12b, c & d
Evidence of formative testing
In any software development, the product must be tested constantly until it's complete. If I were to document all of the testing done during the production of the solution I would have to show pages and pages and pages of endless screenshots. I believe that the completed product itself a better testimony to the amount of formative testing that was undertaken. However, two clear examples of formative testing are described below.
Working with XSLT correctly...
The screenshot above depicts me working with XSLT in Dreamweaver. XSLT is the language that enables you to transform XML (eXtensible Meta Language) into any XML derivative language you wish. These are the files that I need to process the XML with so to output the XHTML and RSS feeds. It also enables you to sort the results of a search in XML (using XPath) by displaying them in the order you wish.
The product will provide users with a choice of sermon viewing options: by Date, by Title and by Book. XSLT will sort the XML accordingly and then transform it into XHTML for their viewing pleasure.
This required an awful alot of 'hassle' so I thought it to be a prime example of formative testing. For the XSLT to work it must also be valid XML. In XML you must declare all 'entities' also known as characters at the top of the XML document. The screen shot shows how I hadn't done this with the character: " » " (also known as '»') and how I hadn't closed the 'xsl:stylesheet' and 'xsl:output' tags at the bottom of the document. This problem was resolved and the finished product is proof of this truth.
Another problem I had was making the MSXML processor stop churning out utf-16 encoding. This really affected the RSS feeds as they couldn't accept any thing other than utf-8 or unspecified.
Identifying problems in the VB editor...
In programming (if your a novice like me) the IDE is always flaging up mistakes. In the image above I was using a breakpoint in the TransformXML() function to discover which XSLT file was not processing properly. The use of watches is also a good example of formative testing.
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