Negative Testing

Explored by: Pushpendra K.

Effectiveness of Test Cases
A test case is said to be effective only when both
positive and negative cases are prepared & executed.

Positive test case: Test to Pass

Negative test case: Test to Fail

So, Negative test cases should be a part of our testing

effort.
Positive Vs. Negative Test Cases
Positive test case:
Testing aimed at showing software works. Also known
as “Test to pass".

Negative test case:

Testing aimed at showing software does not work. Also
known as “Test to fail".
A Positive View of Negative Testing
 It is a core skill of experienced testers and it requires
an exploratory approach to get the best value from
the time spent.

 Negative Testing can find significant failures and

allow overall confidence in the quality of the system.

 Testing the application with negative assumptions to

get a negative result which leads to positive one.

 Can be done for Automation also (jUnit)

Aims of negative testing
 Tests that aim to exercise the functionality that deals with
failure

 The goals is to see how easy it is to break the system, and

having done that, how easy it was to get it up and running
again.

 Discovery of faults that result in significant failures like:

Crashes, Data corruption and Security breaks

 Observation and measurement of a system’s response to

external problems (Networking, Data bandwidth), error
handling & exceptions

 Exposure of software weakness and potential for utilization.

Techniques to derive Negative test cases
 Negative testing is not a test design technique, but rather
an approach or a classification.

 Use formal test design techniques with negative input to

derive tests that can be classified as ‘Negative Tests’.

 Boundary Value Analysis & Equivalence Class Partitioning

 State Transition testing –
 Test against known constraints – e.g. known version
 Failure Mode and Effects analysis -
 Concurrency - two requests, queuing, timeouts & deadlocks
Negative Test Case conditions
 Required Data Entry
 Field Type Test - Special characters
 Field Size Test
 Numeric Bounds Test - BVA
 Date Bounds Test
 Date Validity
 Web Session Testing
 Performance Changes
 Embedded Single Quote
 Error-handling functionality i.e. messaging
 Recovery functionality i.e. fail-over, rollback and restoration
 External (UI) & Internal (DB) data validation
Some more examples…
 Invalid bank transaction
 Violating the order in which the vending machine should be operated
 Simultaneous running of checkpoints for all 50 CDEs
 Try to remove an item from the empty shopping basket
 Power failure when an unsaved document is present in the
application- buffer related issue
Criticisms of Negative Testing
 Negative testing can hurt the project by contributing to
delays and time waste
 (should be done only when all your Positive test
executions are completed & you have time)
 “But that would never happen in normal use”
 “That’s an acceptable failure”
 “Why find a problem we can’t fix?”
 Side Effect occurs due to negative Test case: Long data in
the Textbox gives Fatal error or Java error (occurred in
our application)
Questions