Understanding Negative Testing in Software Quality Assurance

Understanding Negative Testing in Software Quality Assurance

Amongst its many objectives, Quality assurance practices focus on investigating difficult scenarios that involve misuse of the application. We look to confirm that an application behaves as expected when an unexpected scenario occurs.

Following this methodology, Q-Pros can scale up software applications and ensure top quality while discovering ways to improve the application.

In this article, we will look at a testing approach called Negative Testing, and we will also look at some negative test scenarios.

What is Negative Testing?

Negative testing is one of two main software testing strategies (Positive and Negative). Unlike its adversary, Negative testing focuses on test cases that drift away from common use(I.e., providing improper data as input) While positive testing follows an application’s intended steps to make sure it runs as intended.

Take for example an application that has a conditional insert field, what will happen if the user enters a space or a character inside an input field for numbers?

Negative testing looks for ways that can challenge the application and get it outside its comfort zone to make sure it holds its ground.

Some bad results might include system crashes or null outputs of no use.

While performing quality tests, we must include all possible events. Our testing engineers look for the most sophisticated way of improper use to make sure the system is aquept for everything.

Negative Test Case Scenarios

To give you some understanding of what negative testing situations look like, here are some scenarios to clear it up some more:

Data fields character limitations –

To establish a stable database, most applications have a set of conditions for data entries by users.

These conditions can also serve to organize personalized data on websites and assert security guidelines. An example of that would be authentication-based applications that will only allow a certain type of characters to be inserted while creating an account name or password.

Number of characters –

To avoid any sort of misuse, software systems would only allow a certain number of characters to be entered. This condition is essential for developers because it discredits any type of behavior that seeks to crash the system by overloading it with input. On the other hand, not adding enough characters would go against security regulations.

Required data entry –

So far, we looked at scenarios involving the quality and quantity of data entered, but what if the user decides not to enter data at all? Here we need to assess system deficiency when fields are left empty and make sure the system behaves well when this scenario occurs.

Logged-in/Logged-out tests –

Some services and lay-out options change and adapt based on account status, so if you are logged in, some options will show, and this would cause changes in the UI/UX. The objective of negative tests here is to make sure that certain combinations do not mix up and that the application remains intact.

In conclusion

Developers write certain “if statements” in the script of any software application. The reason those if statements are important is because this type of function would direct the user’s journey on the application and create limitations to what you can and cannot do as a user.

Using Negative tests, we can check for weak points that might go unnoticed in the early phases of development or when certain updates are made.