Understanding Test Suites: A Comprehensive Guide

Application performance is a crucial factor in today’s digital landscape, and it is measured by how smoothly your software application shows robust performance and stability across different scenarios. Software testing is the process intended to achieve this. In this process, the test suite plays an important role in ensuring compliance with specified requirements. Some people may get confused with the term test cases. If you are one of them, don’t worry, we have a detailed guide about the test suite to clear your dilemma. In this blog, we will explore the term test suite, its significance, its types, different tools for test suite management, how to build an effective test suite, common challenges, and tips to manage the test suite effectively! 

What is a Test Suite?

A test suite is a structured collection of test cases organized logically to execute a single specification across different test scenarios considering the comprehensive functionality validation. You can think of a test suite as a large container of many test cases that are related to each other. Keeping these relevant test cases together in adequately named suites makes their management easier. So, basically a test suite is a collection of test cases, test scenarios, scripts, and data.

1. Test Case:

It is a detailed document that validates a specific scenario and includes input, expected outcome, and execution steps.

2. Test Scenarios:

It covers the end-to-end functionality of the software and is a detailed documentation of test cases.

3. Test Scripts:

It is a set of step-by-step instructions that helps to test software applications. Test scripts are documents of automation testing.

4. Test Data:

It is a set of inputs and conditions against which proposed test cases are executed. 

Test Suite vs. Test Case vs. Test Plan

Factors	Test Suite	Test Case	Test Plan
Definition	Collection of test cases to test specific functionality of the software	A set of input conditions, input data, and expected outcomes to test particular aspects of the software	The high-level document outlines the overall testing approach and strategy.
Function	Covers multiple scenarios and functionality	Focuses on single functionality	Overview of scope, objectives, timelines, and resources of testing activities
Dependency	Can be dependent on other test suites	Can be run independently	Test plans are generally independent but may depend on other documents like test strategy or system requirements.
Duration	The duration of the test suite is until all the functionalities mentioned are in work.	The duration of test case is until the end of the specific test scenario	The test plan duration is until the end of the entire project.
Key Identification	Both functional and non-functional aspects along with seamless integration of the different test cases	Gathers actual outcome during the actual execution of the test case	Risks and mitigation strategies related to testing activities

Manual vs. Automated Test Suites

Test Suite can be crafted in both manual and automated manner and every method has its pros and cons. Let’s understand the difference between them:

Factor	Manual Test Suite	Automated Test Suite
Definition	Collection of test cases and executed manually by a human tester.	Collection of pre-written test scripts that are executed automatically by computer programs.
Dependency	Depends on human interaction	Less or no dependency on human interaction and can be performed by software programs automatically.
Speed and efficiency	Time-consuming but more flexible for ad-hoc and exploratory test suite creation	Faster and more efficient for repetitive tasks.
Updates	If the tester uses the relevant tool like Test Management tool has the track of versioning and history of the creation/updates..	Automated test scripts are easy to update when the code repository tools are used to manage them.

Why Do We Need a Test Suite?

The test suite keeps all relevant data like test cases, test scenarios, test scripts, and test data together to validate the software functionality. A well-structured test suite envelops several benefits. Let’s highlight the importance and the need for a test suite:

1.  Detecting Bugs Early

The primary objective of the test suite is to identify defects. Developers can use failed test cases as a checking point to investigate gaps and streamline the debugging process. By including performance tests in the test suite, developers can detect bottleneck points and gaps in the code and fix them to make the code more responsive.

2.  Improving Code Quality

A Test suite identifies bugs, defects, and inconsistencies in the early phase which can improve the code quality. Also, consistent testing helps to ensure that the development code remains apt and maintainable. A well-designed and regularly updated test suite ensures no yield of new errors or inconsistencies.

3.  Enhancing Development Speed

Automated test suites streamline the testing process, enabling developers to work on new specifications rather than rechecking the functionality manually. Also, early detection of defects during development saves the time and costs of fixing them later. This significantly boosts the development speed.

4.  Supporting Continuous Integration (CI/CD)

The test suite provides a collection of automated tests that can be integrated into a CI/CD pipeline. This enables fast feedback and faster problem resolution on code changes as the tests are automatically executed after every new code is committed to the repository. 

Types of Test Suites

Based on the scope, purpose, and specifications of the software, test suites are further divided into the following types:

1.  Unit Test Suite

Unit Test suite focuses on single or individual functionality of the software and ensures it works as per the requirement. It is commonly the smallest test suite.

E.g  Testing subject total

2.  Integration Test Suite

As software is a collection of interdependent modules, the integration test suite ensures the flawless interaction between different modules. This test suite ensures the combined functionality of different modules of the software works flawlessly and that data flows in the right direction across systems.

E.g. Verify and validate the data flow between front-end and back-end systems.

