A coverage dashboard

One of our examples from Chapter 9 was a coverage dashboard. It’s easy enough to pop off a dashboard without explaining how it came to be or was used. So, we’ll tell the story of how we developed a real dashboard in more depth, using an example from a company that provides supplies to retail stores. This particular project involved developing a web-based eCommerce frontend so that the customers – the retail stores – could self-service their orders.

Before the dashboard, testing was relatively undocumented. Each person would offer to take a different browser, and we would reconnect at noon to discuss progress. Comments would likely be “Firefox looks pretty good,” and so on. There was neither a good discussion of how deeply things were tested, nor on what bugs were found. For that matter, exactly what we were supposed to be testing was changing frequently – there was no source of truth for requirements.

To create...