The Seapine View

Creating repeatable and tester-independent test cases is a challenge for every team. Making sure steps are accurate and descriptions are detailed enough for any tester that might run the test case are important in building a usable and effective test case. In many cases the tester knows exactly what needs to be done to test a specific piece of functionality, but translating that knowledge into text and screenshots is both challenging and tedious.

With the release of Seapine ALM 2012, the test case creation process became a whole lot easier! What we’ve done is united the screen recording capabilities of QA Wizard Pro with the test case management prowess of TestTrack. Without even considering test automation, you can now create good test cases faster by combining QA Wizard Pro and TestTrack.

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Thanks to everyone who participated in the Scoring with Calculated Fields webinar. The webinar recording is now available if you were unable to attend or if you would like to watch it again. Q & A from the session follows.

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The independent report evaluated eight leading software test management vendors on various product and vendor criteria. TestTrack was cited as an exemplary performer in both workflow customization and ALM integration.

Notably, TestTrack was the only product that included all the advanced features, which, according to Info-Tech Research Group, are the market differentiators. These features include requirements management, code instrumentation, unit testing, automated test execution, monitoring, ability to modify the test environment, test planning and management, reporting, defect/bug tracking, and automated test generation.

Request the Software Test Management Vendor Landscape

TestTrack has built-in item numbering, giving you the ability to quickly reference a defect or test case by number. What this lacks though is any context or details on the item being referenced. Telling someone “go review test case #432″ doesn’t provide them with any usable information until they actually jump into TestTrack and start reviewing. This can be a pain for some teams, where item information is passed around a lot via email or informal discussions. If you’re in a meeting to triage defects or doing the daily stand-up on project progress, efficiency is important and having one identifier that gives everyone the key details on an item can save time and avoid confusion.

To solve this challenge, many customers define their own numbering scheme that in most cases is a combination of several pieces of metadata on the item. So they might abbreviate the product a defect was found in, then tack on the priority along with a unique number and use that as the item “number.” With the release of calculated fields in TestTrack 2012, it’s much easier to define these custom number formats.

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5one works with retailers and consumer goods businesses to deliver sales and margin improvements by collecting, storing, and analyzing data from sales strategies and promotions, enabling clients to quickly and easily measure the results of their decisions. In addition to a proprietary database, 5one offers a suite of web-based applications that provide a means of culling and organizing data, enabling the company’s customers to make decisions on the effectiveness of their retail strategies. Customers’ applications are also updated almost continuously as customers update their data, tweak existing retail programs, or launch new ones. This means that both functional and regression testing occurs on different schedules for each customer’s deployment.

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As quality professionals, we’re all well aware that the applications we test are less than perfect. That’s one very important reason that the software quality field exists. Functional testing won’t make an application perfect, but it can help ensure a certain level of quality, and enable defects to be found and addressed prior to release.

But it’s not just applications that break. The infrastructure surrounding the applications also breaks. Systems crash, networks fail, applications run low on memory, and drives get configured incorrectly. While failures such as these are outside of the scope of the application, they affect applications we test, sometimes severely.

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Thank you to everyone who participated in the Tracking Metrics with Calculated Fields Webinar. The webinar recording is now available if you were unable to attend or if you would like another look. Q & A from the session follows.

Remember, this is part two of a three part series. You can still register for the webinar series.

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Seapine ALM 2012 includes a number of new ways for testers to work with automated test cases with enhanced integration between TestTrack TCM and QA Wizard Pro. The What’s New in 2012 webinar provides an overview of the significant new features in the Seapine ALM 2012 release, including the integration between TestTrack TCM and QA Wizard Pro. Gerhard Kruger’s video demo also shows how to automate test cases stored in TestTrack TCM using QA Wizard Pro.

But there is more to integrating automation and test case management than creating automated scripts from manual steps. There are three different scenarios for automating and managing test cases using these solutions.

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In a recent post about “watching” approved requirements, I presented a simple workflow for moving requirements through the development process. In the real-world though, we see customers using more granular workflows to  accurately gauge progress and track changes throughout the lifecycle. These workflows work great for folks down in the trenches of the project, but don’t always translate as you report on that progress up the chain.

Look at the slightly more complicated workflow below, where we’ve expanded the review cycle to better track where a requirement is in the review/approval loop.

Expanded workflow, with detailed review/approve progress tracking

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Thank you to everyone who participated in the Intro to Calculated Fields webinar. The webinar recording is now available if you weren’t able to attend or if you would like to watch it again. Q&A from the session follows.

Remember, this is the first in a three-part series. You can still register for the webinar series.

Q & A

Q: Do calculated fields work for any item type in TestTrack, or only issues?­

A: Calculated fields are supported across all item types, including issues, test cases, test runs, and all requirement types.

Q: What versions of TestTrack support calculated fields?

A: Calculated fields were introduced in TestTrack 2012, released last month.

Q: Can you use calculated fields with other fields to create a new calculated field?

A: Yes, that’s the power of calculated fields. You can take information from other parts of an item and essentially create a whole new piece of data. For example, you could combine severity and location of an issue to define an issue’s priority.

Q: Can we make a calculation based on the status of a different item? For example, the risk level of one item when it or another item changes?

A: Not currently. Right now calculated fields don’t have the ability to look outside of the item, meaning they can’t pull data from linked items or use other criteria outside of their own scope.

Q: Is all the functionality shown in the demonstration also available in the web version of TestTrack 2012?

A: Yes, both the web and desktop clients have full support for creating, updating, and using calculated fields.

Q: How do you set up the date/time calculations—like weeks to close?

A: See Using Date Functions in Calculated Fields.

Q: If you change the calculation and rerun a report will you get a different value?

A: Reports use the field values in an item at the time the report is run. If the changed formula hasn’t been recalculated when a report is run, the report won’t show the new value because the field itself doesn’t have the new value. Calculated fields are always recalculated when another field or event is changed on an item.