Professional test engineers must deliver reliable, trustworthy error reports; the reported errors must be easily reproducible and understandable.
Carefully prepared test data is a cornerstone of successful web site testing, desktop testing and mobile application testing. Absent, obsolete or wrong test data may prevent the tester from executing the test cases or give unreliable test results. One can even log a defect that appears only because of improper test data.
Customers, programmers and specialists in manual and automated testing consider such events intolerable. That is why one shouldn’t forget about test data, elaborating test cases.
Test engineers must keep in mind that one cannot justify any omitted or unreproducible defect claiming that the test data were absent or outdated.
To Avoid Low-Quality Software Testing One Should:
- prepare test data for every written test case;
- not postpone preparation of the test data till execution of functional testing, usability testing, security testing or another type of testing;
- not count that other test engineers will prepare the test data;
- regularly update the test data, never rely on standard test data that may be obsolete; if test data are regularly updated, one can use them when it is necessary and do not prepare the new ones every time.