According to Business dictionary , ‘Baseline is a clearly defined starting point (point of departure) from where implementation begins, improvement is judged, or comparison is made’. We use this term in HyBIST to setup a clear start point for all actions that we plan to do in the context of evaluation.
To ensure crisp clarity of the start point of evaluation, we need to be clear of two things – what is to be evaluated and what is it to be evaluated for ? Note that what is to be evaluated happens to the EUTs be it flows, requirements, features or structural components. After listing down clearly what EUTs have to be evaluated, it is imperative to sharpen this by being purposeful. By clearly identifying what to evaluate for – i.e. the cleanliness criteria that each EUT is supposed to satisfy or the types of PDT to be uncovered, or the types of the tests to be performed.
In short Baseline can be defined as a cross-product of what-to-test and test-for-what.
Baseline= what-to-test X test-for-what
The picture below shows the ‘Baseline’ as a a yellow shaded portion:
