negligible. To compete,
Egreetings had to operate on a more nim-
ble, easily modified application with a
more compelling presentation layer. First,
the site needed a facelift. Next, gift order
processing needed to be installed to
enhance revenue. Then an entirely new,
rearchitected application duplicating lega-
cy functionality had to be specified,
designed, engineered, and launched.
The definition of CMM1 level 1 describes
organizations that have not yet embarked
on process improvement. Their software
effort can be characterized as ad-hoc, and
sometimes chaotic. In such organizations,
few processes are defined, and successful
implementations can be attributed to indi-
vidual effort as well as heroics. Egreetings'
http://www.testinginstitute.com
development climate was chaotic… most
of the time.
To embark on process improvement, a
Quality Assurance department was
formed. Assumptions implicit in this
action were that better testing would yield
better quality and impart predictability to
launches. There was no specific meaning
associated with "better testing". At
Egreetings, it did take a QA department to
push for better requirements authorship,
application deployment, and quality veri-
fication practices.
The department was formed two weeks
before the presentation layer redesign
project was to be launched. The project
had been under development for the prior
two months.
After launching the redesigned presenta-
tion layer, the company needed to enhance
their revenue stream by offering gift-pur-
chasing capabilities. The rearchitecture
project commenced at about the same time
the gift order-processing project was at full
pace.
June 2001
Rearchitecture's goal was to provide a site
that could sustain daily content and week-
ly feature releases.

So the legacy application was to be

enhanced with additional gift functionality
while the site was being rearchitected for a
later launch. All of the new gift order func-
tionality was to be folded into the rearchi-
tected application.

Here is a timeline of the major projects

and events (Figure 1).

Referring to Figure 1, for major projects

in months 1 through 4, Egreeting's capa-
bility in getting software defined, Figure 1
Acceptance test cases were developed
designed, developed, tested, and launched
QA during months 1-4 could have been through "Intuitive Decomposition", where
could be characterized as entirely "chaot-
characterized as: test analysts ask the question, "How can I
ic" until the beginning of the gift-order
break this?" Good test analysts take pride
processing project.
• Our engineers did some testing in their ability to sense where defects will
• We used domain experts to run occur.
The legacy site Redesign Project launched
through our software
with over 80 undiscovered defects. Two
• The whole company checked out the Low-level business functions had not been
weeks after the Redesign site was
new releases specifically identified, except in the form
launched, feature releases recommenced,
• We used a test check sheet to make sure of web pages (e.g. login page, profile
and were accomplished every 1-3 weeks.
tests achieved basic functional coverage page). Acceptance test cases were docu-
One permanent and three temporary
mented based on the author's ability to
testers performed ad-hoc testing of releas-
Acceptance tests were designed intuitive- intuitively perceive the paths through the
es until midway through the 4th month.
ly, on the fly, relying on the testers' domain business function. Each path identified
expertise. Company wide testing depend- became a test case.
Subsequent to the Rearchitecture Site
ed upon the initiative of individual testers
launch, feature releases occurred semi-
during a specifically scheduled test win- Practices Applied to Single
weekly (twice per week) or weekly.
dow. And there were no requirements Projects First
Content releases occurred daily.
from which to derive test cases. Figure 3 represents the process flow dur-
ing the first four months. Classically, we
followed waterfall development and test-
ing process. Each successive step was
dependent upon the preceding step.

At the beginning of the "Gift Order

Processing" project in month 5, the large
project process matured to a semi-water-
fall model, since test cases were authored
before coding began, then continuously
revised. See figure 4. QA was beginning
to exit from the critical path.

But "adding-in" the test authorship task

was not simple! Both development and
test effectiveness depend upon and sup-
Figure 2 port good requirements, presenting a

June 2001 http://www.testinginstitute.com Journal of Software Testing Professionals 7

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