Test Cases Design — what is it?

There is a formal definition of test cases design in Wikipedia, but as for me this definition leaves much to be designed :) — that’s because this definition is focused on the final result: on test cases, but not on the nature of the test cases design process/activity itself — which is a huuuuge mistake. And this article — is about to fix this mistake!

Definition of Test Cases Design

As to me, more comprehensive definition for Test Cases Design is:

Test Cases Design — is a process (or a period of time) when you analyse product’s purpose and write test cases.

Indeed, when you analyse product’s purpose, you question all the sources of requirements: common sense, specification and standards — about the situations that the product is going to face in real life.

Then you abstract and generalize these situations, using test design techniques. And then you just document these new simplified situations and the ways of reproducing them in your test environment — i.e. create test cases — and that’s the final-result of a big analytical work, that is called Test Cases Design.

A Problem with Manual Test Cases Design

Test Cases Design leads to test cases creation. But test cases are rarely created with no further modifications. And the problem — is the number of these modifications.

According to our investigations each test case, in average, during its lifetime gets modified about 30 times. Some tests less, some more, but in average,
30 changes.

This happens because of evolutionary nature of analytical process called Test Cases Design: you get more and more information both about the product, environment and the ways of verification — and it causes modifications in test cases.

What does this mean to you?

This means, that test cases management tool, that you use, has to address this problem and make test cases creation and test cases modification process as seamless and as simple as possible. And this is — what we miss in existing test cases management tools and what we constantly heading to in Software Quality Assurance Mate — our test cases management tool.

Test cases are notes about testing and SQA Mate aims to manage them like a beast! Give it a try — it’s completely free for Test Cases Design!

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