How to Master Writing Test Cases?

What is a Test Case?

A test case is a group of steps designed to verify a particular functionality of your application. A tester should have the core skills, passion, and a keen eye for perfection towards testing.

Why are Test Cases Necessary?

A well-written test case document equates to half testing done. Test cases documented at the early stage of application development will save considerable time during application delivery.

While writing test case documentation, one would want to put themselves in the shoes of the end user. This approach will find any gaps in the requirements, unanswered questions, and discrepancies at the initial stage. The findings could be communicated to the stakeholders for resolving the changes in the requirements. On the other hand, it will avoid the slips and reiteration in the code at the later stages. The test case documentation is often referred as Big Design Up Front (BDUF).

How to Start Writing A Test Case?

A test case should be written by someone from the testing team. The resource should completely read out the requirements document or User Story before starting to create the test case. The test case may be functional, UI-based, or usability-related. The right visualization of requirements document turns down into valid test cases. A test case should precisely communicate the actual workflow of the test scenario. A test case is different from test scenario. Test Scenario is the high-level representation of a functional workflow which will be broken down into multiple test cases covering every possible way in which the test scenario can be covered.

The below example will give a more detailed insight on test cases:

Business Case(Test Scenario): E commerce Checkout Payment flow verification

Possible Test Cases

1. Checkout by Credit Card
2. Checkout by Gift Card
3. Checkout by Credit Card + Gift Card
4. Checkout by PayPal

Sample

Test Case Title: Checkout successfully using Credit Card

Description: The guest or registered user should check out the products in the cart using valid credit card supported by the website.

Test Steps:

1. Add products to the cart.
2. Add the shipping address.
3. Enter the Valid Credit Card number(test card in this scenario).
4. Click Checkout.

Expected Result

An order should be placed successfully.

Characteristics of Test cases

A well-documented Test Case document should cover the positive scenarios, negative scenarios, boundary values, equivalent partitioning, and localization.

A good test case should have:

• Unique test case ID.
• Well-identified title.
• Transparent and understandable description.
• Adequate test data.
• Lean test steps.
• Relevant references.
• Appropriate expected result per requirement.

Key points to be focused:

• Don’t compromise on the test coverage.
• Include Negative test cases.
• Think out of the box in all angles.
• Cover nook and corner of the requirements document.
• Avoid duplicates in test cases (can be achieved by requirements traceability matrix generation).
• In Agile development, user stories might be changed after several sprints, in this case, update the test cases as needed to avoid obsolete test cases.

A Test case can be written in different types of templates incorporating the main attributes of the test case. In QA Touch, we offer three types of templates to document the test cases.

• Exploratory Template
• Test Cases(By Text)
• Test Cases(By Steps)

Alongside with this, we do offer tailor-made test cases for Magento 2 E Commerce websites. Investing time in writing test cases will provide rewarding result during testing. When you are ready with test cases, you can find more defects which you can’t achieve using ad-hoc testing process. It’s common talk in the testing world; no other application is bug-free. I agree to that, but all the possible bugs which can be easily detected should be fixed before passing on to the end user.

Happy Testing!

References:

http://softwaretestingfundamentals.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_case

https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/QA/Testcase/How_to_write_test_case

http://brodzinski.com/2009/05/what-is-main-benefit-of-writing-test.html