Almost a year ago I shared an advice to use test cases. Not because they are crucial during testing or dramatically improve the quality of the product (they are not), but because of value you get when you create test cases.
A confession (and yes, you’d guess it anyway if you read the title): we don’t write test cases anymore.
We stopped using them and the reason isn’t on the list of shortcomings of test cases. Actually I was aware of these shortcomings a year ago and I were all “test cases are great” anyway. What have changed then?
We dropped test cases as a side effect of implementing Kanban, but you can perfectly use both if you like. In our case one of effects of switching to Kanban was making our pieces of functionality pushed (pulled actually) to development smaller. Before the switch we had pretty big features which were split into several (8-15) detailed user stories. After the switch we have much smaller features which would make 2 or 3 detailed user stories if we didn’t drop writing user stories at all.
And the reason for making features smaller was simple – smaller features, smoother and more flexible workflow.
Initially we were connecting test cases to features, not user stories. It was so because pretty often one testing flow was going through a few different user stories. I told you they were detailed. When standard feature-size went down we realized there’s much less value in preparing test cases.
Once again: main value of creating test cases is thinking about specific usage scenarios, looking for places forgotten during design. The more complex feature the bigger are chances there is something screwed up. With small features test cases lost much of their value for us since most problems we were able to locate instantly and fix problems without additional technique. And yet the effort needed to create and maintain test cases was still significant. So we dropped the practice.
It looks like my advice is: make your features smaller, and then you’ll be able to drop user stories and test cases. And I must say it does make sense, at least for me. What do you think?
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