Question

How to make the test cases maintainable or generic in an agile environment , where there is frequent changes in the requirements.

This is a question that was asked to my friend in an interview.

Answer 1

• Write tests at higher level of abstraction
  • Write intent revealing tests rather than tests that mimic the user clicks on UI
  • Use BDD frameworks like Spock, Cucumber etc.
• Re-use: Identify the reusable features and re-use them. For e.g. Login feature steps can be written once and re-used across other features
  • Write more tests at service level than from the end-to-end
• Use formal techniques to reduce the number of regression tests
  • Equivalence Class Partitioning
  • Combinatorial Testing
  • Boundary Values
• Create a test strategy for the entire team
  • Move white-box testing to unit and integration tests
  • Clearly identify what will be automated by testers and what should be automated by developers. For e.g. most of the white box tests can be realized using unit tests. Testing Quadrants is what I use heavily.
• And most importantly ditch tools from vendors like mercury and IBM.