Vinktank

The most important part to get right with testing is determining what to test. You can waste time writing automated test cases or running manual tests that cover areas that don’t need to be covered. You can also let poor quality code through to production because you forgot to test something.

So how can you reduce the reliance on Test Analysis skills? By capturing the business process in a way that allows test patterns to be applied and drives out the test cases. A Test case in this instance is not the test implementation, but is just the test description or intent. What should be tested. If a business process was captured graphically, not only would it be easier to read and understand (a picture is a thousand words) it would also create an abstraction layer between the test implementation, test intention and business process. This would make the automated tests less brittle.

From a graphical representation of a business process is would be possible to determine what has to be tested. Looking at the different paths to take, decision points and data to be used test cases would be easily generated. If the implementation of those test cases was done properly and tied back to sufficently small enough components of the business process, then it would be possible to reuse those components with data driven testing techniques, and reduce the brittleness of automated tests.

For example, login, this is a component that will be used by many different business processes. The difference would be the data entered, username and password. If an implementation of login was created with variables that allowed the username and password to be supplied, then login can be called in many different business processes but have only one implementation. If the screen changes, field name changes, fields change position, buttons change etc then only the implementation will need to change. If there is another change that has a bigger impact, for example you need to enter two passwords for extra security, then you know all the business processes attached to login and can easily get a list and then edit them.