Dr. Carette's Review of Scope

[samm82]

Links: thesis and paper
Scope: Chapter 2 of thesis and Section II of paper

This section was previously reviewed by @smiths, and I've just gone through it again and made some minor tweaks (mainly in presentation), so I'm ready for you to review it now!

[JacquesCarette]

I'm not quite seeing the point of section 2.1? Listing a bunch of things that are "out of scope" at the level of details seems not useful at all. The same seems to be true for quite a bit of the rest of this.

Other than the introductory paragraph (what I tend to call 2.0, on p.7), I would remove everything that explicitly mentions things that are "out of scope" from the body of Chapter 2. Your scope is clear: it has to involve software as the core artifact.

That doesn't make this chapter empty: it leaves in all the parts that are sometimes more closely associated with other kinds of testing, but are found to be explicitly in-scope. That is useful information.

There's an insufficiently strong "story" to this chapter. In other words, I don't know, as a reader, why I'm being told all this stuff. Certainly I'm not interested in reading about very detailed stuff about things that are out of scope!! So there needs to be a stronger 4.0 that explicitly tells me what I'm supposed to learn from reading this chapter.

[samm82]

I think the point of listing these examples of out-of-scope testing was to show the "completeness" of our research (see #19). If someone asks "did they cover EMSEC testing?", a Ctrl+F of my thesis will reveal this section saying it is out-of-scope. Do you think a small addition to the intro (2.0) would cover this, or should we have a more in-depth discussion about what this section should contain (perhaps during our meeting tomorrow)?

Your scope is clear: it has to involve software as the core artifact.

Yes, but this is not complete. Language-specific test approaches are also out of scope, and we wanted to make this clear (see #63), and static testing is also explicitly in scope, which is notable to specify since it is sometimes excluded.

[JacquesCarette]

Another option, probably the one that I prefer, is to take this out of the body of the thesis and put it in an appendix. In the thesis itself, say something like "For a complete analysis of XXX for scope, see Appendix Y for a detailed discussion."

Then your scope discussion chapter can be focused on the conceptual aspects of what is in/out, and a higher-level reasoned justification for keeping certain things in scope.