3.  Functional Test Suite

As the name suggests, a functional test suite verifies the software’s specific requirements. This ensures each mentioned function works as per the specification and meets the user’s expectations. Along with functional perspectives, this test suite focuses on input, behavior, and expected results.

E.g.: Testing the login page, User registration, and password reset features.       

4.  Regression Test Suite

The regression test suite always ensures introduction of new features has not hampered existing functionality. Whenever there are code changes, the regression test suite is followed to re-test the existing functionalities that remain unaffected. It is important to maintain product quality over multiple releases or updates.

E.g. Regression test suite is executed after every deployment to ensure previous features are working fine.

5.  Performance Test Suite

Performance test suite concentrates on assessing the system performance under different load conditions while tracking parameters like response time, resource usage, scalability, and identifying the gaps. Simulating real-world scenarios, this test suite optimizes the product performance.

E.g. Testing the speed, reliability, and performance of software under different load conditions.

6.  End-to-End (E2E) Test Suite

The comprehensive test suite verifies the complete functionality of the software by simulating real-world scenarios, from start to end. This test suite is followed after integration testing and before user acceptance testing.

E.g. A complete flow of testing from start point to end point, ensuring that every single functionality working fine. 

Popular Tools for Test Suite Management

Test Suite Management tools are useful in managing the test suite creation, test execution, test execution result storage, report generation, and defect tracking. These tools help users to streamline the testing process and eliminate the disorganization.  Some of the popular test suite management tools are explained below:

1. Unit Testing Tools

Unit testing concentrates on isolated small parts of the code, perhaps a single functionality. Generally, unit testing is performed by the development team. They ensure that they get the expected outcomes against the given input conditions. Unit testing helps to minimize the bugs and improve the security of the application. Following are some of the unit testing tools:

• JUnit (Java)

JUnit is a unit testing automation framework for JAVA programming language. It is an open-source framework used to develop and execute repeatable automated tests. In JUnit, the @Suite annotation on the test class is used to define a test suite. Here are steps to build a test suite in JUnit:

1.  Construct a JAVA class.
2.   Add @RunWith(Suite.class) annotation to the class.
3.    Add references to JUnit test classes with the help of @Suite.SuiteClassess annotation.
4.  Create a JAVA class file called TestSuite. java in C:\>JUNIT_WORKSPACE and run the test case(s).

• NUnit (.NET)

NUnit is an open-source unit testing tool for the .NET framework, that inherits most of the features from JUnit. It has a console runner for batch execution of automated tests. This extends support for multiple assemblies and assertions. Steps to create a test suite in NUnit:

1.  Create a new class library project using File->New->Project in Visual Studio.
2.  Create a Test class by right-clicking on your project in  Solution Explorer and selecting add->class.
3.   Write your first test.
4.   Go to Test->Run all Tests or Ctrl+R, A to run the tests.
5.  Check your test results in the Test Explorer window.

• PyTest (Python)

PyTest is a testing framework for Python language and hosts features like parameterized testing, fixtures, and assert re-writing. It supports complex functional testing for applications and libraries. Here are steps to create a test suite using PyTest:

1. Create and navigate to the project directory using commands ‘$ mkdir pytest-demo’ and $ cd pytest-demo. Isolate project dependencies by setting up a virtual environment and activating it. Create the file formatting program in src directory.
2. Automate the testing process using PyTest. First, install it using the command $ pip install -U pytest. Create a directory to you write all your tests.
3.  Execute the test invoking the pytest command.

• PHPUnit

2. Functional and Integration Testing Tools

Functional testing is carried out to validate a functional aspect of the software and ensure whether it is working according to the specification or not. While the integration test suites verify the communication between various modules after the major integration activities. The following tools are popular for carrying out functional and integration testing:

• Selenium (UI Testing)

Selenium is a pioneer tool in UI testing that offers open-source features and extends wider support to a long list of programming languages. Also, it supports all browsers making it easy for testers for UI testing. It is one of the fastest test execution tools and helps parallelize tests to minimize the cost and time for testing. Here are the steps to create a test suite in the Selenium IDE:

1.    Open Selenium IDE. Click ‘Options’ menu.
2.   Select ‘Options’ from the drop-down list. You will get a dialog box.
3.    Select ‘Suite’ Tab and click ‘Add’ to add more tests to your test suite.

• Cypress (JavaScript Testing)

Cypress is a testing tool that runs on almost all leading platforms and is better known for its JavaScript-based E2E testing framework. It helps to build, debug, and test directly in the browser which offers a great relief to developers and testers. It helps to eliminate flaky tests and make the testing process more deterministic. Here are steps to build a test suite in Cypress:

1.  Set up a new folder and Install Cypress using npm.
2.   Create a dedicated folder for test files, let’s say Cypress/test.
3.  Write individual test cases and organize them using the logical names.
4.  Configure Cypress settings in a configuration file
5. Using Cypress CLI, run your tests. 

