One of the major activities in Application Testing is building Agile test cases. Test cases bind the whole testing process together. They are useful in measuring whether the expectations of the client are met or not. Test cases help us in detecting defects which might have been skipped if there weren’t any test cases in the first place. But to understand their importance, we must first be clear about what they are.
What are Test Cases?
Test cases are sets of conditions for the testers to determine whether the mobile application or its features are working as expected or not. They guide the testers through a series of steps which validate if the application is free of bugs and is working as per the requirements of the clients. They can even be used as baseline documents when there is no documentation for a given application. While it seems like writing test cases is an easy task, it isn’t. For writing test cases, the tester needs to understand the application under test (AUT) well. Apart from this understanding, the tester must have basic writing skills and a good attention to detail.
How to Build Effective Agile Test Cases for Application Testing?
Step 1: Perform an in-depth study of the documents or the requirements of the client. To build an effective Agile test case, you must thoroughly know what the application is all about. Without this knowledge, the test cases that you would build would be rather generic. Generic test cases are never a good idea, especially when you are going Agile.
Step 2: It is best practice to update test cases according to the real behavior of the app. Agile is all about changing, about updating, and that should reflect in your test cases as well. As soon as you notice something new or different about the way the app is behaving, you must update your test cases to accommodate these unforeseen changes in the behavior of the app.
Step 3: Keep deleting test cases which are no longer relevant to the app. For example, if you have a set of test cases for a feature of the app but the app’s code is modified to inculcate some other feature in it, the test cases you had made earlier would no longer be relevant to your app. This is when you need to replace those test cases with new ones which would actually be relevant to the features of the app.
Step 4: If there are a few scenarios which are quite similar to each other, merge them. This would not only make a better test case but would also help you reduce the number of resources you would have to spend on testing those scenarios. Testing them separately would only cost you resources which you could use elsewhere for better testing.
Step 5: If the app has a parent product, analyze the previously logged defects of that product and convert those defects into test cases. This would save you a lot of time, and would also help you in building more relevant test cases for the AUT.
Step 6: Go beyond the requirements. Think from a different user’s perspective in order to get a better idea of the usability of the software. This would also allow you to think about innovative testing scenarios, helping you create effective Agile test cases for AUT.
Step 7: Automate repetitive test cases. Tests like regression and sanity tests, amongst many others, have a lot of repetition and cost you a lot of your valuable time in addition to unnecessary manual efforts. Save time and effort by automating such tests. Utilise the time and efforts saved in something actually worthy of your time and efforts.
Step 8: Perform exploratory or random tests. They are very important since a lot of defects not enlisted in the requirements can go unnoticed. Converting these into test cases makes the testing process more efficient. It also helps you build effective Agile test cases for the app you are testing.
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