Understanding Scenario Based Testing

Scenario based tests (SBT) are best suited when you need to tests need to concentrate on the functionality of the application than anything else.
Suppose, you are testing an application which is quite old and it is a banking application. This application has been built based on the requirements of the organization for various banking purposes. Now, this application will have continuous upgrades in the working.
Let us assume that the application is undergoing only functional changes and not the user interface changes. The test cases should be updated for every release. Over a period of time, maintaining the test ware becomes a major set back. The Scenario based tests would help you there.
As per the requirements, the base functionality is stable and there are no user interface changes. There are only changes with respect to the business functionality. As per the requirements and the situation, it is clearly understood that only regression tests need to be run continuously as a part of testing phase. Over a period of time, the individual test cases would become difficult to manage. This is the situation where we use scenarios for testing.
To derive scenarios, the following can be used as a basis:
- From the requirements, list out all the functionality of the application.
- Using a graph notation, draw depictions of various transactions which pass through various functionality of the application.
- Convert these depictions into scenarios.
- Run the scenarios when performing the testing.

Scenario based tests are not only for legacy application testing, but for any application which requires you to concentrate more on the functional requirements. I f you can plan out a perfect test strategy, then the scenario based tests can be used for any application testing for any requirements. Scenario based tests will be a good choice with a combination of various test types and techniques when you are testing projects which adopt UML (Unified Modeling Language) based development strategies.