The following are recommendation and options for representing this work product.
Recommendation: Automated Code Unit.
The most appropriate technique for rendering these tests is code that fully tests the components that can be run
regularly as updates are made.
When code is the sole form of the tests, care must be taken to ensure that the code is self-documenting
including specifications of what conditions are being tested and what setup or clean-up is required for the test to run
properly.
Option: Manual Instructions.
In some cases, some sort of manual instructions can suffice. For example, when testing a user interface, a
developer could walk through a script exercising the component. In this case it can still be valuable to create a
test harness that goes straight to the user interface so that the script can be followed without having to walk through
a complicated set of instructions to get to some particular screen or page.
Option: Embedded Code
Certain technologies (such as Java 5 Test Annotation) will allow tests to be embedded in the implementation. In
those cases, there will be a logical work product, but physically it will be assimilated into the code being
tested. The same issues of ensuring the code is self-documenting described above should be taken into
consideration.
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