Why Test Cases Fail with Rule Changes—and How Software Platform Anatomy Makes Testing Architecture-Aware
- Krish Ayyar
- Jun 12
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 24
Category: Testing, Quality & Regression Control
Series Title: Rethinking Requirements: How the ICMG Enterprise Anatomy Model Makes Systems Change-Ready
Key Variables Impacted: Rule, Data, Function, Event, UI
Perspectives Covered: Strategy, Business Process, System, Component Specification, Implementation, Operations
“The Rules Changed Again—And Tests Failed Everywhere.”
It’s release week. QA reports 200 broken test cases. The trigger? A credit policy update that modified eligibility scoring logic.
Now everything is in triage:
Developers are debugging features they didn’t touch.
Product managers are pushing timelines.
Test teams are rewriting validations in a panic.
The real issue isn’t the rule change. It’s that your test cases weren’t architecturally connected to the rules they’re meant to validate.
When rules live in scattered logic and test cases live in scripts, every change feels like sabotage. But with ICMG, rule changes become traceable—and testing becomes predictable.
Why Conventional SDLC Approaches Fail
Common Problems:
Rule logic is buried in implementation, not clearly modeled—so test cases are written from behavior guesses, not rule definitions.
A single change to eligibility criteria breaks dozens of unrelated test scenarios, triggering expensive regression cycles.
QA teams focus on functional surface behavior, missing deep rule-driven dependencies.
Testing teams don’t know which components, UI elements, or events were affected by a rule tweak.
Manual test scripts lack alignment with architecture, forcing time-consuming rewrites every sprint.
Root Causes:
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