• Postman (API Testing)

API testing confirms the API’s endpoints, methods, and integration functions are working as per the expectations. Postman tool helps to manage, create, test, and document APIs. It enables users to develop scripts from scratch, develop scripts for the entire collection, or even visualization API responses. Steps to build a test suite in Postman:

1.  Create a new collection of API requests along with their respective endpoint, HTTP method, headers, and body parameters.

2.  Navigate to the ‘Tests’ tab to write tests for each request. For larger test suites, create respective folders to organize different API functionalities.

3.  Click ‘Run’ to execute the underlying tests and check the results.

3. Performance Testing Tools

Performance testing tools assess the system’s performance under different load conditions. It comes under non-functional testing but is important as it determines the stability, speed, scalability, and responsiveness under load conditions. Here are some popular tools used for performance testing:

• JMeter

JMeter is a load testing tool, that mainly focuses on web applications, and analyses and measures the performance of the application both on static and dynamic resources. The tool helps to evaluate the application under web load, database load, and more. Here are the steps to build a test suite in JMeter:

1. Write and test your script in JMeter either manually or by recording your scenario.
2. Upload your JMX and Tests Assets.
3. Calibrate your Test.
4. Run your Test.

• Gatling

Gatling is a performance testing tool for web applications specially designed for DevOps and Continuous Integration (CI). It generates reports and performance metrics with various parameters like response times, error rates, and throughput, which helps to identify performance issues in the application. In this tool, the test suite is a collection of individual ‘simulation’ scripts, each representing a load-testing scenario.

To write a test suite in Gatling, the user would define multiple simulations within a single project, each focusing on a particular API endpoint or user flow. Execute all these simulations parallelly or sequentially to get overall system performance under different load conditions.

• LoadRunner

LoadRunner is a professional performance testing tool that simplifies performance load testing for co-located teams. It can simulate thousands of users working on the application at once. Test suite in LoadRunner refers to a collection of automated test scripts created within the software, where actions of multiple users accessing the application simultaneously are simulated so that QA engineers can test the performance and identify bottleneck issues. 

4. CI/CD and Test Automation Platforms

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. This helps to speed up the entire software development cycle. In this approach, code changes are automatically integrated into a shared repository i.e. CI, and CD deploys all code changes in a build for testing or staging.  Some popular tools that revolutionized the CI/CD and automation testing are:

• Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source server that enables to build, test, and deploy software using CI/CD pipelines. For test automation, Jenkins provides plugins that help to run test suites, collect dashboard results, and provide the failure details. Here are steps to build a test suite using Jenkins:

1. Navigate to your Jenkins dashboard. Create your project.
2. Add build step and command to execute your test suite using any testing framework like Selenium, PyTest, or JUnit.

• GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions automates the workflows like build, test, and deploy. It supports a variety of programming languages like .Net, JAVA, GO, PHP, Rust, Python, Node.JS, etc. It is a serverless framework that integrates and deploys code changes to third-party cloud platforms. Here are some steps to create a Test suite in GitHub Actions:

1. Set up your application and write the test cases.
2. Create workflows for GitHub Actions to run. It will look into the .github/workflows/ folder as a repository. Create YAML files that will outline your steps to workflows. 
3. Specify the jobs that workflows will run. 

• CircleCI

CircleCI is a Continuous Integration Continuous Deploy platform that helps to build, test, and deploy DevOps practices. It executes jobs in separate containers or virtual machines. It is well-known for high-end automation that runs complex pipelines efficiently. The steps to build a test suite in CircleCI are:

1.  Set up a CircleCI project and create ‘.circleci/config.yml’ file in your repository.
2. Define the job within this config file, specify the execution command along with setting up all relevant parameters.
3.  Run your test suite within your CircleCI configuration file. 

How to Build an Effective Test Suite

The test suite assembles related test cases, test scripts, test data, and test scenarios to validate software functionality. Building an effective test suite is a series of steps that must be followed to ensure a comprehensive and apt test suite. Some of the major steps are illustrated below:

1. Define Clear Testing Objectives

The primary step in building a test suite is clearly understanding and defining the testing objectives. Be clear about the goals of the test suite. Decide on the functionalities, integrations needed, and performance parameters. We should be clear about the testing objectives, whether we are focusing on performance, functionality, or security aspects. This will ensure optimized testing coverage. 

