Introduction

Xray Test Case Designer is an Xray Enterprise Test case design optimization tool that enhances the effectiveness of your testing while saving time.

Teams use it during the early stages of the testing process, including when they create scenario-based Requirements. Benefiting from the model-based approach and the intelligent augmentation algorithm, Xray Test Case Designer's Test suites have repeatedly proven to find more defects - and do so more efficiently - than hand-selected Test suites.

Xray Test Case Designer carefully constructs combinations of Test conditions to achieve maximum coverage with the fewest possible Tests, using statistics-based optimization methods refined over more than 40 years.

This core feature of Xray Test Case Designer focuses on the following areas:

• Systematically avoiding wasteful repetition.
• Systematically covering all user-specified requirements and 100% of the application's critical interactions.
• Doing so in the lowest mathematically possible number of Tests.

Benefits

With Xray Test Case Designer, the goal is to enhance both the speed and the quality - teams create more thorough Tests faster, find defects earlier in the process, and do so in fewer Tests to run and maintain over time, which leads to cost savings.

Designing Faster

Creating Test Models in Xray Test Case Designer is fundamentally different from manually selecting and documenting individual Tests. Instead, the designer thoughtfully identifies inputs and variations and enters them into the tool. Once identified, you can generate entire suites of thorough and efficient scenarios in seconds and adjust them as needed.

Approving Faster

Each time you generate a set of Scenarios, the Xray Test Case Designer automatically creates insightful interaction coverage reports, clearly showing what is and isn't covered by any chosen scenario. These visualizations facilitate clear and efficient communication among stakeholders.

With Xray Test Case Designer's coverage graphs, you'll have clear, actionable, and fact-based answers to questions like "How many Tests are enough?".

Automating Faster

If many of your automated Tests are currently written using hard-coded variables, your SDETs, developers, and automation engineers will benefit from Xray Test Case Designer. It enables accelerated and optimized in-sprint automation:

• Rapidly create clear, consistent Test Steps that leverage Behavior Driven Development principles. The primary benefit is the one-to-many relationship between Xray Test Case Designer Scripts and the data Scenarios.
• Export one scenario block into multiple skeletal Scripts based on your chosen language (using the Automated Test Framework option).
• Maintain and reuse Script components faster, thanks to the model-based approach.

Eliminating Wasteful Redundancy

The most common type of wasteful repetition occurs when certain system paths and Test input combinations are tested repeatedly across multiple Tests (instead of branching out). Based on our analysis of thousands of hand-selected Test suites, even those achieving "Requirements coverage" often fail to thoroughly Test critical system interactions.

Eliminating Gaps, Maximizing Variation and Thoroughness

Most software defects are triggered by simple interactions within a system. Xray Test Case Designer uses combinatorial Test generation algorithms powered by intelligent augmentation to systematically eliminate coverage gaps. Whether a system under Test has 50 critical interactions or 5000, Xray Test Case Designer keeps track of 100% of them, ensuring your Tests cover them all in the fewest possible scenarios.

Concepts

Test Model

A Test Model is an abstraction of a focused use case you aim to Test. This model is built around a specific scope (e.g., "book a flight") that can be exercised in different ways, depending on a combination of input parameters (e.g., "origin, destination, number of seats, date"). To find bugs related to the input parameters and increase coverage, an optimized set of Test cases (manual or automated) can be derived from it.

Parameters

Parameters define the variables and their possible values within the Test Model. Typically, these refer to input variables. Parameters, along with restrictions specified using Rules, are used to derive the combination of Parameters/Values.

Rules

While Parameters enumerate the variables in your Test Model and their possible values, Rules allow you to apply restrictions. Rules can define which parameter values should never be tested together because they either don't make sense (e.g., Windows + Safari) or aren't representative/relevant.

Conversely, Rules can also enforce Scenarios where certain lengthy parameter value combinations must be incorporated into the Test suite as a priority.

Scenarios

Scenarios are the generated combinations of input parameter values, where each row represents a combination of Parameters (and their Values) to be used in a Test.

Think of Scenarios as an optimized dataset used to iterate your Test Model multiple times, testing it under slightly different circumstances.

Not all Parameter/Value combinations are created. Xray Test Case Designer uses coverage optimization algorithms (e.g., pairwise, n-wise) to achieve high coverage with few Tests. This can be adjusted for greater coverage if needed.

Scripts

While Scenarios focus on the data used for your Tests, Scripts provide the context so testers know how and where to apply it.

Scripts contain detailed Steps with actions and expectations for your test scenarios. Scripts can be manual or automated.

For manual Test Scripts, detailed Steps and expected results can be specified, with parameters mentioned. These parameters will be replaced by the respective values when exporting the Tests later.

For automated Test Scripts, you can specify Gherkin (e.g., Cucumber) Scenarios or Scenario Outlines, or even Robot Framework Test cases. Similar to manual Test Scripts, parameters can be mentioned in the specification and replaced by proper values later.

Features