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What do well-designed software tests look like?
What do well-designed software tests look like?

The qualities found in a high-quality test case.

Scott Johnson avatar
Written by Scott Johnson
Updated over a week ago

The video at the bottom explains - no, shows - what a well-designed set of software tests should look like.

Most test scripts look a lot like this...

If you watched 1,000 American brides walk down the aisle in the 1950's, slight variations on this same general theme would be repeated again and again.

Similarly, if you looked carefully at 1,000 manually-selected tests, you wouldn't find many of those tests that repeated each other identically, but you would find a tremendous amount of repetition from one test to the next.  Certain test inputs (like "typical user" or "IE 11" or "select Option A" (or any other common test inputs in your tests), would be repeated again and again in hundreds of tests, for example.

Watch the YouTube video. In short, variation is good.

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