There are many operational settings for the Test Tool; mainly the program will be used as a functioning software system for: (1) Professors in the Cal Poly CS Department (2) Professors of other Cal Poly departments (3) Professors of interested universities and colleges The Test Tool will also be used as an example in software engineering courses.

The Test Tool is intended to be general public domain software. As such, there is no specific operational setting in which it must be installed. The setting for which it is appropriately suited is an office or organizational environment of some form, where users maintain their own Tests and need to organize and manage where question go and administration properties for the program to function correctly. There will be a shared test and question database, where users will have to differentiate which is for what class. There will also be securely posted tests for student confidentiality, as well as practice tests for students to take.

The program will have three different applications for different scenarios. The first scenario will be for the instructors that will generate and deploy the tests for students to take. The second application would be for slave client machines on the computer labs that would be set up at dedicated test-taking rooms for students to take them in. The last application of this program would be for students to download on their personal computer for take home tests as well as use for practice tests.

As noted in the preceding section on system personnel, there is a single primary customer for the Test Tool, and he is representative of customers in a particular university department. As such, the tool's requirements reflect the point of view of the customer base, including their work setting. Given the intent to develop a general-purpose product, the customer has made a conscience effort to exclude setting-specific features from the Test Tool requirements.

For use as a pedagogical example, the Test Tool has been designed to fit the curriculum used by Gene Fisher in undergraduate and graduate software engineering courses at Cal Poly University. These courses are two-quarter sequences that cover standard aspects of software engineering, with emphasis on the practical application of formal methods. For the most part, the concepts covered in these courses, and hence the concepts embodied in the Test Tool, are mainstream software engineering. Other instructors may therefore find the Test Tool and its development artifacts useful as course examples.