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Categories are test artifact attributes. They're used for tagging or grouping artifacts within
a test project into logical hierarchies. For example, say I'm configuring categories
for use with test plans for multiple flavors of personal banking software. I want to organize
my test plans not only by product, but by various licenses and editions as well. How
would I do that? First, I'll need a parent category--Product
in this case. This is already defined in this project, but remember that you can create
new root categories with the Create icon over here. The Product category has two values
associated with it already: Personal Banking and Personal Investing.
From there, I can drill down with subcategories. I'll start with License. I'll also create
a subcategory of that: Mobile Extension. You'll notice here that, although it looks
like I should have Mobile Extension under License, it's not appearing. Why is that?
First, I need to define values for License. Until a parent category has values, you won't
be able to see its subcategories. So here I'll create two values to be associated
with the License subcategory of Product: Standard and Premium. Notice here that, once these
are created, Mobile Extension appears beneath License.
I can select and drag values from the Values box onto a subcategory in the Categories box
in order to associate them with it. I'll also create two values for Mobile Extension:
iOS and Android. The values box provides a filtering category
so that you can easily find values in your project.
Let's assume that I have different editions of my product based on interface. So, I'll
create another subcategory beneath License, I'll call it edition, and associate three
values with it: Traditional, Touchscreen, and let's say that we're working with very
advanced banking software and say Haptic, too. We can create these values and associate
them with the Edition subcategory of License. Notice here that we have two subcategories
beneath License, which exists beneath Product. Once I save this new scheme of categories
and subcategories, I'll be able to use them to organize my test plan artifacts.
Here's an example of how they would appear in a test plan. All of the values appear in
the boxes for their respective categories. Let's look at our collection of test plans
in this project. Right away, you'll notice that our new subcategories appear as columns
to be used for sorting. We can also group this artifacts by their attributes.
We can also filter by categories. We can filter these artifacts we've just defined in precisely
the hierarchies that we've defined them. For example, I can decide that I only want to
see Haptic or Android editions of my Premium Personal Banking software, or maybe I only
want to see Android versions of my Standard Personal Investing software. With categories,
they're only clicks away.