Test Case Quality as Perceived in Sweden

In order to reach an acceptable level of confidence in the quality of a software product, testing of the software is paramount. To obtain "good" quality software it is essential to rely on "good" test cases. To define the criteria for what make up for a "good" test case is not a trivial task. Over the past 15 years, a short list of publications have presented criteria for "good" test cases but without ranking them based on their importance. This paper presents a non-exhaustive and non-authoritative tentative list of 15 criteria and a ranking of their relative importance. A number of the criteria come from previous publications but also from discussions with our industrial partners. The ranking is based on results collected via a questionnaire that was sent out to a limited number of randomly chosen respondents in the Swedish software industry. This means that the results are more indicative than conclusive.