Have you tested this ? Text input fields testing.

When testing text input fields recently I missed something very embarrassing and simple. I did not test for characters like "é" in the name field. Here is an (evolving) enumeration of tests for text fields. Depending on the nature of your input field some of these tests may not be applicable.

1. Simplest Happy Case (an average, input string, without any errors or special conditions).
   
2. Does it enforce input character set limitation ?
3. †Does the accepted character set meet the minimum requirement for the field. For example a it might make sense for description to "™", "©", "®", etc.
   
4. Does the accepted character set include unnecessary characters. For example a "#" in an email input field.
5. Are validation rules enforced correctly ? For example payment amount in an Indian site my accept numbers with comma's like this 1,00,00,000 instead of 10,000,000. Sometimes an input field might accept "-username@domain.com"
   
6. Is the validation rule exhaustive ?
   
7. Is minimum length enforced correctly ?
8. Does it trim spaces (leading and trailing) before processing data ? For example it should n't say illegal input for input with leading spaces.
9. † Is the minimum length reasonable. For example if the minimum name length of a name is 5 or even 3 it could spell trouble because some folks have 2 character last names or worse just might want to use the initial of their last name.
   
10. Is maximum length enforced correctly ? Does it accept maximum number of characters ? If it persists it somewhere, does it actually save all the characters and can you retrieve those correctly ?
11. † Is the maximum length appropriate ? For example, should the maximum length for name be 200 characters ?

this will be updated sometime soon.

not considered here: security testing.

Email input fields: on top of the above rules here are some more

1. plain vanilla email, like YourLogin@domain.com
2. names with ".", like firstname.lastname@domain.com
3. domain name with more than on segment, like firstname.lastname@host.subdomain.domain.com.cc
4. hypenated names and domains firstname-lastname@some-hyphenated-domain.gov
5. + aliases, like YourLogin+sortCoupons@domain.com
6. very short email ab@bc.tv

† If there were requirements this would be caught at requirements review time, in the absence of it, testers are left with this task.