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Showing posts from January, 2018

Do we need step by step test cases?

Many companies have moved to agile software development but they still maintain large suites of step by step test cases for regression testing. At the company I work for, I’ve managed to get rid of these step by step test cases altogether. What is wrong with step by step test cases anyway? If you are in a traditional waterfall setup with high level requirements and test cases, then the test cases are actually quite valuable as they document how the system works. But if you start to move quality to the left and specify requirements in more detail upfront with user stories, then test cases make much less sense. You are essentially duplicating the requirements in test cases and end up with a whole set of assets that need to be maintained in a separate test management or ALM tool. A big problem with that is that you do not have a single source of truth on how the system behaves. A second problem with step by step test cases is that they are not visible to the business. I can’