Where does location fit in to HTSM?

🙋 Questions
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This is a philosophy of test type question.

Suppose you are testing a security device which has rules, similar to a firewall. The behavior may change depending on the location, say different countries.

Where would location be used in the HTSM

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Isn’t location an input (from GPS or any mocked service)?

Product Elements - SFDIPOT - Focus on I.

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I’d say that location is something that influences the elements that comprise the product, rather than be an element themselves. It influences quality criteria, like portability and localizability.

Is that change between countries because of those countries, or because different rules are used in each country? Or is it that the rules treat different countries differently based on, say, IP address? Is it the location of the hardware, or the software, or the source of the input?

So, in short, the HTSM can be used on the idea of location in all kinds of ways. Location might change the code (Structure), how the information is processed (Function) be based on rules (Data) or inputs from other locations (Data). It might be dealt with by some interface at a lower layer (Interfaces). You could consider how users locations change the way it’s used (Operations), and how information from different locations has differing rates, uses different time zones, and are concurrently routed (Time).

And much more, then again for Criteria, Environment and Techniques.

Inserting location into the HTSM itself seems unnecessary to me, but I think that the most important point is that if it makes sense to you then you should do it. Try and see if you can add to the possibilities. The thing about being context driven is knowing that value depends on context, and there’s nothing stopping you from adapting the tools to your situation - anything that helps you to build a better strategy. You can also add it to a risk catalogue for consideration when forming charters and whatnot.

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Location for me means:

  1. Am I on a mobile phone now? On a small-screen or a resource-constrained device? Am I doing a short task that cannot take more than 5 minutes before I go through a tunnel and loose my 4G signal before I finish
  2. Am I in a country that is on a IP blocklist, should the app still work for me, are we operating legally here. Is my IP address blocklist accurate and working well
  3. Am I in an internet cafe on a security-constrained or untrusted environment
  4. Am I paying for my network bandwidth? Example a farmer in a field trying to get soil moisture data and weather predictions on limited or expensive airtime so I know how much water to use
  5. Am I in a corporate network behind a firewall
  6. Am I in a country that has a unusual locale for things like reading layouts being bottom to top and right to left. Most apps enforce left->right, which may penalize us. Would making menu layouts the user will be familiar with help them work faster
  7. Am I in an interesting location GPS wise, for example can I target the user with adverts more accurately, can I perhaps send more localized disaster alerts (The UK is about to enable such a system this summer.)
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