Technology allows amazing innovations to optimize business and deliver new and better services, but if you don’t carefully consider your entire user community, innovations may cost you business. When designing for stakeholders, don't stop at the obvious cases—or else you may find that you forgot an important customer.

Every objective has certain elements that are fundamental to its success. These include the supporting tasks or systems that we take for granted but without which our “real” work could not get done. In order for any organization or team to meet its primary objectives, these fundamentals need to be functioning properly.

There's a simple rule for the minimum values testers should explore: “none, one, some”—or, how the software behaves if you send it nothing, one thing, or some set greater than one. It's not comprehensive, but it gives a good feel for how the feature works at the moment. Developers can also use this in unit testing.