In MTLM, test cases can reference a reusable, sharable set of test steps. This cuts down on the amount of work it takes to author new test cases, because many test cases contain some of the same steps.

The ideal use for this is in common tasks. The quintessential shared step is for logging into the application. Assuming your application cares about identity as many do, this is something nearly every test case will need to do as part of the process to get where you want to test.

If you didn’t have shared steps, you would either have to rewrite those steps for every test case, or you’d simply have a test case that handled login and you’d position that test ahead of the others in the test suite.

Rewriting the steps in every test case is painstaking and annoying. I want to be productive as a tester, not waste my time doing repetitive tasks! Worse, if the steps change for logging in, I have to go and change every test case. That is a terrible option, and I would prefer to avoid it as much as possible.

I could just ignore obvious steps like this, but that might