A test suite is a collection of test cases grouped by shared characteristics. They help organize tests around a specific feature or workflow for easier management.
Depending on your product, there are many ways to categorize test suites. In this guide, you'll learn:
Let's dive in!
A test suite is a structured group of test cases that you intentionally bundle together to validate a specific feature, workflow, or behavior in your application. Instead of treating each test case as an isolated check, a test suite lets you organize them in a way that reflects how your product actually works in the real world.
Think of it this way: you wouldn’t store hundreds of loose files on your desktop and expect to find anything quickly. You’d group them into folders. A test suite works exactly the same. You put all relevant test cases, especially the ones that belong to the same feature or flow into one place. This gives you two major advantages:
And the benefits don’t stop at organization. A test suite also helps you track the health of a feature over time. When something breaks, it’s much easier to see which area was affected because the test cases are already grouped logically. Reporting becomes cleaner, debugging becomes faster, and maintenance becomes far less painful.
As your testing needs expand, you can take organization one step further by combining multiple test suites into a test suite collection. This is especially useful when you want to execute:
A test suite collection allows you to run several suites in a single execution, in parallel or in sequence, depending on your configuration. It’s the scalable way to ensure your entire application is covered — not just individual features.
So in short:
As your app grows more complex, this hierarchy helps you keep testing structured, repeatable, and easy to manage.
An automated test suite is a test suite you don’t have to manually trigger, since it runs completely on its own based on rules, timing, or events you define. Once you set it up, it becomes part of your development workflow, constantly checking the stability of your application in the background.
You can configure an automated suite to run in several ways, depending on how your team works. For example, you might have it run automatically:
The biggest benefit is consistency. Automated suites don’t get tired, distracted, or forget a step. They run the same way every time, which means you get stable, repeatable results. They also remove a ton of manual work, which means no more clicking “Run” hundreds of times or waiting for QA availability. You get immediate feedback about the health of your application, and issues are caught sooner, long before they reach production.
Here are the biggest advantages you get from automated suites:
Imagine you’re working on an e-commerce app and your team just shipped a new “Buy Now” button on the product page. On the surface it looks like a small change, but you know it directly touches revenue, so you can’t afford for it to break anything.
To protect that flow, you create an automated test suite called “Product Page Smoke Tests.” Inside this suite, you add a set of targeted test cases that cover the core user journey on that page, for example:
Now instead of running these checks manually every time someone touches the product page, you wire this suite into your pipeline. You configure it to run automatically:
You don’t just run it in one browser either. You configure the suite to execute across multiple browsers (for example, Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and different environments using a cloud testing platform like Katalon TestCloud. That way, you’re not maintaining a farm of devices or VMs yourself, but you still get broad coverage.
The result for you is:
Before you start grouping test cases into suites, it helps to establish a clear taxonomy — essentially the system of categories you’ll use to classify each test. Without a well-defined structure, your test library can get messy fast, especially as your application grows and new features are added.
Think of taxonomy as the “rules of organization” you set upfront. When every test case follows the same set of categories, it becomes far easier for you (and your whole team) to decide where new tests belong, how to prioritize them, and how to run them efficiently.
Here are some of the most common and practical ways you can group test cases:
Executing a test suite depends on the tools and runners you use. Whether you work in Katalon, JUnit, TestNG, Pytest, or a CI/CD platform, the idea is the same: you take a group of test cases and tell your test runner when, where, and how to execute them.
To run a suite, you typically need three things:
Once these are in place, your test suite becomes a repeatable, scriptable action that you can trigger from the command line, build pipelines, or scheduled jobs. Most modern testing frameworks let you execute an entire test suite using a single CLI command.
mvn -Dtest=ProductPageSuite testjava -cp "libs/*" org.testng.TestNG testng.xmlpytest -m "smoke and product_page"npx cypress run --spec "cypress/e2e/smoke/product_page.cy.js"A CI/CD tool (like GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps) doesn’t run tests on its own.
It needs your test runner to do the work.
For example:
The CI agent pulls your repo, installs dependencies, then calls the test runner with a command like:
npm run test:smoke
pytest -m "smoke"
mvn -Dtest=ProductPageSuite testMaintaining an automated test suite becomes significantly harder if you treat it as a “set it and forget it” asset. Just like your application code, your test suite needs ongoing care, updates, and structure. Regardless of the framework you use, you (or your QA team) should actively maintain the suite to keep it reliable, fast, and meaningful. Below are the key best practices to help you do that.
Before you automate anything, create a maintenance plan that outlines what will be tested, who owns the suite, and how often it will be reviewed. Once your plan is drafted, discuss it with developers, product owners, and other stakeholders. Sharing the plan early helps everyone understand the impact of changes and reduces unnecessary rework later. A clear plan prevents constant churn and gives your suite long-term stability.
As your application evolves, some test cases will naturally become outdated or irrelevant. A button may move, a workflow may change, or a feature may be deprecated and your tests need to reflect that. If you leave old or broken tests lying around, the entire suite becomes less trustworthy. Make it a habit to update or retire test cases as soon as changes are made in the product. Regular housekeeping ensures your suite always produces reliable results.
One of the fastest ways to reduce test maintenance is to avoid duplication. Instead of writing the same steps in multiple test cases, move repeated logic into helper methods, utility classes, or shared libraries. When a change occurs — for example, a new login selector or an updated API endpoint — you only need to fix it once. This dramatically improves reusability, consistency, and long-term upkeep.
Managing test suites in spreadsheets, scattered folders, or ad-hoc scripts quickly becomes unmanageable. A centralized test management tool helps you create, update, filter, and audit all your suites from a single place. Whether you’re using a dedicated automation platform or a CI/CD-integrated tool, centralized visibility makes it easier to spot gaps, remove duplicates, and keep everything aligned as the product grows.
Your application changes, your team evolves, and your testing strategy should evolve with it. Schedule periodic reviews of your automated suite (ideally every sprint or monthly). During these reviews, identify:
A streamlined, well-maintained suite is faster, cheaper to run, and far more accurate than a bloated one.
Automated test suites streamline testing, improve reliability, and accelerate feedback loops. By organizing related tests and integrating them into development workflows, you can maintain a stable, scalable software product.