S60 Smartphone Quality Assurance: A Guide for Mobile Engineers and Developers

Chapter 8: Platform Testing versus Platform-based Phone Testing

Some decades ago testing was often considered as a useless, time- and money-consuming activity in a software project. However, since the sizes and complexities of the average software program have grown along with the time, testing has become recognized as one of the three main activities (together with design and implementation) in all software projects throughout the world. This turn-around point occurred approximately three decades ago. Nowadays, no self-respecting organization will carry out any significant implementation until the required test plans have been documented, reviewed and approved.

As shown in Figure 8-1, S60 full delivery includes a full set of documented test cases. These test cases describe the tests that have been run on the platform, or are to be run on the platform prior to the final delivery of the release. In part, these documents are delivered in order to make the testing quality visible to the customer so that the customer can decide how probable it is that their program inherits new defects from the platform. This chapter focuses on platform test planning and the execution processes.

Figure 8-1. Customer testing support.

The platform-based phone program will find that some of the tests that come along with the platform delivery are worth copying to the phone program test plans. However, ...