Managing the Testing Process: Practical Tools and Techniques for Managing Hardware and Software Testing

3.7. Case Study

In this section, I illustrate two styles of test case documentation. The first follows the screen-oriented template introduced earlier, which my team and I used for testing the browser-based program for home equity loan processing described in the case study for Chapter 2. Note that the test procedure (actions taken) is implied by the flow of the screens, but that the input data and the expected results are defined very precisely. The document, "Case Study Loan Processing Test Cases.xls," is available at www.rexblackconsulting.com.

I thank my client on this project, a major mid-western bank, and the executive in charge of development for allowing me to share this example with readers of this book. I have purged all identifying and otherwise private information from this document. My client contact has asked that the organization remain anonymous.

The second set of tests show a data-driven approach used for a custom automated test harness. This test harness sent the data to the subsystem under test—in this case, small programs running across a network providing security and access control—and then checked the return values. Note the use of HTML-style "tags" to define stanzas that control the harness. The documents, "Case Study Functionality.suite" and "Case Study AddValidUser.case," are available at www.rexblackconsulting.com.