Ideal Scope of a Rainforest Test

Writing a good functional test case means ensuring the scope aligns with the feedback you care about. In other words, you should avoid cramming too much into a single test.

Ideally, a test case should represent a straightforward user activity. In the e-commerce world, you might leave a review for a past purchase or create a new account.

While testing both activities in a single test case might be tempting, each set of actions represents a different activity—and a separate test case.

Over time, creating tests that are broad in scope makes it difficult to measure results. Better to keep tests short, modular, and confined to a specific function or user flow.

Poor Example 1

Sign up as a new user using an invalid email address and confirm that the system raises an error. Then, sign up with a valid email address and password. Now, search for an Airbnb stay in Paris, France, and verify the results.

Lumping together unrelated user actions results in a test that is unfocused.

Poor Example 2

Click the sign-up button and confirm that a sign-up modal appears.

Here, the scope is too narrow; no useful activity can be completed.

Good Example

This is a suitable test case with a well-defined outcome.

To keep tests modular and simplify test suite maintenance, we recommend Embedded Tests. You can use these pre-written modules as building blocks when creating test cases.

Additional resources:

For a more tactical approach to creating Rainforest tests, check out our Deep Dive: Building Your First Test Suite guide.
To learn about QA strategy, refer to our Introduction to QA Strategy guide.
As your process matures, consider setting up seeded states to minimize the steps required to put test accounts in a specific state for testing. Check out our Seeded State Management guide.

If you have any questions, reach out to us at [email protected].