Apple Newton Internet Enabler Spezifikationen PDF herunterladen (Seite 23)

Newton Technology Journal June 1996

The change should be code-reviewed by another development engineer.

The developer making the change should write a release note about the

change, its impact on other areas of the system, and important tests to run.

SQA should verify and test the change and any related areas.

Bugs

Since you can’t test everything or use the product in every way that a real

customer might, you won’t find every bug, and you’ll almost certainly ship

with known bugs. Make sure you prioritize the bugs to fix based upon

their importance to the customer. If a bug happens in only obscure cases

it may not be worth fixing. Fix the bugs and usability problems that will

affect the majority of users, or which might cause bad press. Sometimes

you’ll guess wrong. Keep track of the bugs you defer and see if real

customers report them, then escalate them to fix in the next version.

• Customer Feedback

Improving product development is based on a feedback loop. There are

three main programs for incorporating customer feedback at different parts of

the product cycle: user testing, beta testing, and (uh oh) customer support.

User Testing

Bringing in target users to give feedback on your product early in the

development cycle can give you data about the intuitiveness of the design

and validate whether your feature set is the right one. SQA engineers can

also improve their tests by watching how real customers use the product.

Fresh perspectives are always valuable, because the development team

becomes too close to the product.

Beta Testing

Software used in real-world situations often provides some of the best

feedback and bugs. During the Newton 2.0 OS project, most people on

the Newton team carried around flash ROM MessagePads with the latest

software. A lot of the good bug reports came from people using them in

meetings. That was the difference between 1.x and 2.0 – you can actually

take notes in meetings.

Customer Support

Product development doesn’t end when you ship your product.

Customer support quantifies customer reaction, and based upon call

frequency you can prioritize bugs to fix in future revisions. Feature

requests provide a source of good ideas from people actually using the

product. The development of Newton 2.0 OS was largely driven from

customer requests and usability problems, along with inspired design

work from the software engineering team.

SPECIFICS OF NEWTON TESTING

Testing a Mac OS, Windows, or Newton application is all essentially the same.

Take your software development and SQA background and overlay the

technical details of the platform. When testing a Newton application, know

how the Newton works and how it’s architected. The best sources of

information are the user’s manual, Newton Programmer’s Guide (NPG),

and Newton User Interface Guidelines. Applications written for the Newton

plug into a layer of system services. So, besides testing the features of your

software in isolation, you need to test the areas where your application

intersects with these system services.

Some of the important things to test are:

• Make sure the recognition view flags are set for the right kind of input.

• Test data storage and filing on an unlocked and locked card and

internally to validate the soup code.

• Erase your application from extras to test its removeScript and optional

deletionScript. Make sure the application removes itself from various

registries to avoid the “grip of death.”

• Eject a card with application data on it. Make sure the screen is

refreshed.

• Test the differences when your application modifies a built-in prototype.

• If your application supports landscape, make sure all the dialogs fit.

• Test your application’s use of Find – especially if it does something

different like highlight the entry.

• Make your application the backdrop and see if it behaves correctly.

• If you link in custom dictionaries, test them in the various fields.

• Make sure soup change and other notifications get intercepted by your

application.

• Optimize your program’s use of frame and/or system memory.

• Make sure your application doesn’t create global functions unless

absolutely necessary.

• Test with the latest version of the system update. (The easiest way to

remove a system update is to remove all batteries and short the backup

battery terminals with a penny).

• Make sure your application uses screen-relative bounds to remain

compatible with different screen sizes.

• Make sure the user interface of your application conforms to the

guidelines.

• Delete your soup from the storage folder and see if your application

handles it gracefully.

• If your application supports both 1.x and 2.0, test on both platforms.

• Test how your application reacts to its own data on a read-only 1.x and

locked 2.0 formatted card in a 2.0 system.

• Use the Newton Keyboard with your application and make sure the tab

order for views is correct.

• Test any application interfaces exported for public use.

• Test all peripherals you support.

• If your application runs on 1.x and 2.0, make sure it uses

gestalt

test for the existence of Newton features.

• If your application modifies the behavior of a built-in application, then

research existing applications and see if anyone else is doing what you’re

doing and document any incompatibilities.

• Make sure your application uses documented APIs or DTS-approved

methods, for example, when accessing built-in application soup data.

This will avoid incompatibilities in the future.

Applying the background and Newton-specific information, the following

five steps provide the framework for testing a Newton application through its

development:

1. Create a very detailed, hierarchical feature list for the product based

upon documentation, prototypes, and communication with

development engineers. Every feature that a user can access should be

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