Overview of Test Cases

A test case is an automated test that addresses one objective of a test plan. A test case:

Drives the application from the initial state to the state you want to test.
Verifies that the actual state matches the expected (correct) state. Your QA department might use the term baseline to refer to this expected state. This stage is the heart of the test case.
Cleans up the application, in preparation for the next test case, by undoing the steps performed in the first stage.

In order for a test case to function properly, the application must be in a stable state when the test case begins to execute. This stable state is called the base state. The recovery system is responsible for maintaining the base state in the event the application fails or crashes, either during the execution of a test cases or between test cases.

Each test case is independent and should perform its own setup, driving the application to the state that you want to test, executing the test case, and then returning the application to the base state. The test case should not rely on the successful or unsuccessful completion of another test case, and the order in which the test case is executed should have no bearing on its outcome. If a test case relies on a prior test case to perform some setup actions, and an error causes the setup to fail or, worse yet, the application to crash, all subsequent test cases will fail because they cannot achieve the state where the test is designed to begin.

A test case has a single purpose: a single test case should verify a single aspect of the application. When a test case designed in this manner passes or fails, it is easy to determine specifically what aspect of the target application is either working or not working.

If a test case contains more than one objective, many outcomes are possible. Therefore, an exception may not point specifically to a single failure in the software under test but rather to several related function points. This makes debugging more difficult and time-consuming and leads to confusion in interpreting and quantifying results. The result is an overall lack of confidence in any statistics that might be generated. But there are techniques you can use to perform more than one verification in a test case.

Types of test cases

Silk Test Classic supports two types of test cases, depending on the type of application that you are testing. You can create test cases that use:

Hierarchical object recognition: This is a fast, easy method for creating scripts. This type of testing is supported for all application types.
Dynamic object recognition: This is a more robust and easy to maintain method for creating scripts. However, dynamic object recognition is only supported for applications that use the Open Agent.

If you are using the Open Agent, you can create tests for both dynamic and hierarchical object recognition in your test environment. Use the method best suited to meet your test requirements. You can use both recognition methods within a single test case if necessary.