The Differences between negative cases and abnormalities cases

Can somebody from here help to clarify for me what’s the differences between negative test cases and abnormal test cases. I did some reading and a bit confused between this two.

Like for negative test cases, it is when you test the feature with a different input than the positive cases input and see if it will break or not.

How about abnormality test cases?

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A negative test case example:

  1. When the user enters their password incorrectly, the system prevents any kind of privileged access.

Abnormality test case example:

  1. When the user looses 4G connection by going through a tunnel, bad things must not happen to their “state”. I.e if they were busy filling in a form, the form contents should not be wiped clear.
  2. When a user spends the last of the funds in their “joint” account, the bank prevents them from going overdrawn if another valid “cardholder” initiates a transaction at the same time.

Basically tests that cover state-transitions which operate and loose consistency over time are glitches or abnormalities. We sometimes call this class of test stress testing, and that’s why you might not see it mentioned often, and that’s because it is a class of it’s own. (And sadly often overlooked.) When you create a stress test environment, your chances of discovering “abnormality” faults pretty much quadruples.

And finally, welcome to the Ministry of Test. Which, and I’ll say this often, is probably them most awesome software testing engineer community in the multiverse. Do let me know if I’m wrong on that one. And brilliant question by the way, thanks for asking, it brightened my Monday a lot.

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