The Regular, the Blank and the Error

Make the basic Quality Assurance of your app fast

Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/83269636@N00/864364024

There are 3 simple tests that are the best spot to start your testing from: the Regular, the Blank and the Error tests.

If you test the app, the form, configuration — anything — you can make a fast assurance of their quality just testing them on these 3 simple conditions.

Take a classic example: a login form which has 2 input fields (login and password) and a submit button.

Does the form work? How to check it fast with the minimum amount of tests? Use these 3 simple tests: the Regular, the Blank and the Error — to get the answer!

For our login form example they could be:

• The Regular: sign in with valid login and password of an existing user — system must authorize you;
• The Blank: sign in with empty login and password fields — system must not authorize you, must not crash, must not throw an error, but inform you that login and password are mandatory fields;
• The Error: sign in with valid login of existing user but enter incorrect password — system must not authorize you, must not crash, must not throw an error, but inform you that there is no such login and password pair:

Error state of login form https://sqamate.com/login

The Positive, the Negative and the Corner

These are not 3 tests that will test all your app for you. No!
They are simply 3 representatives of 3 types of test case groups:

• Positive tests (Regular)
• Negative tests (Error)
• and Special/Corner scenarios (Blank)

And every test suite normally has all these 3 types of tests. Some of them more, some of them less, but we usually have them. And when we hire test cases to do some job for us, we’d better hire at least one cowboy from every group: the Regular, the Blank and the Error.

Bonus article

A bonus article for those who wants to test more than 3 test conditions: 5 test conditions that make even bigger positive impact on software quality!

Here it is:

Always test these 5 conditions in software

If you found this article interesting and useful, please don’t hesitate to give it some claps — so I could know, that you are interested to read such articles more and more people could know about it!

Thanks, Alexey!