How many test cases?

Question

I'm having trouble with test cases.

I have two questions:

1. Is it necessary to make test cases for all use cases / user stories? Or is it enough to just make test cases for the most important functionality (including documents etc.)?
2. Imagine I've made a test case for an ordering system. My test of the ordering system fails, so I give a description of how I encountered this error. So the developers fix this error and now I have to test it again. Do I simply use the same test case as previous? If I do, do I just increment the version of the test case document?

Answer 1

You only need to test for things that you care about. If you care about all functionality then you should test it. Sometimes you do not have time to do that, so you test the most important things. The key is to communicate what you doing so that no one is surprised that something was not covered.

You should absolutely run the same test to validate the fix, but I would add that you should "test around" the failure and run related tests that may fail in a similar way. For example if an input was expecting a number and the bug was a crash when you enter a string, then try special characters and see if that also crashes.

I don't think you would incremental a test case version number unless you changed the test case, but I have never used test case version numbers.

Answer 2

I agreed with David Cain for the answer at 1st answer, But for the 2nd answer ; When you are running the same test case for the 2nd time, add a separate column with the heading "test cycle number" so you can run the test case for n number of cycles. eg: Test cycle 1,Test cycle 2,Test cycle 3...etc.

And also dont forget to keep the track of Actual results for each and every cycle.