Prompting Cheat sheet for Testers - Rahul's Testing Titbits

I have been learning AI in Testing through the 30 Days of AI in Testing Challenge by the Ministry of Testing. As part of this challenge, I get to engage with fellow participants. This checklist is the result of one such collaborative effort between me and one of my fellow participants and an awesome tester, Joyz Ng. We combined our learnings from the study of prompt engineering and prompting techniques, along with hands-on experience with AI LLM bots, to help fellow testers master the art of crafting better prompts for testing.

Work through it, tick off what you use, and share your feedback in the comments or via LinkedIn. Happy Prompting!

Want to see these principles in action? Browse the AI Prompt Repository for Testers for real, ready-to-use testing prompts built on this checklist.

General

9 items

Use simple and complete sentences
Define the task / instruction well — Extract, Infer, Transform, Expand, etc.
Be specific — precision matters — about what you want to receive
Provide all core prompt elements
partsContextInstructionInput / ReferencesOutput Indicator
Minimize ambiguity — avoid vague termse.g. “Give me 10 datasets” beats “Give me some datasets”
Set the desired temperature level
e.g.CreativePreciseBalanced
Mention tone / target audience
e.g.ProfessionalPersonalFunnyCreative
Mention formatting guidelines & use delimiters
e.g.Bullet pointsDouble quotesTriple quotesBack ticksDashesAngle bracketsCSVTabular
Avoid sharing sensitive / proprietary information on public LLMs

Context

3 items

Ask it to act as a [persona]
e.g.TesterTest LeadRegular CustomerDeveloperAutomation Engineer
Specify background informatione.g. sites or people to refer to, such as the works of the Context-Driven community
Explain & define your domain, application type, and system under test
viaImagesSystem descriptionProduct modelTechnical description

Input & Output

7 items

Specify what’s expected from the LLM
askPositive only or diverse cases?Functional or data coverage?Test data or a generator?
Give examples of the desired format and style
e.g.Code snippetEmail templateReport structure
Define data requirements
e.g.Username — String (20 chars)Age — Integer (> 18)
Reference existing content or a link for inspiration
e.g.Coding guidelineTesting mnemonicsWriting sample
Ask for a “step by step” explanation on reasoning tasksChain-of-Thought
Provide examples of the desired output formatFew-Shot
Ask it to double-check the correctness of its answersTime to Think

LLM Models