Software Quality Assurance Forums: Test case from Use case

From your use cases, you should be able to build detailed requirements specification. The requirements gathering is likely be done by the System Analyst. You should study the documentations on Software Requirement Specification (SRS), Software Development Plan (SDP), Software Testing Design (STD), and Software Testing Requirement(STR)(all of these documents were originally used by the military)

I would like to state that use case is different from test case. If you did the use case according to the Unified Modeling Language (UML)'s rules and understand its concept, there will be not much problem. However, your use case should not specify all functionalities that you want in your system. Including too much info. in your use case is not such a good practice either.

In the SRS, after creating the use case, now only we will move on to the requirements specification. Only from a clear requirements specification, you can develop a good class diagram, sequence diagram and so on in the SRS. (in my opinion, SRS can become the first guidance to build test cases)

Now, when you have finished doing the SDP, SRS, and SDD, its time to move to STD and STR. Both of these two documents will become second guidance to help you build test cases.

Again, i would like to stress that the requirements descriptions should be written based on the use cases. And the way to write your test cases should be based on the requirements description or class diagram or sequence diagram. Basically it still means the same - that you are using use case to build test case

All these documentations effort is really a hardworking job. I suggest you find yourself a system analyst who will make the SRS, STD and STR and then, by using that thorough documentations, you as a tester should be able to use it as a guidance to write a good test cases. (or you could just ask the system analyst to write you one after doing some discussions.)

I suggest reading on IBM's UML use case diagram, sequence diagram, class diagram, statechart diagram, activity diagram, SRS documentations, STD and STR documentation.

(P.S.: Please correct me if i am wrong...)

Edited by Natz (03/17/07 11:58 AM)