Technical Writing - Writing a Test Case, A Simple Guide

One of the many skills required of the technical author is the ability to write test cases. What's a test case? During the product development phase sooner or later you need to understand if the product performs as it is expected to perform and if it doesn't what you will do about that.

So how do you develop your test cases? Here's a simple guide to outline the process.

Overall Description

Before you start you need a formal system to describe your challenges;

Reference Number - Particularly important in the case of complex products where there will be hundreds of unique tests

Name - Give each item a name that enables it to be easily referenced

Owner - Who is responsible for conducting the work

Full Description - What is it you will test? How will you test it? Don't forget when you do this that you need to test for human error in the process too, so if for example you're testing a database field that needs a numerical input, you should also try a negative number, text, random characters, and combinations thereof.

The Set Up Description

Here you'll describe how your test should be performed and under what conditions.

Environment - Where will you perform it and with what tools?

Pre-Requisites - Does anything need to be done to the environment prior to commencing the test? (To continue with the database example, do you have to load any data on to the platform before you start?)

Full Script - The precise step-by-step guide to how you will perform your case and what each action should be during the test.

Post-Test Activity - Is there anything you need to do once you've finished? (For example: delete that data from your server?)

Reporting

There are only two things you should need to report on:

Expected Results: What was the right output for your actions? If everything was working correctly, what would you expect to observe?

Actual Results: What really happened? Where there any other observations that you made during the process that were unexpected or unforeseen (or even just annoying)?

If you follow this basic outline you won't go far wrong when it comes to designing test cases, even if you've never had any experience before. For simple products there may be only a few documents generated for this process, but with complex tools like software packages there may be thousands of them, in these instances it's a good idea to develop a tracking tool to enable quick reference to progress in the testing cycle.

The experience you gain when working as part of a testing team is invaluable to your ability to develop final user documentation and the technical author should be pleased to be part of the process.

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