Contributions of tester experience and a checklist guideline to the identification of categories and choices for software testing

An early step for most black-box testing methods is to identify a set of categories and choices (or their equivalents) from the specification. The identification is often performed in an ad hoc manner, thus the quality of categories and choices is in doubt. Poorly identified categories and choices will affect the comprehensiveness of test cases. In this paper, we describe several comparative studies using three commercial specifications and discuss the major results. The objectives of our studies are (a) to investigate the differences in the types and amounts of mistakes made between inexperienced and experienced software testers in an ad hoc identification approach and (b) to determine the extent of mistake reduction after discussing the mistakes with the software testers and providing them with an identification checklist.