QW2002 Paper 4I1 Giri Vijayaraghavan and Cem Kaner (Florida Tech Dept of Computer Sciences) Bugs in Your Shopping Cart: A Taxonomy

Key Points

• Presents an outline of potential problems testers can find in ecommerce sites
• Applies the outline to shopping cart functionality--identifies 300+ specific risks
• Illustrates one common approach to risk-based testing

Presentation Abstract

Imagine being asked to test a website's shopping cart. If you hadn't tested one before, where would you start? What experience would you draw on? Where would you look for more information? Even very experienced testers have blind spots when they try to generate test ideas for an application that they have not tested. This session presents a simple outline that will help you generate test ideas and limit your blind spots. The outline is the result of a year's research on classifying e-commerce related failures and risks. The result has 60 top-level categories and examples of errors (potential issues to test for) under most categories. In many cases, we also link to examples of e-commerce defects that have been publicized in the press.

Using the list, you could pick a category of interest (such as accessibility or software upgrade), read descriptions of several types of problems that fit within that category, and so identify a few issues that would be appropriate to test for in your application. Based on feedback to the authors of Testing Computer Software, we believe that many testers will be able to use this list to identify potential problems that they would otherwise have missed.

We intend the outline to serve similar functions to Kaner / Falk / Nguyen's bug appendix in Testing Computer Software (TCS): help testers generate ideas; help test plan inspectors check a large set of tests for thoroughness and coverage; help testers and other stakeholders identify risks during discussions of prioritizing the testing effort. Kaner expects this to become the successor to the TCS list, and we have structured the outline (e.g. more top-level categories and fewer levels) based on feedback from many TCS readers.

About the Author

Giri Vijayaraghavan, giirii@hotmail.com, www.girivijay.com, is a Master's student in Computer Science at Florida Institute of Technology. This paper summarizes his thesis research on "E-commerce risks and failures.". Giri holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering and has worked as Research Assistant in various funded projects of IBM and Texas Instruments and as an intern at Fidelity Investments- eBusiness.

Cem Kaner, J.D., Ph.D., kaner@kaner.com, www.kaner.com, is Professor of Computer Sciences at Florida Institute of Technology. He is senior author of Testing Computer Software, of Lessons Learned in Software Testing, and of Bad Software: What To Do When Software Fails.