Testing involves planning and the practice of writing test cases. Within a company, there are many different ways of designing tests, as the QA team's work is constrained by factors such as time, money and the needs of the customer.
There is a burning question for the company: how should a test case be developed and written? How should the testing process be documented? In this article we answer these questions.
Why is it necessary to write test cases?
For most companies, a common problem in software development is that there is no universally accepted and usable documentation for a project. In other words, it is very important to have a knowledge base of what exactly you expect from your software. Different teams look at development from different perspectives: the developer thinks differently, the business side thinks differently, and the testers think differently. However, if everyone relies on each other's solution – because there is no clear mission and goal for the project –, it can lead to a lot of conflict. This is the problem that test cases solve for us.
What does a good test case look like?
Quality assurance is typically the responsibility of the whole development team, but in general, test cases are written and maintained by testers. When we talk about a good test case, we are talking about documentation that describes what is expected from a particular user step – or test step – and where they should be performed in the software.
If our software performs exactly as described, then it is working well. But if we get a different result than expected, we need to improve it. In this case, there are several possible solutions. It may be that a particular feature of the software is buggy or it may be that the system works correctly but we need to fix the test case.
How can test cases be prioritized?
Today, there is a little focus on testing, but it is a complex and important part of software development. Testers also have to perform many tasks carefully, and often management gets less visible results because they don't see the QA team's work.
But there is a new way to get measureable, well-monitored results from both management and testers. With a feature of TestNavigator, TestAdvisor's test selection algorithm the QA team can prioritize their test cases by detecting the most important and critical parts of the software. TestNavigator detects the impact of changes as well as code-level information about the execution of test cases, such as the complexity of the affected parts and the coding issues. With TestNavigator testers can work in a more efficient, transparent and controlled way. TestNavigator provides the possibility to integrate a new coverage-driven testing approach, saving a lot of time and resources for the company.