It’s clear that quality assurance activities are critical for project success. Those activities are also time-consuming and costly. So as businesses need to deliver value faster, they become prime targets for re-engineering. Leaders ask: “Why does testing take so long?” and “How can we speed it up?”
Why Quality Assurance is So Time Consuming
The truth is, quality assurance takes so much time, because there’s lots to do. It’s about more than just testing: For every test that’s executed, someone has to create some form of documentation detailing how the test should be performed and the desired outcomes.
For most software development projects, writing test cases for functional requirements – those that document what the system is supposed to do – is the biggest time consumer, because:
- Tests must be written to cover every use case and the processes that support them. Every branch and decision tree has to be tested, as do business rules. More numerous and complex requirements lead to more test cases.
- This effort is multiplied by the need for functional tests at varying levels of detail to support different testing phases. QA pros start testing at a granular level for specific steps within lower-level sub-processes. As more functionality is developed, they broaden their perspective, testing end-to-end sub-processes and then move up the process tree to test higher-level processes.
Eventually, teams test use cases, user stories, and features that tie multiple processes and user stories together. They keep expanding the breadth of testing while reducing the depth of detail. The highest level – and the least detailed – is user acceptance testing. Each level of testing requires that someone write a targeted set of test cases.
For a large system enabling hundreds of business processes, it’s easy to see how writing tests for functional requirements can consume a large portion of a project’s time and budget. And, yes, it takes time to write tests for non-functional requirements, like those for performance, security, or availability, but their more global nature means tests take a different form, and they can commonly be reused across projects and teams. The majority of time spent writing tests is almost always consumed writing them to address functional requirements.
How Can You Reduce the Time Required to Write Functional Test Cases?
If you’re looking to reduce the time your teams spend writing functional test cases, you should know that tools exist to automatically generate most of them for you.
Blueprint’s capability to auto-generate test cases based on functional requirements is a robust, here-and-now capability. For procedural-based requirements, it generates a complete set of test cases for every scenario in every use case. It can also create sets of test cases designed for different testing levels. Testers focused on individual processes can use test cases generated from process models, while business stakeholders can use a higher-level, smaller number of test cases generated from use cases.
It’s important to know that auto-generation of test cases from requirements won’t cover all the tests a team needs. Someone still needs to write the broader, more global tests, like those for non-functional requirements, system testing, and integration testing. But for projects focused on delivering user-facing software, with the large majority of requirements being functional, auto-generating test cases can give your teams a major jumpstart on confirming quality.
To learn more about Blueprint’s time-saving ability to auto-generate test cases, please contact us today.
