Key Principles of Test Design

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Introduction Test design is the single biggest contributor to success in software testing. Not only can good test design result in good coverage, it is also a major contributor to efficiency. The principle of test design should be "lean and mean." The tests should be of a manageable size, and at the same time complete and aggressive enough to find bugs before a system or system update is released. Test design is also a major factor for success in test automation. This is not that intuitive. Like many others, I initially also thought that successful automation is an issue of good programming or even "buying the right tool". That test design turns out to be a main driver for automation success is something that I had to learn over the years, often the hard way. What I have found is that there are three main goals that need to be achieved in test design. I like to characterize them as the "Three Holy Grails of Test Design", a metaphor based on the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table. Each of the three goals is hard to reach, just like it was hard for the knights of King Arthur to find the Holy Grail. This article will introduce the three "grails" to look for in test design. In subsequent articles in this article series I go into more detail about each of the goals. The terminology in this article and the three follow up articles is based on Action Based Testing (ABT), LogiGear's method for testing and test automation. You can read more about the ABT methodology on the LogiGear web site. In ABT test cases are organized into spreadsheets which are called "test modules". Within the test modules the tests are described as a sequences of "test lines", each starting in the A column with an "action", while the other columns contain arguments. The automation in ABT does not focus on automating test cases, but on automating individual actions, which can be re-used as

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