Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table ..1
Structure of a Test Case Execution Sheet
Test Case
No.
Date
Created
Module
Steps to
Reproduce
Expected
Result
Actual
Result
Execution
Result
(Pass/Fail)
Comments
There are some issues involved in monitoring production instances. To run
sanity tests, you need to have some testing data in the production instance data-
base. These data have three issues. First, this test data should be completely isolated
from production data that is critical to the business. This test data should never
interfere with production data. Second, the test data should be such that it should
not get deleted by any DBA or anybody responsible for maintaining the database.
Otherwise the test scripts cannot run. The best convention is that you should use
some prefix or suffix with this data to identify that it is for testing purposes only.
For instance, you can add a prefix like “qa_” with each test data. Third, the test
scripts should never generate too much transaction data. Otherwise the database
will be cluttered with unwanted data. So test scripts should be written such that
if any transaction data is created, then the script should delete that data after the
testing run is over.
The nightly sanity tests should be completely automated so that they can be
executed fast, and no test engineer should do it manually. It should run automati-
cally at a specified time so that no human intervention is needed to start them.
Whenever a patch is applied on the production instance, the sanity test suite
must be run to ensure that all application functionality is working fine.
...
Test Case Execution
One bottleneck during test execution is that many test cases may be dependent on
each other. If the first test case fails, then the dependent test case will also fail. If the
first test case has failed, then there is no point in executing the second test case. In
software testing parlance this is called the showstopper defect. Unless the first test
case passes, the dependent test cases cannot be executed. So apart from the usual
categories of defects—that is, minor, medium, and severe defects—we have an addi-
tional category called showstopper. The development team must fix this defect as a
priority so that test case execution does not get affected badly (see Table 7.1).
...
Checklist for Test Execution
◾
Has test data been created and validated?
◾
Have regression test cases been identified and created for this release of
Has an inventory of test cases been created?
◾
the application?
