Recently, during a coaching session, a tester was wrestling with something that was a mystery to her. She asked:

Why do some tech leaders (for example, CTOs, development managers, test managers, and test leads) jump straight to test cases when they want to provide traceability, share testing efforts with stakeholders, and share feature knowledge with testers?

I’m not sure. I fear that most of the time, fixation on test cases is simply due to ignorance. Many people literally don’t know any other way to think about testing, and have never bothered to try. Alarmingly, that seems to apply not only to leaders, but to testers, too. Much of the business of testing seems to limp along on mythology, folklore, and inertia.

Testing, as we’ve pointed out (many times), is not test cases; testing is a performance. Testing, as we’ve pointed out, is the process of learning about a product through exploration and experimentation, which includes to some degree questioning, studying, modeling, observation, inference, etc. You don’t need test cases for that.

The obsession with procedurally scripted test cases is painful to see, because a mandate to follow a script removes agency, turning the tester into a robot instead of an investigator. Overly formalized procedures run a serious risk of over-focusing testing and testers alike. As James Bach has said, “testing shouldn’t be too focused… unless you want to miss lots of bugs.”

There may be specific conditions, elements of the product, notions of quality, interactions with other products, that we’d like to examine during a test, or that might change the outcome of a test. Keeping track of these could be very important. Is a procedurally scripted test case the only way to keep track? The only way to guide the testing? The best way? A good way, even?

Let’s look at alternatives for addressing the leaders’ desires (traceability, shared knowledge of testing effort, shared feature knowledge).

Traceability. It seems to me that the usual goal of traceability is be able to narrate and justify your testing by connecting test cases to requirements. From a positive perspective, it’s a good thing to make those connections to make sure that the tester isn’t wasting time on unimportant stuff.

On the other hand, testing isn’t only about confirming that the product is consistent with the requirements documents. Testing is about finding problems that matter to people. Among other things, that requires us to learn about things that the requirements documents get wrong or don’t discuss at all. If the requirements documents are incorrect or silent on a given point, “traceable” test cases won’t reveal problems reliably.

For that reason, we’ve proposed a more powerful alternative to traceability: test framing, which is the process of establishing and describing the logical connections between the outcome of the test at the bottom and the overarching mission of testing at the top.

Requirements documents and test cases may or may not appear in the chain of connections. That’s okay, as long as the tester is able to link the test with the testing mission explicitly. In a reasonable working environment, much of the time, the framing will be tacit. If you don’t believe that, pause for a moment and note how often test cases provide a set of instructions for the tester to follow, but don’t describe the motivation for the test, or the risk that informs it.

Some testers may not have sufficient skill to describe their test framing. If that’s so, giving test cases to those testers papers over that problem in an unhelpful and unsustainable way. A much better way to address the problem would, I believe, would be to train and supervise the testers to be powerful, independent, reliable agents, with freedom to design their work and responsibility to negotiate it and account for it.

Sharing efforts with stakeholders. One key responsibility for a tester is to describe the testing work. Again, using procedurally scripted test cases seems to be a peculiar and limited means for describing what a tester does. The most important things that testers do happen inside their heads: modeling the product, studying it, observing it, making conjectures about it, analyzing risk, designing experiments… A collection of test cases, and an assertion that someone has completed them, don’t represent the thinking part of testing very well.

A test case doesn’t tell people much about your modeling and evaluation of risk. A suite of test cases doesn’t either, and typical test cases certainly don’t do so efficiently. A conversation, a list, an outline, a mind map, or a report would tend to be more fitting ways of talking about your risk models, or the processes by which you developed them.

Perhaps the worst aspect of using test cases to describe effort is that tests—performances of testing activity—become reified, turned into things, widgets, testburgers. Effort becomes recast in terms of counting test cases, which leads to no end of mischief.

If you want people to know what you’ve done, record and report on what you’ve done. Tell the testing story, which is not only about the status of the product, but also about how you performed the work, and what made it more and less valuable; harder or easier; slower or faster.

Sharing feature knowledge with testers. There are lots of ways for testers to learn about the product, and almost all of them would foster learning better than procedurally scripted test cases. Giving a tester a script tends to focus the tester on following the script, rather than learning about the product, how people might value it, and how value might be threatened.

If you want a tester to learn about a product (or feature) quickly, provide the tester with something to examine or interact with, and give the tester a mission. Try putting the tester in front of

the product to be tested (if that’s available)

an old version of the product (while you’re waiting for a newer one)

a prototype of the product (if there is one)

a comparable or competitive product or feature (if there is one)

a specification to be analyzed (or compared with the product, if it’s available)

a requirements document to be studied

a standard to review

a user story to be expanded upon

a tutorial to walk through

a user manual to digest

a diagram to be interpreted

a product manager to be interviewed

another tester to pair with

a domain expert to outline a business process

Give the tester the mission to learn something based on one or more of these things. Require the tester to take notes, and then to provide some additional evidence of what he or she learned.

(What if none of the listed items is available? If none of that is available, is any development work going on at all? If so, what is guiding the developers? Hint: it won’t be development cases!)

Perhaps some people are concerned not that there’s too little information, but too much. A corresponding worry might be that the available information is inconsistent. When important information about the product is missing, or unclear, or inconsistent, that’s a test result with important information about the project. Bugs breed in those omissions or inconsistencies.

What could be used as evidence that the tester learned something? Supplemented by the tester’s notes, the tester could

have a conversation with a test lead or test manager

provide a report on the activities the tester performed, and what the tester learned (that is, a test report)

produce a description of the product or feature, bugs and all (see The Honest Manual Writer Heuristic)

offer proposed revisions, expansions, or refinements of any of the artifacts listed above

identify a list of problems about the product that the tester encountered

develop a list of ways in which testers might identify inconsistencies between the product and something desirable (that is, a list of useful oracles)

report on a list of problems that the tester had in fulfilling the information mission

in a mind map, outline a set of ideas about how the tester might learn more about the product (that is, a test strategy)

list out a set of ideas about potential problems in the product (that is, a risk list)

develop a set of ideas about where to look for problems in product (that is, a product coverage outline)

Then review the tester’s work. Provide feedback, coaching and mentoring. Offer praise where the tester has learned something well; course correction where the tester hasn’t. Testers will get a lot more from this interactive process than from following step-by-step instructions in a test case.

My coaching client had some more questions about test cases. We’ll get to those next time.

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