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Created and summarized by Brian Marick.
As far as I know, Cem Kaner coined the term "staked application testing". Here's the idea: suppose you're developing a product that should do everything another product does. For example, your company might be making a presentation program (overhead slide generator) that competes with Microsoft Powerpoint. Your product's selling point is that it does everything that Powerpoint does, but costs half as much.
How should you test your product? Well, if you go to the Google search engine and type in "powerpoint samples", you'll get a lot of hits (5102 on December 10, 1999). These are the things people do with your competitor's product. Can they do them with your "compatible" one? If not, they might become annoyed and ask for a refund.
Your product should also be able to do everything your competitor's marketing literature shows off. (Not to mention everything your marketing literature says.)
Staked application testing is useful for these reasons:
The organization has a clear stake in the outcome. (Hence the name.) You're checking a promise the company makes. Influential stakeholders like marketing will be able to clearly see the relevance of a bug.
Replicating another product's results will often lead you into complex tasks that require you to use many features of the product together. That's a good counterbalance - other test design techniques tend to focus you on narrow but deep examination of one feature at a time, which misses interaction bugs.
Since you act as a user, you may discover usability problems. As you do this over and over again, you become an expert user - so you'll discover the usability problems that novices don't notice but that drive experts wild. (Formal usability testing often seems to focus only on novices.)
Case studies
On the AbiWord project, I began testing by seeing how the Word import code handled a modestly complex table I'd recently used in a proposal. My testing involved using a Word-to-HTML converter. Throughout, I used Word's own HTML export as the "gold standard" against which to compare that converter. I did that because the developer had a stake in doing as good a job as Word did.
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