Adding Edge Cases to Your Tests

Hi, and welcome to the final video on writing test cases. 0:00 In this video, we're going to actually putting a lot of the theory from 0:04 the last video into our test case, and try to add some common Edge cases 0:09 to the text input field for the edit named feature. 0:14 We should be looking around the application for 0:18 everything that a user can input. 0:20 The RSVP app has one that we just tested in the previous video, 0:21 this edit name text box that we can see right here. 0:26 Now, the acceptance criteria for 0:29 this feature never specified how long a name should be, 0:31 how many names it can have, or any special characters that are allowed here. 0:34 Let's try all those out and add them to our test case. 0:39 We're going to add these test steps onto 0:42 the original Invitee Edit test that we started in the last video. 0:45 Right now the test is very happy path. 0:49 We click edit, changed the name, and save it. 0:52 But it doesn't really give us a lot of confidence that this feature is going to 0:54 work for our other Edge cases. 0:59 Let's add a new step right after saving the new name step. 1:01 For this step, we simply wanna get back the edit screen. 1:05 So click edit button with an expected result of 1:08 Text box appears with 'Test Person', 1:13 which is the name that we changed it to earlier. 1:17 Note that this is also testing the ability to re-edit something that we just saved. 1:22 Our first Edge case is users who enter in way too many characters in the name field. 1:27 To test this we are simply going to type in as many characters as we can. 1:32 But we expect that the app has a hard limit of 150 characters for this field. 1:36 So for our next test step, adding in a new one, 1:41 let's put Enter more than 100 characters and save. 1:46 Let's go back to the RSVP app just to see what that looks like. 1:52 We don't really care if someone has one name or multiple names, we just wanna 1:56 limit the amount of characters so that it doesn't throw off the display too much. 2:00 If a person has one word for their name but many, many characters. 2:04 So let's just type in Manymanymanymanymanymanycharacters. 2:10 And we just wanna test that it doesn't throw the display off too much. 2:18 You can see here that that many characters does expand how much room this card 2:22 takes up. 2:26 So it'll force the area the box renders in to be much larger than usual. 2:27 We really don't want that to negatively affect the app's presentation. 2:31 By the way, a really easy way to test how many characters are in your word, 2:35 is to open up a notepad application that has a line number and a column counter, 2:39 such as Adam. 2:44 Or look up a character counter website, 2:45 like the one that I'm at right now called CharacterCounterOnline.com. 2:47 When you type in the word, 2:52 you should see the amount of characters there are as you type them. 2:54 It's safe to say that we would want some kinda error to appear if the user enters 3:03 in more than 100 characters. 3:07 So our expected result that we would wanna see is Textbox is red and 3:09 error appears: 'too many characters, 3:17 please enter a name less than 100 characters'. 3:22 Note that this is not necessarily what we are going to see in the app right now. 3:30 Remember that we want this error to happen and we want it to be helpful to the user. 3:35 I'm sure you've experienced errors in programs before that simply read error, 3:40 with no other context for why that happened. 3:45 When possible an error should both tell the user what went wrong and 3:48 how to fix it. 3:54 We also wanna test that putting in the very maximum amount of characters works 3:55 properly. 3:59 So let's add another step. 4:00 Enter 100 characters with no spaces and save. 4:05 With an expected result of Name is saved and the text box, 4:12 Stays inside the boundaries of the application. 4:20 We're trying to make sure that entering one single long name doesn't break 4:27 the appearance to the app, but still saves properly. 4:31 So I'm going to enter in a very very long name again. 4:34 Long name with a many, many, many characters. 4:41 And when I save this box it should take up its own line entirely. 4:46 But you'll notice that it still fits. 4:51 One other Edge case I can think of that will happen pretty often is that users 4:54 will wanna put quotes, or parenthesis, in for someone's nickname. 4:58 Or they might wanna trademark someone's name just as a joke. 5:02 So for our next step we want to ensure that many special characters are allowed. 5:05 So let's go back to the test case, and add in a special character step. 5:10 Special characters are just about anything that's not an alpha-numeric character, so 5:15 things like asterisks, parentheses, pound signs and dollar signs, or 5:20 even more esoteric things like copyright symbol or the omega symbol would count. 5:24 The reason I wanna test this is that oftentimes special characters 5:29 present awkward challenges to the databases, 5:33 HTML links, and even some JavaScript functions if they're not saved properly. 5:35 Since we're fairly confident that our users will wanna use these characters, 5:40 let's add it in as a step. 5:45 So let's add a new step. 5:46 And we'll say Enter, 5:49 and then just choose some of the keys that are at the top of your keyboard. 5:50 I like to enter most of them in, And save. 5:54 This is just a string of characters that you can easily find, obviously. 5:59 But for fun, let's also add the registered symbol, 6:03 which I've added to the teacher's notes at the bottom. 6:06 And I'll just add this in right there. 6:12 You could also enter it as a special key combination on your 6:15 keyboard if your operating system supports it. 6:18 Our expected result is simply that the special character save and 6:21 display on the site. 6:25 So let's add that in. 6:26 All special characters, Are saved as the name. 6:28 Lastly, there will probably be some cases where users delete the name and 6:36 forget to add the new one before saving. 6:40 So let's verify that the name field is required when editing the name. 6:43 If a user erases everything in the field, 6:47 we will want to remind them to enter something. 6:49 So for our last step let's write, Edit and 6:52 delete all characters from text box, then save. 6:58 Our expected result would be, Textbox is red and 7:05 error appears: 'You must provide a name'. 7:12 Great, note on that last step I added a lot of our previous steps into one. 7:21 Tests should generally start very atomically. 7:28 But as the steps become more repetitive it's okay to start putting some 7:30 simple steps together, 7:35 especially after we've established that those actions work in previous steps. 7:37 And that does it for building out our first test case, and 7:42 adding in some common Edge cases. 7:46 We're now testing more than the happy path of editing a username, 7:48 we're also testing Edge cases where the user might experience an error. 7:53 We also want to make sure that errors are helpful to the user when they 7:57 experience them, with some sort of advice on how to fix it. 8:02 Edge cases are all about thinking outside the box. 8:06 So hopefully these examples will help you think of ways to do that within 8:09 the features that you'll be writing tests for. 8:13