Negative Testing: How to Automate With Testsigma?

Software testing has many types of testing – Functional, unit, integration, system, smoke, regression, and sanity testing. Despite their differences, they all fall under Positive or Negative Testing. This blog post will explain how to implement negative testing in test automation tools. It provides an overview of negative testing with examples of common negative test scenarios.

What is Negative Testing?

In simple words, Negative testing is when you try to make the app fail or go down the wrong path to see if it can handle it. It’s important to make sure the app is stable in all possible scenarios!

Negative testing is a technique to ensure a system or application can handle unexpected input and conditions. This testing focuses on inputting invalid or out-of-range data and performing actions under unusual circumstances. This testing aims to identify vulnerabilities or weaknesses in the system’s error-handling capabilities. It ensures the system fails gracefully rather than crashing or providing incorrect results. By identifying such issues beforehand, you can improve the application’s robustness and ensure users have a seamless experience even under negative conditions.

Why Negative Testing?

Negative testing is key to building reliable, secure software that meets user needs while minimizing risk.- It helps identify vulnerabilities in the system, including areas with insufficient validation and weak error handling. – Negative tests can simulate real-world scenarios where users may make mistakes or deliberately attempt malicious actions. – Testing edge cases, boundary conditions, and unexpected situations can prevent costly errors from happening down the line. – By testing for failure scenarios, developers can build more resilient systems that continue to operate even in the face of unexpected inputs or errors.

How to Do Negative Testing?

Effective negative testing requires a systematic approach that considers all possible input scenarios.

• The first step is to clearly define test scenarios and boundaries that will challenge the system under test. Attempt to trigger common input errors, such as entering invalid data types or exceeding maximum input lengths.
• Once a set of well-defined scenarios has been established, it’s important to execute them once.
• Testers should try to introduce environment-related errors like uneven load distribution and network disruption.
• Finally, study the output of each test carefully for any irregularities or deviations from the expected results. Also, ensure that appropriate debugging tools are utilized when necessary.
• If the tests need to be executed repeatedly, then going for automation is recommended.

Should Negative Testing be Automated?

Yes, automated negative testing can be beneficial. Automating these tests allows you to catch potential bugs and issues that might otherwise slip through the cracks. Plus, automated tests are faster and more reliable than manual ones.

Automate Negative Testing Using Testsigma

Testsigma is an easy-to-use test automation tool that allows you to perform automated negative testing easily. Its intuitive interface lets you quickly create and execute tests that simulate negative scenarios.

Here are the step-by-step processes to automate using Testsigma:

Step-1: Create a new project in Testsigma.

Step-2: Add your test cases. For example, if you want to check an e-commerce website, you can check the login details.

Step 3: Create test cases for each negative scenario. In Testsigma, you can create test cases using natural language syntax, which makes it easy to write and understand tests.

Step 4: Add steps to your test case that simulate the negative scenario. Run and see the results.

With Testsigma, you can easily create and execute these test cases, allowing you to quickly identify and fix any issues before they impact your users.

With Testsigma, you can automate your negative tests for web, mobile, APIs and desktop from the same.

Testsigma is also available as an open source and free version.

Start automating your negative tests with Testsigma Open Source.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages	Disadvantages
Identifying potential bugs: This testing helps identify bugs in the software by stressing it with unexpected input and conditions.	This testing can be time-consuming and complex, as testers need to think creatively about all the possible ways a user might try to break the system.
Enhancing software quality: By exposing issues early in the development cycle, can help improve the overall quality of the software.	This testing may not always accurately reflect real-world usage scenarios, as users may not necessarily deliberately try to input incorrect data or perform unexpected actions.
Saving time and money: Fixing bugs during development is less expensive than fixing them after release, making this testing a cost-effective approach.	This testing may result in false positives or false negatives, where issues are either reported when they don’t exist or missed when they do.
Increasing user confidence: When a product fails gracefully even in unexpected scenarios, it also builds user’s confidence in it.	This testing can be challenging to automate, requiring human intuition and creativity to develop effective test cases.
	This testing is not a substitute for positive testing, which focuses on verifying that the system behaves correctly under normal conditions. Therefore, both techniques should be used in combination for comprehensive software testing.

Negative Testing Techniques

Here are some simple techniques you can try out:

1. Boundary Value Analysis involves testing the extremes of input values, such as the minimum and maximum values.
2. Input Validation means testing for invalid or unexpected inputs, such as special characters or incorrect data types.
3. Error Guessing involves using your intuition and experience to guess potential errors and testing for them.
4. Compatibility Testing means testing the application on different platforms, browsers, and devices to see if it works as expected.
5. Stress Testing involves testing the system under heavy loads or high traffic to see how it performs.
6. Security Testing means testing the application for vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an example of Negative Testing?

A simple example of this testing could be testing a login form by entering incorrect credentials, such as an invalid username or password. The objective is to verify whether the system provides appropriate feedback and error messages in response to the wrong input. It ensures that the system doesn’t crash or behave unexpectedly when it encounters faulty data, which may lead to severe consequences in actual usage scenarios.

What are the characteristics of Negative Testing?

The primary objective of this testing is to identify specific issues, such as security vulnerabilities and unintended interactions between different system components. It necessitates skilled testers with a deep understanding of programming languages and significant experience conducting a thorough analysis of functional requirements.

Read More: Positive and Negative Testing Scenarios