How do you design your test method/function

Question

This question has been revolving on my mind from quite some time. Do you develop one method for one test scenario or club similar scenarios in one method and develop automated tests for it. Both approaches have their pros and cons. For example consider you are writing GUI level automated tests and are validating whether application has certain elements on page or not, and if it succeeds then you proceed with more tests now do you do something like this -

testGUIElements() {

Assert Element1;
Assert Element2;
Assert Element3;

}

or do you do something like -

testElement1() {
}

testElement2() {
}

testElement3() {
}

I am not writing my approach here to avoid getting biased answers... I must mention that I am not a developer and has been hard core manual QA in my career.

n.b. I modified the question to make it more clear, hopefully :)

Answer 1

My preference is to have one test per element. This aids in diagnosability (test failure points directly to missing element) and maintainability (e.g. if elements are added or removed). I also like to use namespaces and classes to group the tests - e.g.

namespace TestPrerequisites
{

   public class GuiElements
   {
      public bool VerifyElementOne() {...}
      public bool VerifyElementTwo() {...}
   }
   //you could put other prequisites in this namespace
   public class DatabaseElements {}

 }
 namespace FunctionalTests
 {
    // put functional tests here - 
    // note that you could group these by type of tests, 
    // or functional area as appropriate
    // (e.g. "namespace InputTests"
 }

Answer 2

My preference would be one method per test scenario

Reasons

1.Easy(ier) to cherry pick and port/maintain/change/execute/analyze

2.Better traceability -- 1:1 relationship between test scenario & test method

Answer 3

This is IMHO a good reason to use a framework such as Cucumber that allows you to have steps that are reusable between multiple scenarios, and also provides ways for a scenario step to repeated multiple times with different data, or an entire scenario to be repeated with different data.

Answer 4

If the test methods are repeatedly used in other tests and can be made reusable you could define it as a separate method. For example Login method is used by almost all the test cases. Creating a separate login test method enhances re-usability and avoids writing code from scratch each time.

For testing login method the test method should be separate and re-usable as below:

<br>
testLogin()

If you are defining a specific scenario that is seldom re-usable you can group up the verification points in a single method. Alan's suggestion is valuable in this case. Define a package say payment for all payment related testcases. Define a class for each payment test case say testShoppingPay, testRecurringPay. Inside each class you need to call a reusable method for initial setup. Write a testmethod for verification points involved.

It would look like:

<br>
testinitSetup() //Method for initial test case setup<br>

test() //contains all verification points<br>
{<br>
      testLogin() //Calls reusable login method<br>
      Assert(Element1Present)<br>
      Assert(Element2Present)<br>
......<br>
......<br>
}