NEGATIVE CRITERIA Section

It is not enough to just do 'happy path' testing, you should do negative testing as well to ensure the system is stable even with harmful parameters. AnkrPt Pairwise does this with NEGATIVE CRITERIA as follows:

NEGATIVE CRITERIA (1)
Name, value1, value 2, "value3", ... (2)
1 NEGATIVE CRITERIA tag identifying the start of the Negative Criteria section
2 each row identifies the name of a valid criterion followed by a list of invalid values

Let’s see an example of a NEGATIVE CRITERIA section with invalid criteria.

negative criteria example
Figure 1. Negative Criteria Example

It is similar to the CRITERIA section except for negative values, and you must refer to an existing criteria name from the CRITERIA section. Some basic rules for Negative Criteria are:

  • The Negative Criteria section starts with the NEGATIVE CRITERIA tag.

  • There must be one, and only one, Negative Criteria section.

  • Each negative criteria defines a criteria name and corresponding negative values.

  • Each criterion must reference an existing valid criteria from the CRITERIA section.

  • You cannot define a negative value if it is already a valid value for that name.

  • Each negative criteria are optional.

  • All names and values are automatically trimmed (removal of leading and trailing spaces).

  • To use the delimiter within values, use quotes as per normal csv processing.

  • Blank lines are ignored.

By default, Pairwise generates as many negative test cases as there are negative values (one invalid value per Test Case). But you can change this to condense multiple negative tests into as few tests possible producing tests with multiple negative conditions on a single row.