Testing without requirements or specifications

How should QA Tester test without requirements or specifications? Is it possible to develop test plan and test cases without written requirements or specifications? I bet this is not only the most popular testing interview question, but the real testing life problem for many software organizations.

There are several approaches to dealing with absence of proper documentation. The testing without requirements would oblige QA tester to have effective communication skills in addition to analytical, logical and technical skills. The reason for this is that there are always specifications and requirements, perhaps not formally documented and QA Tester should be able to extract this hidden requirements and specification from the customers and developers.

Even without precise requirements the standard set of the features could be tested in almost any software application and it doesn’t matter if the software runs in Windows or Linux systems, store the data in MS SQL Server or Oracle databases, developed in Java or ASP.NET platforms. Any software application should have a proper logging mechanism, automatically rotate log files, send proper error notification, restart cleanly after power outage, alert the support team about accidental outage, notify customers about maintenance work and of course should not consume all computer and network resources.

Next step for QA Tester would be to interview the project manager and the manager of developers regarding general software environment. For example, should this application work on Windows, Linux or if this is a mobile application should it support iPhone or Android platforms. Does the application support MS SQL Server 2010 and Oracle 11g databases or only one of them? If it is web based application, what browsers it should support. Check with the project manager why they want to release the next version of the application and what features are replaced, added or removed.

Discover the security requirement for the application. Who and when should have an access to the application? How do you control this access? Does application store the passwords or social security numbers in the plain text in the database?

Find out if the application is externally and internally consistent. For example the online web store should not crash under heavy load during Black Friday sale or corrupt the existing data when someone submit non common character from UTF-8. The application should be compatible with other applications developed by company and have similar look and feel features.

Figure out the external requirement for the application. If it is real estate web site, check with real estate and property laws and regulations. If it is medical application, consult with FDA requirements and specifications. If it is educational application, discover FERPA requirements. You would be amazed how many requirement you could gather from external sources.

Check the application testability. Does QA team have the appropriate testing tools for the web application developed in HTML5 and CSS3? Do QA Engineers have only manual testing skills or could bring into play Selenium or Watir as testing tool. Can the company find resources for QA Training, if needed? Do you have enough hardware and software resources to set up testing lab to test the application features. If cross browser compatibility testing is needed, would you able to set up VMware or VirtualBox for testing?

The last suggestion would be to never assume anything on order to do testing without requirements and specifications.