Designing Your Own Test Cases in an Online Assessment

Context

You are taking a technical online assessment that provides very few example tests and expects you to create your own. You need a systematic, repeatable way to design tests that surface logic errors and edge cases quickly.

Prompt

Describe how you would:

1. Create a repeatable checklist of edge-case categories applicable to most algorithm/data-structure problems.
2. Quickly generate inputs and compute expected outputs.
3. Compare your solution against a reference answer (oracle), including when you must write the oracle yourself.
4. Decide when coverage is sufficient (e.g., after creating 5–10 curated cases).