During my meetings and discussions with our customers, I have been noticing an issue with current Quality Center, that many people find it hard to use.
Especially business users who see it for the very first time they are totally lost with it and it's concept how it is used.
On bigger project's things that these users have issues are
- Where are test sets with test cases that I should test?
- How do I execute tests?
- Where are my previously executed test results? Why don't I see my comments I added last time to run steps?
- How can I create a defect?
Having thoughts on how to make things better it happened that one of our customer approached me with an requirement towards OffRoad to have an simplified wizard like user interface for test execution.
After reading through the first requirement specification on this, it really started to look like exactly the same type of issues that I had been facing lately.
So, after few days of development work we ended up putting an special OffRoad version together which starts with very simple user interface:
It has four tasks involved:
- Download tests. This launches the traditional OffRoad download tests functionality with additional features to help these non-technical people to find their test cases. These features include the possibility show only test sets with Status 'Open' and download only those test cases from these test sets where current user is marked as Responsible Tester. This - of course - means that person guiding the testing will need to update these fields for this to work, but still this small effort is smaller than the actual guidance needed for testers to find their test cases in other cases.
- Create a virtual test set. This is already a special feature made for OffRoad to create new test sets from already existing test sets and can include custom selection criteria's using custom built DLL linked into OffRoad.
- Execute tests. This will simply guide through the test cases from selected test set. It creates only one run for each test case, if run already exists, it will simply open it instead of creating new one.
- Upload results. Since OffRoad is working totally independent from Quality Center server, results need to be uploaded to server once testing has finished.
We have made this version available as an early version for our customers. If you are interested on seeing how this works on your case, just contact us.
To download tests from Quality Center server follow these steps.
Type in server URL, username and password:
Then select the test sets that are assigned to you:
Include defects, if you like:
Include Requirements if you need to look at them:
And then just click Finish to download the data you have selected:
After these steps the selected test sets are available for execution and actually you do not need to have an network connection at all to the Quality Center server while doing the tests. You have be on totally separate network, do the testing and once you are back after the testing just upload the results!
To create new virtual test set
Starting point is to copy existing test set, but custom DLL can be also used to add some more criteria's into this process.
Select the test set you want to use from the list
And click Finish to confirm your selection and to create the new virtual test set
So now we have a second instance from the same test set as one of our alternatives for execution:
To execute tests follow these steps
This will start the execution wizard with the first selection screen (this will be probably skipped if custom execution screens are not available):
Then select from the list of local test sets the one you want:
Run through all the steps and cases and Pass/Fail steps and record Actual Results for steps
And once done with the testing, select Finish to end your testing and return to the main screen
To upload results back to Quality Center project follow these steps
Select test set that you want to upload to Quality Center server by selecting it from the list
Type in server URL, username and password to connect to Quality Center
Note: it is also possible to send the results to different server than they originated from, in that case select Next to change the domain and project.
Once everything is uploaded, focus is moved back to main selection.
OffRoad's main user interface
OffRoad has also still available the original user interface which has all features for more advanced people:
Lock picture in above means that the run has already been uploaded to Quality Center server.
All the runs created in the wizard mode are visible in here as well and they can be edited, deleted and uploaded to Quality Center server as before.
We are still continuing to develop both the OffRoad's main user interface and this wizard interface even further. Some new features that we have added to the coming OffRoad version is things like
- Creating and Adding missing test sets and test cases if they are removed from the Quality Center server project before the uploading of results
- Support for SnagIt screen capturing, if you already own the SnagIt, OffRoad will be able to use it to add these captures as an attachments:
