Grow Your Own Tree

Creating software testing documentation may seem to be boring, but this doesn’t mean that you can simply skip this part of your project. Sometimes the documentation is the only way to save and share information about the product.

Test Cases vs Checklists

There are several types of the documentation: checklists and test cases. Cases are extremely detailed and heavy and take a lot of time. Besides, bugs can adapt to tests, and cases increase the possibility of this problem. Checklists give you more flexibility, but their functionality may at some point decrease due to the human factor.

Going into details

To avoid the mistakes, you can try to make checklists more detailed. Such a strategy will virtually turn them into one giant test case, and it has certain advantages:

• Both positive and negative cases are covered;
• Your chances of detecting problems are higher;
• It’s easier to understand how the software works;
• Such list covers a lot of user scenarios.

Obviously, some cons are still here:

• The checklist becomes heavier;
• It’s easier for bugs to adapt;
• Such documentation can’t replace requirements for developers;
• It’s difficult to maintain such list.

A little lifehack

To make the life of your team easier, you can try to use nested lists instead of tables. You can turn user scenarios into a tree, and every its branch will be a test case. In this way, your documentation will have a very flexible structure. Your developers may even be able to use it instead of a technical task! You will also spend less time on creating test cases and checklists. However, “growing” this tree requires preliminary analytics and very careful designing.