Customer Tests

Rick Mugridge (r.mugridge@auckland.ac.nz)

Here are two challenges:

Writing of Customer Tests for a process control system is difficult.
The hardware being controlled seems to be too complex to be managed
straightforwardly with mocks, so a simulation approach has been used.
But this raises issues about testing the fidelity of the simulation.

It is difficult  to manage Customer Tests when the UI is expected to
evolve considerably through the project. Tests need to be concrete
enough to be executed, but tend to require a premature commitment to
the UI using most tools.  When the UI changes, the tests have to change.
One approach is to write early  tests for an abstract form of the UI,
closer to the API, and generate a simple form of the UI automatically.
Later, additional tests can be specific to the UI as it evolves.