Test Cases Structuration techniques
One of the main reasons why MS Word and MS Excel become an evil when you try to manage hundreds or thousands of test cases using them, is because that they fail to address structuration and categorization issues for the test cases.
And yes, MS Excel still can fight for a while, but not so far… — and that’s fine, because neither MS Word nor MS Excel have been designed for test cases management purposes!
This article is about 4 most practical and useful categorization techniques, used by QA Engineers all over the world:
1. Suites
2. Prefixes
3. Keywords
4. Hashtags
— and I am going to show you how to use them in test cases management tool, that has been designed to support all these important structuration approaches: with Software Quality Assurance Mate.
Let’s get started!
1. Suites
Suites — are folders, that contain a group of test cases and/or other suites with other test cases. Such structure forms a usual tree:
But in SQA Mate test cases management tool we added a feature for the suites to make them even more useful: if a suite has a content, then it’s content is propagated to all children of this suite:
— and this is very useful!
More than that: “Preconditions from parent suites” section, that appears in this case, could be kept folded, unfolded or even ignored (not displayed at all for this particular case).
2. Prefixes
Prefixes — are some special information that is given at the beginning of test case’s Summary. Prefixes are often used to compensate something, for example, to compensate a lack of desired functionality in test cases management app:
Prefixes are fine, especially when test cases management tool has smart filter and bulk update operations support.
3. Keywords
Keywords — are properties (or tags), that are assigned on test cases for test cases categorization and structuration purposes.
It’s better to make some semantic groups of Keywords. For example, semantic group “priority” and keywords for that group “Low”, “Medium” and “High”. And now each test case should have assigned only one Keyword from that particular semantic group.
Keywords Groups could be extremely powerful tool when are used correctly:
— displayed Reliability test case with priority “High”, written for “HMP 9.0” project during “Phase 1” in “Sprint 3”. Simple and clear!
4. Hashtags
Hashtags in test cases management systems — are the same, as the ones used in modern social networks: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Hashtags are not mandatory, they are optional keywords and they could be used by any QA Engineers on their own purposes and needs:
— in this example we can see a test case with hashtags: #crash, #highavailability, #failover, #media. And you can search for test cases, using hashtags — that’s the reason they exist: group and search.
Conclusion
In practice, Quality Assurance Engineers need completely different approaches in categorization of their test cases. More than that: they often need different approaches simultaneously!
And this challenge must be addressed by every modern test cases management tool — they must give test cases designers a simple way to apply different categorization techniques to the same test case at the same time.
SQA Mate — is our test cases management tool — gives Quality Assurance Engineers such support. If you haven’t yet tried it, then give it a try — it’s completely free for test cases design process!
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