The post http://www.developsense.com/blog/2010/11/context-free-questions-for-testing/ contains a list of very good questions related to any project, even for people who don’t use  any particular approach in testing.

I will try to go over some of the most relevant to me for now and comment/give answers on it.

Is it okay if I ask you questions?

It is an important part in the beginning of a project to know to whom you ask the questions. Its a moment also where someone can be reluctant in having the courage to ask it, but can have a greater impact later.

Who is my client?

This is again a critical one. I think you need to be able to separate and clarify who is the client. Is it your boss or someone upper?  Because you can have a bad lead than can block you to bring value to your real client and eventually you might pay for it.

What is my mission?

You need to find or define your mission. If you have experience is much more easier. But still the difficulty of a project might come from lack of information or other thing that you haven’t experienced so far. You might need also to ask a lot of question to define your mission.

Has anyone else tested this?

This is one of those questions that are necessary. But is also a question that will trigger the need of other questions since in a product is not easy to delimit a certain area, without having in mind interactions with other components.

What equipment and tools are available to help with my testing?

Special software needs more than a simple PC to test it. So the value of the testing done will depend a lot of the tools/equipment used.

All the questions in the list are great and most of them  are asked by testers subconsciously.  But for improvement we need to bring this to the surface.

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