Reader Gianni Pucciani has a good question about a question in the Advanced Software Testing: Volume 2 book:

I have another doubt for a question in Advanced Software Testing Vol. 2. It is about the first question in Chapter 7, Incident Management. The book says that the correct answer is C “Insufficient Isolation”. What does it mean? I had chosen B “Inadequate classification information”, because all the rest was not making sense to me. For B, I could justify it saying that more information could be added to the incident report, e.g the error message displayed by the application.

Here is the question from the book:

Assume you are a test manager working on a project to create a programmable thermostat for home use to control central heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. In addition to the normal HVAC control functions, the thermostat also has the ability to download data to a browser-based application that runs on PCs for further analysis.

During quality risk analysis, you identify compatibility problems between the browser-based application and the different PC configurations that can host that application as a quality risk item with a high level of likelihood.

Your test team is currently executing compatibility tests. Consider the following excerpt from the failure description of a compatibility bug report:

1. Connect the thermostat to a Windows Vista PC.

2. Start the thermostat analysis application on the PC. Application starts normally and recognizes connected thermostat.

3. Attempt to download the data from the thermostat.

4. Data does not download.

5. Attempt to download the data three times. Data will not download.

Based on this information alone, which of the following is a problem that exists with this bug report?

A. Lack of structured testing

B. Inadequate classification information

C. Insufficient isolation

D. Poorly documented steps to reproduce

The reason that the answer is “C” is because we don’t see any evidence of the tester trying some different scenarios to see if the data downloads properly.  The testing is clearly well-structured and carefully thought out, and the steps to reproduce are well-described.  The classifications are not given, so we have no way of saying, based on this information alone, whether those classifications are correct.