Defining your Test Cases

Last update: March 5, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • Developer

Your test cases should be based on the:

Use Cases

  • These define required functionality in terms of the interaction between Actors (roles which initiate certain actions) and the system.
  • The Use Cases should be defined by the customer.

Detailed Requirements Specification

  • All functional and performance requirements should be tested.

The tests should clearly define:

  • Prerequisites; these may cover specific systems, configurations, or tester experience.
  • Steps to be followed; at an appropriate level of detail.
  • Expected results.
  • Clear criteria for pass or fail.

The prospect of automating test cases is attractive because it eliminates repetitive tasks.

Manual versus Automated Tests

However, automating test cases is a significant investment, so certain aspects should be considered:

  • Require time, effort, and experience to set up and configure.
  • If browser based, there is an increased risk of problems when browser updates are installed; requiring further time to correct.
  • Only feasible for large projects.
  • Good when multiple releases are being generated either for testing or in the long-term release plan.

Testing specific aspects

When testing AEM, a few specific details are of particular interest:

Author and Publish Environments

Although covered in Environments, it is worth highlighting a deciding factor of AEM regarding testing.

Consider AEM as two applications:

  • the Author environment
    This instance allows authors to input, and publish, content.
    This has a small(er), predictable set of users, for whom specific functionality and performance is crucial.

  • the Publish environment
    This instance presents the website in its published form for access from visitors.
    This usually has a larger set of users, where the volume of traffic is not always 100% predictable. Performance is still crucial - when responding to requests. Consider also caching and load-balancing.

Although the same software as such, they:

  • serve different purposes
  • have different requirements regarding functionality and performance
  • are configured differently
  • are tuned separately
  • each has their own set of acceptance tests

In other words, they must be tested separately and with different test cases.

Personalization

When testing personalization each individual use case should be repeated using multiple user accounts to prove behavior.

Check caching also for correct behavior.

The Dispatcher

Most projects install the Dispatcher for caching and load balancing.

Testing is difficult (caching occurs at various levels and in various locations) and must be made on a black-box basis. Key aspects to test for are:

  • Accuracy
    Ensures that content updates are seen by the website visitor.

  • Continuity
    Ensure that the website is still available when one server is shut down.

  • Clusters
    Used to provide the following:

    • Failover
      If one server fails, then other servers in the cluster will take over processing.

    • Performance
      Load balancing with full failover increases the performance of a cluster.
      When used for a customer project the cluster must be tested to confirm correct operation of the configuration.

Testing third-party software

Any third-party software interfaced to AEM will be referenced in the Detailed Requirement Specifications.

Any tests required (dependent on the defined scope) must be analyzed and clean test obtained.

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