Why software architecture is your friend in testing

For most agile teams the immediate sources of truth when approaching new features are requirements, designs and user stories. They should tell us everything on how to use the feature, what risks might be implied and by whom it is being used. Based on this information we can know what needs to be verified and we can derive our test strategies and test concepts from there.

However, there is also a less obvious and for many non-developers more ambiguous source available: technical software architecture. In this talk I will introduce you to ways on how to approach software architecture diagrams as a source of information for testers. It can provide valuable input to create new or improve standing test strategies and illustrate test coverage across the system. Even better: it provides a good base of communication across the whole team in terms of risk management. Although this source of information may be more obvious for test automation engineers, I want to encourage also non-technical testers to give it a try and incorporate software architecture into your test planning.