Role of Test Conditional Analysis in Product Quality

What are Test Conditions

Test conditions are nothing but a set of scenarios, or a series of pathways, that when executed either validate the accurate and successful implementation of a feature/function or identify a defect, flaw or bug.

In traditional development styles, test conditions were driven for the consumption of the QA team. QA resources would use these test conditions to write detailed test cases, meant for execution by testers.

Seldom do these test conditions get viewed or used by developers. However with rapid software development styles as what the industry has seen with the popularity of agile development, DevOps style of implementation, having these test conditions available to teams have been found to be highly effective.

Testable Outcome Or Incomplete Test Condition

Test conditional analysis inadvertently identifies one of two outcomes –

either a testable condition or
an incomplete test condition.

An incomplete test condition is one that is missing information, the absence of which poses a challenge for testers to successful test functionality. An incomplete test condition therefore also poses a challenge for developers, where the same absence of information poses a challenge to their completion of specific user path.

And thus having test conditional analysis performed early, albeit whilst the requirements or user stories are being created or right after, highlights the missing information for all parties, the product owner, developer and test team alike.

Having these test conditions, which are nothing but the user paths that a test team shall execute at a micro level, identified early in the phase, allows for developers to pick the test conditions that may increase code coverage and/or strengthen their unit testing.

In other words, test conditional analysis performed early in the phase;