The Seapine View

If you’re new to TestTrack TCM or already use it, and want to learn better ways to manage your testing process, check out the TestTrack TCM Best Practices. This document covers:

• How TestTrack TCM items map to items from your manual test case management process.
• Suggestions for creating test suites and test run sets for better organization and meaningful reporting.
• When to create test cases and generate test runs.
• How to rerun failed tests.
• How to prepare for testing future releases.
• Which reports and live charts can help you accurately measure the progress of your testing effort.

Additional best practices were recently added for enhancements introduced in TestTrack TCM 2011.1, including new project options that can help you ensure tests meet compliance requirements or that your testing process is followed, and the ability share test case steps to maximize reuse.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for our Take the Pain out of Test Case Management webinar. The recording is now available on YouTube if you missed the webinar or want to watch it again.  It is also available on SlideShare if you want to view or download the slide deck. Q&A from the session follows.

As I have worked with customers to implement our tools and improve current processes, one thing I have noticed is the use of modular tests. While the specific approach varies, these are tests that focus on a specific piece of functionality or contain a set of steps commonly used in the application being tested. Modular test cases are then reused and incorporated into longer test cases.

In this video, I provide an overview of modular test cases, the benefits, and how to manage them in TestTrack using the Share Steps feature, which is available in the 2011.1 release.

As projects grow in scope, both testing complexity and demands on the testing team increase. Homegrown methods for managing those tests start letting you down. Even as you spend more time managing individual tests, it becomes clear that you’ve lost track of the larger picture—what the results of your testing mean for the quality of your software and the efficiency of your testing program.

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Time tracking in TestTrack is a feature that has been written about on this blog here and there. Time tracking is a pretty straightforward concept. You estimate how long it will take to complete a task and, as you progress, you report on how much effort you have put in and how much time you think there is left to complete the task.

However, time tracking in TestTrack TCM can be tricky because there are two objects, the test case and the test run, to track time for. It can be confusing to know which object you are placing an estimate on and what it really means.

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If you haven’t been intimately involved in an application development project, this question probably evokes some puzzlement. You ship your software when it’s done, right? Well, maybe. There are a number of considerations that you take into account when deciding when to ship an application—is the coding complete, is the quality there, and is the business ready?

The developers are responsible for determining when coding is complete, while the business owners have to determine if the application is ready to increase revenue or reduce costs.

I’m interested in focusing on the second aspect—the assessment of application quality. We can point to things like defect rate or requirements met as shipping criteria, but those are still ambiguous terms. Any application is going to have defects, and some requirements will be met better than others.

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One question I get every now and then is how to implement a test sequence in TestTrack TCM.  The concept of “before you test Y, you must test X first”.

There isn’t a specific feature in TestTrack to address this but there are actually several ways to implement test sequences. Following is one way.
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We recently released version 2010.1 of TestTrack, which contains many new exciting new features. One new feature that I would like to give some love to is Item Mapping Rules. This feature will benefit users who have more than one TestTrack applications, as it allows you to configure how field values are mapped from one application to another.

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Recently, a customer asked the following question: “How can you filter the list of test runs based on the test variants it contains?”

The reason the question came up is because, while you can display a “Test Variant” column in the Test Runs list window, you can only filter the column between runs that have variants and those that do not.

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A QA Wizard Pro batch script (.qawbatch) allows you to extend your testing time since you can schedule the script to run overnight when you are out of the office. If you use TestTrack TCM, you can also attach the batch script to a test case to create a unique copy of the script for each generated test run. You can then launch the batch script from TestTrack TCM directly or via the TestTrack TCM scheduler. The QA Wizard Pro Report that is generated is automatically attached to the test run. You can make this process even more flexible and powerful when you take advantage of the parameters that can be included with the batch script.
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