2. Choose the Right Testing Framework

After getting a clear picture of testing objectives, the next move is choosing the right testing framework. But this process involves various factors such as type of application (web, Mobile, API) programming language, framework’s flexibility and scalability, team’s skill set and proficiency, and project-specific requirements. Depending on programming language, and budgetary requirements, here are some of the popular choices of testing tools:

• JUnit (for Java applications)
• PyTest (for Python)
• Jest (for JavaScript)
• Selenium (for UI testing)

3. Write Reliable and Maintainable Test Cases

As a test suite is a collection of several test cases, concentrating on the quality of test cases impacts the effectiveness of the test suite. Follow some standard practices while writing test cases such as prioritizing clarity and transparency, eliminating repetition, keeping test steps minimal, paying attention to end-user requirements, etc. When the underlying test cases are reliable and maintainable, the final test suite is more effective. 

4. Automate Where Possible

Manual intervention brings a lot of hassles in the testing process so opt for automation wherever possible and optimize the results. It significantly increases efficiency, test coverage, and accuracy with rapid execution. The faster feedback loop and improved quality assurance help QA engineers to concentrate on complex testing scenarios. 

5. Organize and Categorize Tests

After the set of the test cases, it’s time to organize and categorize the tests to make them maintainable. To organize and categorize the tests, follow the primary approach of grouping the tests based on the functionality they cover. Tests can be categorized based on types – functional vs. non-functional, priority vs. severity, test types, test environment, and module or feature.

6. Set Up a Continuous Testing Pipeline

A continuous testing pipeline approach helps to catch bugs early and maintain application quality. To implement this approach, you need to integrate automated tests into the development workflow and connect them to the CI/CD pipeline so that they can run automatically on each code change. Based on the requirements, tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and CircleCI are used to fetch optimized results. 

7. Monitor and Analyze Test Results

The Test Manager should keep a close watch on the ‘Test Result’ section of the testing tools to get insights into the testing process. From the section, you can get valuables like individual test outcomes, identify failures, analyze execution logs, and monitor overall test suite performance. Testing tools normally provide dashboards to give a quick status glance of the testing process. 

Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them

As test suite management is a vast process, it faces several challenges. Here are some key challenges and solutions to overcome them!

1.  Flaky Tests

Challenge: Flaky tests may fail intermittently due to various factors like dynamic UI, environmental instability, or timing issues. This affects trust issues and reliability.

Solution: Adopt robust synchronization methods like explicit waits or retries to address timing issues. Regular review and debugging of flaky tests can maintain reliability. Use stable locators for dynamic elements.

2.  Slow Test Execution

Slow test execution impacts test suites heavily causing prolonged feedback loops, less efficiency in test identification and bug fixing, and hindering development velocity. This can impact the test coverage and longer testing cycles.

Solution: Reduce unnecessary operations, implement parallel testing, and leverage efficient test frameworks and data providers. Optimize database interactions and external API calls if necessary.

3.  High Maintenance Effort

A test suite is a large collection so requires large data sets, collection of test cases, and scenarios. Managing this large collection of data can be cumbersome.

Solution: Incorporate test suite management tools to ease the process and focus on automating repetitive tasks.

4.  Lack of Test Coverage

Concentrating on automation of easy-to-automate test cases may side down the critical test cases testing. This inadequate test coverage may not guarantee the meeting of test requirements to its fullest.

Solution: Prioritize high-risk, high-priority test cases covering the edge scenarios. Implement manual and automation testing to get optimum testing coverage. Get code coverage tools on board. 

Best Practices for Managing Test Suites

Test Suite management is very crucial to streamline the entire testing process. Embracing the best practices ensures the longevity and effectiveness of test suites.

1.  Keep the tests Independent and Self-Contained

Although a test suite is an organized container of different test cases, it is important to keep the underlying test cases independent and self-contained. You can make them organized based on specific logic, priority, types, or module-wise.

2.  Use Meaningful Test Names

Follow standard naming structure while naming the test suite naming process so that it is easier to manage and track.

3.  Regular Update and Refactor Tests

Schedule regular maintenance meetings as regular updating of test cases is crucial to keep them relevant and effective. Also, delete obsolete test cases and create new ones to incorporate new functionalities.

4.  Implement Parallel Testing

Parallel testing saves a lot of time, and money while improving the quality of the application. Implement it so that changes are reflected in the test suites on time.

5.  Integrate Test Reporting Tools

Integrating test reporting tools with the test suite makes the process seamless and easier to track the changes. You can track key matrices and generate regular reports. 

Conclusion

Software testers are the gatekeepers of software quality. Test suites designed by them serve as trusty weapons ensuring the development is on the right track. They are at the heart of the software testing process and collaboration among the teams can bring the desired results efficiently. They are the tools for ensuring code reliability, stability, and quality. Getting the best practices in every single phase of test suite management like creation, management, and maintenance can bring more reliability and resilience in the application.AI-driven platforms like QA Touch will ensure to accomplish the test suite management process smoothly and meet most of your testing requirements. Explore our built-in features to streamline the testing process and drive better outcomes. Book a demo or get a free trial!