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Efficiency is crucial when it comes to software testing. Yet, many testing teams are bogged down by one particular task: building new test cases. A recent survey we conducted found that building new test cases is the most time-consuming testing task for 45% of respondents (23% each said that tracking progress and maintaining those test cases was the most time-consuming thing). The common culprit behind this time drain? A manual, spreadsheet-based approach to test cases.
While spreadsheets have long been the default tool for creating, managing and tracking test cases, they are far from ideal. They’re clunky, error-prone, and handle the complexity of modern testing environments as well as small children handle late bedtimes. Incidentally, that’s where the Original Software platform comes in. It offers a much faster, easier, and more streamlined way to create, track, and maintain your test cases.
In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at best practices for modern test case creation and management, using examples from our platform. By simplifying the test case creation process, our solution helps you reduce the time and effort spent on testing and improves the quality of your testing.
Spreadsheets: complex for managers and testers
For many testing teams, spreadsheets have been a go-to solution for organizing test cases. They’re familiar, easy to customize, and offer flexibility in managing test data. They do, however, have a number of drawbacks that become more apparent as testing teams grow and test cycles become more frequent:
- Lack of structure and standardization: Spreadsheets offer little in terms of enforcing structure. Even with standardized test case templates, it’s easy for test cases to become inconsistent, leading to gaps in coverage and difficulties in understanding what’s been tested.
- Manual effort: Spreadsheets require both test managers to enter data manually when building a test case, describing steps and conditions for passing them while referring to a different screen (or window on the same screen, depending on how many monitors you have). This slows down the process and increases the risk of human error. This manual effort can lead to incomplete or inaccurate test cases, impacting the overall quality of your testing. The same is true for testers themselves, when they come to take the test.
- Cumbersome to update: When new features or updates are introduced, test cases need to be adjusted accordingly. In spreadsheets, this means manually searching through rows and columns, making individual updates – a process as vulnerable to errors as starting from scratch.
- Difficult collaboration: If multiple people are working on the same test case, version control can become a headache. Spreadsheets are not designed for real-time collaboration, and multiple versions of the same document can lead to confusion and conflicting data.
- Limited scalability: As the number of test cases you need grows, the volume of spreadsheets in your test case library becomes increasingly hard to navigate and manage. You might start with a few dozen test cases, but once you scale into hundreds or thousands, finding and managing test cases becomes overwhelming – the risk being that test cases are used incorrectly, damaging your test coverage.
So what should you do instead?
While spreadsheets may have been the only option for test cases in the past, modern test management platforms like ours offer a much more efficient solution. By creating software whose only purpose is to create and manage test cases, we’ve eliminated many of the challenges of test case creation, tracking, and maintenance.
The guiding principles from our platform are:
1. A UX people enjoy using
Our platform offers an intuitive, user-friendly interface for test case creation. Instead of manually entering data into cells, testers can build out test cases with easy-to-use input fields, with accompanying screenshots (more on that later). This reduces the complexity and time spent on test case creation, allowing testers to focus on the quality of their test cases rather than trying to interpret a spreadsheet.
Testers can quickly add test steps, expected results, and associated requirements, all within a clean, structured environment. The platform ensures that each test case is created with the necessary information, reducing the risk of missing details that are critical for successful test execution.
2. Efficient test case management and organization
Unlike spreadsheets living in folders, test managers can view and search their entire test library from within our platform, with test cases tagged for easy categorization and structure. Test cases can be grouped by feature, module, or requirement, making it easy to find and manage them as your project grows. You can even see which test cases are currently in use in a testing project.
This structure dramatically improves test case management, particularly in large-scale projects with hundreds or thousands of test cases, eliminating version control challenges and helping ensure the right test case is always to hand when you need it.
3. One place for all your testing
Tracking the status of test cases in a spreadsheet usually involves manual updates and color-coding, which is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. If you’re a whizz at spreadsheets, you could link data between spreadsheets – but if you have a version control issue the whole thing can break down.
Our platform keep all your test cases in the same environment as your test management tools, eliminating the need for manual updates or complex formulas.
With our platform, you can monitor the execution status of your test cases in real-time. Whether a test case is passed, failed, or blocked, the platform automatically updates its status and provides a clear overview of your testing progress. This makes it easier to identify gaps in coverage, track overall progress, and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
Benefits beyond test case creation
Switching from spreadsheet-based test cases to our platform doesn’t just make test case creation easier. It can improve test management, test automation, your bug resolution processes, and even make life easier for your manual testers. Here’s what you can expect:
- Better manual testing: test cases are presented to the tester in context – when they launch a test case, the application they need to test launches, with unobtrusive tools that enable them to leave annotations and feedback that are consistent and informative. You may find your manual testers actually enjoy testing!
- Powerful test automation: Our platform can transform manual test cases into automated test scripts in just a few clicks – and our unique AI-powered object recognition means that our automated testing keeps going when other tools break down.
- Integration with developers: Feedback from your testers can be passed to developers with accompanying annotated screenshots, effortlessly. Plus, as issues are fixed, you can track them and arrange re-testing without missing a beat.
- Modern management: we’ve already mentioned our test management capabilities. Original Software gives you one place to see all testing progress, communicate with testers, schedule testing, and more.
Work smarter, not harder
If you’re still using spreadsheets to manage your test cases, hopefully you agree that upgrading to Original Software would make your life considerably easier. Our platform offers a faster, easier, and more efficient way to create and manage your test cases, freeing up your team to focus on delivering high-quality software.
If you’d like to explore our platform and see how much easier test case creation can be, just click below.
