QA Soft-e

What is a Test Case?

A test case is an action plan that will be used to test a particular set of software. For example let’s say you have a 2-page application. Your first page is the “Home Page” and the second page is the “Contact Page.” You would create 2 test cases in this scenario. One to the test the “Home Page” and one to test the “Contact Page.” The test case will have each required step or required action that the web page should perform for the user and the results of the actual test. For example if you had 1 page that had 20 different functions on it, then you would create 20 different test cases, 1 for each function. It is recommended to make short, accurate, manual test cases so that they can be automated quicker in the future. After about 20 pages for 1 test case it gets significantly harder to keep up with what one is testing.

Why is a Test Case Important?

About half of us would build a book shelve we bought from the store with the directions (manual testers) and the other half of us would build a book shelve without the directions (exploratory testers), but all of us would put items on the book shelve after we were done building it to see how our hard work turned out. We all would test the strength of the book shelve and some of us would accidently test the limitations of the book shelve. A Test Case is like testing out our book shelve. We want to make sure that our test case covers every possible scenario a user would attempt when coming on to a web site/application in order for us to have productive web sites/applications and more importantly productive profits.

What is in a Test Case?

Sample Test Case Layout:

Test Step Number – The test step case number. This number can be used at a future date to figure out the number of total tests that you have, also known as execution points or number of validations.

Test Step – What am I going to test? What am I trying to validate? Example: Validate that my book shelve can hold my 50 pound book on the top shelve.

Expected Results – What do I expect to happen when I put my 50 pound book on the top shelve? What should happen? Example: Book shelve does not fall apart when I place the 50 pound book on the top shelve. Some Test Cases do have an Actual Results column, but I have seriously found this to be an overlap in work and most testers just copy the expected results and paste them into the Actual Results column, so I prefer not to use it. If there is a true issue with the actual test, it can be noted in the last column.

Browser Requirements – The browsers that the web site or application needs to be compatible with and testing needs to be completed in each one. These are usually defined by the users that will use the system. If you do not know what type of users you will have, I would recommend sticking with the one’s above. There are additional browsers to select from and cell phone columns can be added to this as well.

Comments/Defect/Notes – This is a place to add your comments or notes about the testing. You can list a defect number here if you are using a defect tracking tool. Example: Defect #0001 – My book shelve just fell apart when I put the 50 pound book on it.