Occasionally we may be asked to help our Software Testers run through their manual regression test cases
When I was a tester, even though writing test cases should be easy, you often find they are so tedious to write if you want to accurately describe every single step. Therefore, you may choose to be more concise with your wording or make assumptions that the person running through the test will understand what to click.
Sometimes you think you have written a brilliant test, but when you come to run it again at a later point, you realise that it was ambiguous and then might end up looking at the code to work out how it was meant to work at the time.
If the test case is misleading, sometimes the tester will then modify it to be “less ambiguous”/“correct” but there’s times where they have incorrectly changed it, causing further confusion.
I ran a test called “Enter 1020 characters into the Description Textbox ensuring to include numbers and special characters (namely ‘&’)”
However the expected result was “Textbox will only accept the first 260 characters”
Why would we be entering 1020 characters if the textbox is gonna stop at 260? Clearly something is up with this test.
So I look at the history to see if someone had changed it. It used to say enter 260, but 255 is accepted but then Sarah changed it to “enter 1020 and 260 is accepted”.
So I looked at the linked change to see what it should have been changed to (or maybe not changed at all). The item was called “Extend description from 255 to 1023 characters”
That seemed really random. Why 1023 characters? And why did the tester change the test case to 1020 (and 260) when that still isn’t enough.
Even more confusing was the developer didn’t even change it to 1023 – it was set to 1000 in the database.
＼（〇_ｏ）／
So we wanted 1023, the developer provided 1000, and the tester either tried 1020 or 260 and passed it.
Stranger Coding Tings 