What are techniques to analyze requirements in order to write test cases?

Question

Can you please share your techniques that you had used to analyze requirements in order to write test cases? May be a lot of it comes with experience, in my case I remember I had struggled with financial projects but not so much with application /web testing projects.
The biggest one was coming up with negative test cases. I googled and found most of the results were about gathering requirement: for BA.
Don't forget to post a good link if you have found one.

Answer 1

There are three ways to design the test cases

1. Behavioural, As over the period of time a tester develops a sense to figure out the areas of issue.

2. Look at the functionality and the specification

3. Use the BVA and ECP concepts

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Answer 2

In my experience this is what I have seen as the most effective way. The starting point will be Business Requirements and Product Requirement documents. This helps to derive test cases and then drill down to Solution design documents and detailed designs.

E.g. from a Web Application testing project.

Product Requirement A. As a Product owner the company's logo must be visible on the Login page in Arial Font size 10. Business Requirement a. The application when accessed via PC/Mac must display a login prompt to the user just below the company logo on Welcome screen.

Solution Design : When referenced the solution design will give more insight to the flow from the login page to the subsequent components

Detailed design of the Login component will emphasise whether it uses http/https. How it is hosted and triggered. API detail, etc.

Assuming you/your team is responsible for entire testing, you will need to refer to all the documents to ensure all the areas are covered in test including negative tests.

In larger organisations where there are multiple teams and vendors are involved the responsibilities may change and accordingly documentation to be referred changes as the test scope changes.