Does your project need Test Cases?

Published in

Fintegro Company Inc

3 min readApr 16, 2019

Writing test cases is currently quite popular as a mandatory “tool” to ensure the quality of the project. In particular, they are used as one of the forms for providing important information about the quality of a product during the testing process. In addition, writing test cases is also popular as a separate service at various stages of work on a project, regardless of its size and complexity.

But there is a reverse trend. Some companies do not practice test cases at all! Test cases are not used in any way and are not created despite the fact that a full-fledged department of testing exists! Worse, there can only be a situation where this documentation exists only formally and no more, in order to throw dust in the eyes of the customer or the boss. And often, testers, in particular, beginners, simply do not understand why we need test cases at all, how to write a case correctly and what it should consist of: “Do I need to use any methodology when creating them?”

But is such a deviation from generally accepted standards in the quality assurance process so terrible? What is fraught with the lack of test cases on the project? Let’s understand why we still need test cases for the project and how they can be used most effectively.

Let’s start with a little theory ..

..to mark the boundaries of each approach. There are two of them, as you should have guessed:

Scenario-based approach (with test cases). Before testing, tests are formally described in the form of scripts. With this approach, the assessment of test coverage does not cause any problems. All parts of the system are listed with the necessary test coverage, which allows you to clearly determine the amount of time for testing work. Usually writing test-cases is manual tester’s task.
Exploratory. This approach involves the parallel development and execution of cases, that is, the absence of a clear test scenario. This method is virtually unstructured and provides a lot of freedom in actions for the tester. Also, in the course of its implementation, it is impossible to be completely objective, as in case testing.

This type of testing, in particular, is used when information about a project is not enough, or even as a preparatory stage before creating test scenarios.

The second approach is the opposite of the scenario approach. But do not think that the results of exploratory testing will differ dramatically from the results of the scenario approach since both of them are quite well compatible. Some companies use two approaches simultaneously on the same project. And yet, the differences between them are significant.

Compare!

The best time to conduct a comparative analysis!

What can we say?

Thus, both of these approaches have visible advantages and disadvantages. However, as we see, Scenario-based approach (with test cases) still wins. But this does not mean that this approach will be good for any project and for any company. Before writing test cases, you should, first of all, assess the scope and complexity of the project, the need for automation, which is becoming increasingly popular. If such an analysis was carried out, the implementation of test scenarios on the project will be as effective as possible to ensure the high quality of the product. And if you work with lots of small mobile applications — test exploratively and write checklists, test cases will only litter your process.

BTW, Fintegro Company Inc. provides great QA Engineers who can write test-cases and not only that!

Does your project need Test Cases?

Written by Arine Baghdasaryan