October 2006 - Posts

• How are You organizing your Testing Assets?

  When starting up brand new testing project, very important thing is that project structure is planned, written down and communicated to all contributors. This plan includes things like  Common terminology Rules how to organize data Naming conventions for testing entities like test case and test set How are test cases described, which type of information belongs to description, what goes into steps What is the target group for executing test cases? Are they people who have not previously used the tool? This is needed in order to define the level in which test cases need to be written in order to tester to understand what should be done What fields are used to categorize items, are they mandatory or not and what values to use What are standard reports that are taken out after every testing period and reported forward What is my Test Set? Is it all the test cases everytime or a subset of them? And of course as these apply mainly when working with Test Management tool (like OnRoad Test Management server) it must be agreed that all information is really put in there and for example errors are not communicated from tester to developer via e-mail! When defining a Test Set you can then later on look at your testing grouped by (similar) test sets as well, not only using timeline. And in here you need to remember that while looking at test set based reports, these usually order test sets alphabetically. If you want to see test set report and follow it by software release, you must use naming convention which supports ordering of these alphabetically so that you can follow it. When project structure is well planned and implemented, it also makes reporting a lot easier. You do not want to spend lot of time manually creating graphs to analyze what is your testing status now and how has it's maturity has been evolving over period of time or from version to version. When you have used fields to categorize your entities, it is then possible to use something like Grouping Grid Report to look how your results look. It is very powerfull tool once you just get used to it and understand what does it tell you. Posted Oct 31 2006, 04:01 PM by ilpo with no comments Filed under: Quality Center, TestDirector, Using, Mercury, OnRoad Test Management

• Featured Item: Communicating with Business Partners

  One scenario that is often discussed is how can I share and reuse requirements and test cases that my subcontractor has been defining while developing and testing system in their premises? Both of us are using Mercury Quality Center (not the same version though) and it seems redicilous that I can not access those and I need to totally rewrite them during acceptance testing. One option is that they will just print them out in the word document, send it over and I will try to import them back to my Quality Center, but this is really slow and erranous scenario where lots of things can go wrong. And what if requirements and test cases are changed very often? I need to do this import all over again and again... Not a good idea. Answer to this question is really an utility which can export requirements, test cases (including linked test cases), design steps and all of these while preserving folder structure and taking the attachments out as well. Then I could receive all of these in one file which I could then import again to our Quality Center. When it is time to get new versions, do the same thing again and it updates requirements and test cases that are already existing in our Quality Center instance! This is something that Import Export Utility can do. It does not care about Quality Center versions, works between different Quality Center and TestDirector versions: you can get your test cases that were taken out from Quality Center 9.0 and import them into TestDirector 8.0. Or vice versa. Import Export Utility is part of Utility Tools, which can be downloaded from here: Utility Tools Setup for Mercury Quality Center 9.0 Utility Tools Setup for TestDirector 8.0 and Quality Center 8.2 Two different installations due to technical issues in API, but both can be installed on the same time. When you use them, just remember to have correct Mercury client files installed on your computer! Posted Oct 02 2006, 10:33 AM by ilpo with no comments Filed under: Quality Center, TestDirector, Using, Import Export Utility, Utility Tools, Mercury