What is test case management: What it is and why it’s important

A thorough testing process is essential to ensure your developing quality, competitive, and relevant software. Testing allows you to identify and fix defects and errors that may prevent your software from functioning properly. Before a software product hits the market, you need to conduct copious testing. But managing all these tests is a critical job in and of itself. Test case management is an approach that helps you identify areas of improvement for your software and correct defects that may cause your application to perform incorrectly.

This post explores test case management—why it’s important, what its challenges are, and how to overcome those challenges. Further, it provides examples of test case management tools and walks you through the steps to conduct test case management.

What is test case management?

Test case management is the set of steps you follow to verify that an application meets expected functionality. This systematic process involves:

• planning, preparing, executing, and documenting test cases, and
• logging defects.

Test case management gives you control over your software testing process, allowing you to trace and easily maintain test cases.

Why is test case management important?

Standardizes test cases

Test case management helps you create a standard approach to test case planning, execution, maintenance, and reporting. When test cases are standardized, you can reuse them to save time. Also, it’s easy to maintain and update standardized test cases. With well-documented, standardized test cases, onboarding new members becomes easier and their learning curve shortens.

Encourages collaboration

Effective communication is needed to keep up with today’s fast-paced environment, and test case management facilitates this. With a test case management plan, the various teams involved in testing can collaborate effectively. Testers and developers must work together in test case management. For instance, you’ll find the quality assurance team sharing the testing approach, goals, and scope. The testing team can also share feedback or issues that are affecting them more easily.

Increases traceability

With a test case management plan, the various teams involved in testing can collaborate effectively. 

Test case management allows you to link and track requirements to test cases at various stages of the testing process. Linking requirements to test cases promotes test traceability. And test traceability ensures that all the functions specified in the requirements are verified and validated.

Promotes efficiency

A clear test case management strategy helps prevent duplication of steps, while also ensuring that there are no gaps in the testing process. With a clear overview of the test suite, you can prioritize and allocate resources according to the relevance of test cases, reducing testing time.

Test case management tools

To ensure an application runs smoothly, you’ll need to create and execute many types of test cases, including those targeting the user interface, usability, database functionality, security, integration, API connection, and performance. Test case management tools make your work easier.

Below, we’ve gathered a list of some of the top tools for you to add to your test case management strategy.

Tricentis qTest

Tricentis qTest is a test case management tool that helps you scale test operations and track and analyze tests cases. It provides a centralized platform for planning, creating, tracking, and reporting on test cases, test reports, and test results.

• It allows you to create event-driven testing workflows with third-party tools like Teams and Azure DevOps.
• It offers comprehensive reporting on defects and test status and allows you to share these reports via email and URL.
• It integrates with DevOps tools like GitHub, Jenkins, Jira, and Selenium.

qTest is appropriate for handling complex and diverse testing needs due to its high scalability and ability to accommodate large volumes of test data and projects.

TestLink

TestLink is an open-source tool that helps you create test scripts, execute tests, and track results.

• Users can prioritize, assign, and link test cases to milestones.
• Users can create test case reports and export them to HTML, Microsoft Word, and Excel.

You’ll find this tool useful for managing less complex test cases on a small scale.

A look at the test case management process

According to Richard Bradshaw, we should not see testing as just “checking against the requirements.” Test case management involves many systematic steps for handling test cases, from planning to execution. This guide contains the different phases of the test case management process. By improving how you manage test cases, you can deliver better software to the market faster.

Step 1: Planning

At this stage, you define what to test, where to test it, and who will conduct those tests. You must identify a suitable test environment and testers to whom you’ll assign the test cases. Define your testing strategy based on risk analysis, so you know where to allocate most of the testing time.

A critical reason for testing is also to generate a quality report. Thus, early on you must establish quality indicators that you’ll use at various stages of the testing process.

Step 2: Preparation and specification

Once you create a test plan, you must create test case specifications. Specifications detail instructions on the scenarios that you’ll test, how you’ll test them, and how often. Identify the test scripts and schedule them for execution. You can categorize test cases or scripts by grouping them by test function. For instance, you can group test cases into regression, authorization, integration, sanity, user acceptance, and smoke tests.

These specifications form the basis for individual test cases. At this stage, you want to determine the purpose of each test and the versions of the software you’ll test. You also need to provide input data for the test cases, steps for executing the test, and the expected results. Include steps that you’ll follow to compare the actual results for the test case and the expected results. During this stage, you also step up the test infrastructure in both the hardware and software environments.

Step 3: Execution

Once the first testable components of the application are available, you enter the execution phase. But first, you must set up an initial test database. This will act as a centralized repository to store the test cases for easy access and collaboration. qTest allows you to manage test cases in a centralized repository and collaborate in real time.

Once you assign test cases, you share the preconditions. The testers will receive test instructions, review test cases, and provide feedback.

Before the actual tests, execute pretests to ensure that your test environment can successfully test the main functions of the test object. Once this is complete, start the test execution using the test scripts. If the actual results differ from the expected results, it suggests a defect in your software product. However, it may also indicate a defect in your test infrastructure, specification, or test case. So, determine the cause of the defects, correct them, and return the reworked test cases for further testing.

Step 4: Test tracking and reporting

You need to track and record defects found during execution and generate a final evaluation report. Besides the test results and defects, the report includes details such as the duration and status of all the test cases executed. Most test case management tools can help you generate test logs and reports automatically. For instance, qTest allows you to track and record the status of executed test cases in real time so that you know which test versions were successfully executed and which had defects. With qTest Insights, you can also generate quality, coverage, and velocity analysis reports.

You can go into the production phase once you prepare a final evaluation report. If users find new defects during this stage, resolve the retest immediately.

Step 5: Completion

The generated reports contain essential statistics that will help you evaluate your testing process and the quality of your software product. With this data, you can perform a cost-benefit analysis of the testing process. This will help you optimize and improve future software quality assessment processes.

Common problems in test case management

Below are some common challenges that hinder effective test case management:

• Test cases may become outdated as software receives updates such as security patches, bug fixes, and performance improvements. You can track updates and changes by integrating test case management tools with version control systems.
• Testers and developers may miss out on important project aspects due to a lack of proper communication regarding project requirements, deliverables, and specifications. Use a test management tool to ensure proper documentation of test inputs, defects, changes, and test output.
• Testing applications on every mobile device, operating system, and network is challenging. You can adopt cloud-based testing to test on real devices in environments that mimic those of real users.

Test case management best practices

Below are best practices for effective test case management:

• Perform risk-based QA testing and focus on the areas of the application that could affect the reliability, quality, and usability of your software product.
• Build reusable quality assurance assets. For example, you can reuse test data such as user profiles and accounts. You can reuse standard templates such as test guidelines, plans, and bug reports. Also, develop a repository of reusable test procedures to reuse against different versions of your software product.
• Minimize manual testing and leverage automation. Use test management tools to automate repetitive tasks, generate comprehensive reports, and track test coverage. This will help you control testing costs and reduce time to market.

Final thoughts

Test case management is central to ensuring high-quality software development and reduced time to market. The right test case management process involves planning, preparing, executing, tracking test cases, and generating and analyzing reports.

qTest is your partner in test case management. Watch a demo to learn how qTest can improve your test case management, or sign up for a free trial.

This post was written by Caroline Wanjiru. Caroline is a software developer and a technical writer. In her work, she has developed interests and worked on many machine learning and artificial intelligence projects.