The testing industry was ‘maturing’ with Best Practices and Industry Standards when the context driven school evolved. The knowledge that there are no best practices that exists in the testing domain was (and to some extent, still is) against the conventional wisdom that preaching by the testing service providers which tried to build their strength on best practices that are based on prior experience, which iteratively refined the testing process over time.
‘Context driven testing’ takes into account, the different ways in which the software program will be used. It also considers the varying capabilities, interests and needs of the individuals using the program along with other influencing environmental factors. This brings in a lot of agility to testing, which makes context driven to be considered a variant of agile practices.
The approach identifies tests based on the context, and explores the possibilities so as to optimize the software for its intended users and target environment rather that going by the traditional method of validating requirements using a defined and static approach.
But, there could be issues with this approach in terms of the traditional test metrics, and might even require a new set of measures altogether. I tried to draw a set of rules for this games, to make it ‘more structured’ to the testing wisdom. I was successful in doing that to a certain extent at which I got a revelation that I am actually bringing it back to the traditional method, thus stripping off the benefits, un-intentionally. In other words, I was trying to draft another ‘Best Practice’ that the context driven school challenged in the very beginning!
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