Advice needed for functional test

Question

My company is releasing a new website with all the bells and whistles. I am looking for advice on specifically what we should test. I know that we want to make sure that the site functionally works, but different people on the team have opinions on what should be tested beyond that. Some people want to check that the pages are exactly the same from run to run, others just want to check text. I would like to see what test teams outside my company are actually doing. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Hello FiveNines,
You don't give a lot of information about your application, so it is hard to give you specific advice...I was at a very interesting IIST seminar last week in Boston and I walked away with 2 major take aways:
1) Negative testing is as important as positive testing. As development typically focuses on positive testing, it's critical for QA to have good test plans in place for this. Most of the QA teams on the room had a 20% negative testing to 80% positive or functional testing, but the goal should be to target more a 50%-50% ratio, if no higher negative testing than positive.
2) When you think about building your Negative testing Test Cases think about 2 areas:
* Invalid data input (like if you expect an integer value, try typing letters., etc, or enter an invalid user account to make sure the application behaves properly, etc)
*More importantly, think about failing pre-conditions. For example, if your application connects to a DB on the back, build test cases to see how your application will handle processing a new user when the DB is down...This really open up my eyes, as when we build our test cases we usually don't think about this type of scenario, and we have been focusing a lot on functionality testing...
I hope it helps