Thinking Out of the Box While Creating Test Cases!

This is a phrase that you come across dozens of times a day, ‘Creative Thinking’ or ‘Out of the Box Thinking’.

Do we know what it actually means when we say ‘Thinking out of the Box’?

As per Wikipedia:

“Thinking outside the box is to think differently, unconventionally or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel or creative thinking”

But the above definition could be extended when we relate it to our field, Software Testing.

Testing sometimes could be a laborious and hectic process ; the ideas may begin to saturate, one starts feeling that none of the solutions are working out or one might even run out of ideas.

Before taking on the task of test cases generation (TCG), make sure that you are feeling energetic, fresh and in a comfortable mental state.

Try to start the TCG in the morning session/before lunch or if you are required to write them in the evening session/after lunch; take a brief pause.

In such cases an effective Pause can do a lot of wonders and could help you kick start.

A Pause could be grabbing a cup of Coffee or simply gazing out of the window.

When we step into the field of software testing the first thing we are taught or we learn are the Three Boxes, a white box, a black box and a grey box. Since then all we do is either black box, grey box or white box testing. For generation of test cases, you would have to think "Out of the Box" most of the times.

Here are some generic test cases generation techniques:

Questioning

Ideally every QA Engineer should know the purpose of a requirement. Putting up questions will help a QA Engineer to refine his purpose of testing. If a QA Engineer is good at questioning he/she will be good at testing by default. You need to make sure none of the questions how so ever small or silly is ignored.

And in turn questioning will also enhance the domain knowledge of the person performing the testing.

Research (R&D)

Research on the complete end to end flow of Testing area. For example, if you are testing the Login area of a web based application; you should have proper and thorough research about the UI defintion document for that screen to be used for login, Boundary Value Analysis (BVA) for those credentials (User Name and Password), Use cases study etc.

Rapid Fire Test Case Generation

 This technique, as the name suggests is about rapidly creating test cases. The first thing that comes to our mind when we talk about test case creation is a Requirement Document, an Excel Sheet and some guidelines provided by the organization in Water fall model. In agile model, there are user stories in which Definition of Done (DoD) criteria is defined by Product Owner. For using the Rapid Fire technique, one should keep aside all the things, get an idea about what one thinks he/she is about to test , Pick up a Pen and a Paper and write as many scenarios you can write within 60 seconds. Repeat the process till you are not able to think of more scenarios or ideas and finally review them.

You will definitely be surprised by the number of ideas you already have without looking into the requirement document.

One thing, that should be kept in mind is that no functional or non functional requirement get missed while TCG, software tractability document needs to be there for mapping each requirement with it's test case in order to meet the above mentioned criteria. There are also many automated tools available for TCG these days which can be used accordingly to minimized the effort.

TCG can be fun if followed properly. Have fun.