We can define a test scenario as a brief statement describing how an application will be used in specific real-life situations, for example, “the user will be able to log in with a valid username and password.” Commonly, test scenarios are written from development documents such as requirements or user stories, each one with the required acceptance criteria to accomplish that. If these documents are not created yet, product owners should write them and define the different scenarios and acceptance criteria to mark the product as complete.

Scenarios are useful because they can guide exploratory testing, giving a good understanding of a GUI event, without restricting the testing team to a specific procedure. Since it is much faster to create a test scenario instead of writing a full test case, scenarios are most used in agile environments.

If scenarios are used in scripted testing, they can be used as the base from which test cases can be written.

For example, the login scenario mentioned earlier can have test cases for GUI events such as the following:

• User enters a valid username and password
• User enters invalid username
• User enters valid username but invalid password
• User tries to reset the password
• User presses the Submit button repeatedly