Have you ever heard of positive and negative testing? These are some of the basic QA concepts, so we can’t help but talk about them.
When a QA specialist performs a positive test, they check if software works as intended. A negative test, in turn, evaluates what happens if someone uses a nontypical, unexpected input. Will software be able to respond correctly? And what does “correctly” mean under such circumstances? That’s what we’ll try to explain in this article.
In a nutshell, negative testing ensures that your application can handle invalid input and unexpected user behavior. To be more specific, it verifies that the system can handle invalid inputs responding with error messages and not allowing the software to perform in a certain way.
Let’s take a close look at the negative testing by comparing it to the positive. Let’s take an ordinary elevator in the QA Madness’ office as an example and examine how it works.
Negative testing will answer the following questions:
Meanwhile, we work with normal conditions for running positive tests:
To write a negative test case, select invalid input data or unwanted user behavior that would be useful to check. Indicate the expected result for this unexpected action. As a rule, it will be “failed.”
In our blog, you can find a guide for creating test cases, positive and negative ones. Read and refresh your memory. Generally, the logic of writing positive and negative test scenarios is similar. Just remember that negative testing intends to identify possible program failures under any circumstances.
ID: TC-1.1
Summary: Check the registration with empty required fields.
Steps to reproduce:
Expected result: A user cannot register. The error message is displayed.
* The QA Madness team hasn’t tested this website, the link and screenshot are for illustrative purposes only.
The purpose of negative testing is to detect potential errors and application crashes in different situations. You can find several examples of such situations below:
Since all of the QA processes are time-consuming, the decision of “what,” “how,” and “how much” to test is highly important. We can’t create a perfect bug-free system. However, we can make sure we’ve done everything to prevent those bugs. To achieve that, it’s necessary to run negative testing.
Let’s talk in more detail:
Negative testing is a crucial part of software testing that can be costly and time-consuming. Negative test cases have their pros and cons, so it’s worth remembering when, where, and how to apply them. Therefore, the best advice we can give is to learn theory and practice.
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