Market context
April 28th, 2008 in Heuristics
I have a recommendation from an additional application tour from Cem Kaner.
“Testers should be touring the market context as well as the product itself. For example, a lot of customer expectations are best discovered from regulations, competitive products, magazine articles or books about this class of product.”
I like it.
I’m trying to figure out a new mnemonic that works with the new letter “M.” I’m thinking FCC CUTS VIDS could become FCC VICDUM TSS. Perhaps I can remember that some fictitious company “TSS” was a victim of the FCC.
I guess I’ll have to keep thinking about it.
I came up with MUTII to deal with user considerations in a business environment.
http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=65
Market—The targeted constituency of users this software is intended for. For example, “the finance department”, or “medium sized accounting firms”.
Users—The actual users who will use the software. Who are the users? What do they do? What are their motivations for using our software?
Tasks—What are the tasks that the users will use this software for? What are some typical tasks in their work?
Information—What does the product tell me about the tasks it automates, and how I can perform them?
Implementation—Is the software easy to use as a first time user? Is it reliable? Can I easily implement the tasks given the information and design of the product?
Under “Market”, I want to know:
- what are we promising?
- do we have written agreements?
- what do our users expect?
- what tasks do they perform?
- how does our software help them address that?
- what are our competitors doing?
- how do similar products address automation in this space?
- what are our sales targets?
and on and on… :)
This illustrates one of the reasons that I resist the fashionability of mnemonics for collections of test-related ideas.
“Market tour” hasn’t been incorporated into any of the lists of tours, not because it is a bad idea but because we can’t come up with the right mnemonic.