Fitness For Purpose Testing

Fitness For Purpose Testing (FFPT) is a special type of testing that is carried out for determining the Fitness Of a Product for a Particular set of business needs. The growing demand of quality testing services has led to tremendous growth in functional testing discipline. Domain experts help businesses validate marketing claims from product based companies, using functional test procedures. Business houses have learnt that getting the right software the first time, may have an additional testing cost attached to it, but has Long term advantages like less maintenance overhead and better facilities for meeting future growth.

This testing (black box) process can be better managed using the ‘FITNESS FOR PURPOSE TESTING (FFPT)’ Methodology. The FFPT methodology helps businesses compare the performance / features of a particular software product under review against the ideal dream product or user wish list.

There are a few differences between a FFPT project and a "vanilla" functional testing assignments. These differences span over phases including test estimation, test planning, test execution, effort tracking, test focus and result representation. The next section discusses in detail the challenges that occur because of these differences in the nature of the FFPT assignment.

The Author (Nishant Pandey) has worked extensively on FFPT Projects and has prepared a methodology covering details of FFPT Methodology. The FFPT Methodology can assist test teams identify evolved test processes to meet the FFPT Testing Needs. The Output of the FFPT Test Exercise should generally include (apart from other things) a quantifiable fitness indicator / percentage which is a measure of “how fit a product is” to meet the client’s purpose. The author has had a paper on the topic published in NCSOFT07 (National Conference On Software Engineering 2007) - organized by the Cochin University in collaboration with CSI.