What is Fringe Testing?

Fringe testing is testing the unusual cases, the things that weren’t written down, weren’t predictable and weren’t obvious. In short it’s the kind of thing inventive, creative humans are good at.
When we’ve got requirements they’re often written in a form that states the normal way something will go, like a basic flow in a use case (or similar). Testing this might be useful but if it doesn’t work then the developer who wrote it clearly owes everyone a doughnut because after writing it, or finishing writing it, the very first thing that should be tried is going through the basic flow. In fact it’s a good candidate for automation and testing it should be considered part of the development team’s lowest levels of their definition of done.

Use Cases are normally elaborated in terms of more than just a basic flow with a set of alternative or exceptional cases or scenarios. You might consider each of these scenarios as Use Stories – I quite like this way of working with both Use Cases to make a high level scope diagram and User Stories for actually elaborating the requirements and acceptance criteria (see Use Case vs. User Story). The thing is, if it’s been written down in the requirements then the team should be testing it as a matter of course, the probability of finding defects in these flows is again pretty low. If they’re written as stories and implemented incrementally with acceptance criteria then it’s even more unlikely as they’re not much different from the basic flow. Just another story that should be developed and tested as part of the lowest levels of getting things done.

The fringe cases are the weird things that weren’t written down, that are odd ways through the requirements and are the places where the quality risks probably lie. Coming up with these is what real professional testers are good at and what proper test techniques are good for. Testing the basic paths of everything is less useful.

I’ve often thought that one way to simulate a user using my app is to take a scatter gun approach to clicking and pressing buttons in an app, because I think algorithmically, users often don’t. Many “normal” usages of your software may actually be fringe cases because things aren’t necessarily always used as designed. Of course that makes for a good argument for simpler interfaces (both GUIs and APIs).

So “Fringe Testing” is simply testing the unusual paths through your software, the places that most likely are the highest quality risks. Of course the most “fringey” cases are often the cross requirement paths, the end to end scenarios, that users take through your software or set of integrating components. As for traditional testing… I think it’s dead.

I’ve previously blogged on the Quality Confidence metric being a useful lead indicator for software quality. One common question I’ve had on that is “Are you expecting us to fully test every requirement?”. The simple answer is “no”, testing should be focussed on the fringe cases to put an expensive resource where it’s most valuable. The Quality Confidence measure requires you to assert when you have enough coverage, for me that’s when you feel you’ve got a handle on the quality risks by testing a mix of important flows, risky stories and weird fringe cases – the rest I cover with simple professional development which always covers verification as part of development.