Test Case Maintenance

Changes to Product features can happen many times during a product development lifecycle. These may be driven by change of customer requirements, design changes or some times as late as customer acceptance tests. Many times, making necessary changes reported by customers can be crucial. In such scenarios test cases drawn by Test Engineers can become obsolete rendering the whole effort in test planning a fruitless exercise.

Planning for Test Case Maintenance is critical as -
- Test cases may become redundant due to behavior change.
- Expected Outcome may change for some test cases.
- Additional test cases need to be added because of altered conditions.

For effective Test Case Maintenance:
1. It is important to keep the test case list updated to reflect changes of product features otherwise for next phase of testing there will be a tendency to discard current test case list and start afresh.

2. Making the Test Case a 'Work Sheet' is very important. On daily basis this test case list should be updated. To enable each member in the team to update test cases the Excel Worksheet was kept in a shared drive and workbook was shared to allow concurrent editing.

3. Keeping track of Test Cases Metrics complements Defect Reports Metrics and gives a better view of Product quality. When you read that there are 30 defects pending and only 50 test cases are pending with 1200 test cases successful, you have better knowledge of product quality.

4. Maintaining the test case list updated works as proof of testing. In future when a defect is reported, it will be possible to validate whether this case has been covered during testing or not.

5. This list of updated test cases list can be used by anyone who will do the testing for next version of product. Same team need not work on next release as test case list matches 'current' behavior of application.