Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
IBM Rational Quality Manager is a collaborative web-based quality management hub that teams
can use to plan, execute, and report on test efforts.
This video is the first in a series of videos aimed at explaining how you can use test case
execution records to plan, execute, and report on testing.
Part 1 introduces test case execution records and explains why they are so important. In
part 2, you will explore some existing test case execution records. In parts 3 and 4 you
will see how to generate test case execution records for a single test case and for all
test cases in a test plan. Part 5 shows variations on the procedure for generating test case
execution records. And in part 6, you will learn how to use test case execution records
to run tests and generate test results.
Let's begin with part 1: Why you need to understand and manage test case execution records.
This video explains: How Rational Quality Manager uses test case
execution records to plan, execute, and report on testing.
How test case execution records facilitate the reuse of test cases in multiple test plans,
iterations, and environments, while maintaining separate results for reporting purposes.
How test plans, test cases, and test case execution records are linked.
How test case execution records provide critical test planning and execution information to
test status reports.
One of Quality Manager's most powerful features is that it allows you to reuse the same test
case against multiple test plans, iterations and test environments.
So what do we mean by reuse? We mean that you create and manage one test case, however,
for reporting purposes, and execution records are all about reporting execution, for reporting
purposes, you have completely separate execution results for the different test plans, iterations,
and test environments that you're reusing these test cases to report execution against
and this means that you don't need to duplicate the test case. And it also means that you
have far fewer test cases that you need to manage.
Let's talk a little bit about this reuse and the need for separate execution results.
This slide shows two test cases, Change Password and Create Account, and both test cases are
linked to two test plans, the Release 1 Test Plan and the Release 2 Test Plan.
If you're using the same test case against two test plans that represent two efforts,
you would, of course,
need to have separate results for each plan because the test may have passed for one plan
and failed for the other or not even have been executed yet.
If you're using Quality Manager iterations and have linked your Quality Manager test
plan to them, you'll in all likelihood need to report test execution status for each iteration.
And if you're using iterations, there's also a very strong chance that the same test will
need to be executed within multiple iterations.
In this type of context, for reporting purposes, you certainly would want to have separate
execution results for the same test case across each of the iterations that it needs to be
executed in.
So, we see that Create Account for iterations one and three passed, but it failed in iteration
two.
Change Password wasn't planned to be executed as part of iteration one. It failed in iteration
two and hasn't yet been executed for iteration three.
If you're using Rational Quality Manager test environments, and in this slide we're using
them to represent different operating system browser combinations, you surely would want
to be able to report execution of the test case against different environments and have
separate results for each environment that you're using.
So in order for the same test case to have separate execution results for these different
test plan iteration and test environment combinations of values, we need to create something to
express those test plan, iteration, and test environment combinations, and that thing that
we need to create is called a test case execution record.
Let's take a look at what we have in Rational Quality Manager to illustrate test case execution
records.
We're in a project area called Online Banking (Quality Management).
We have a test plan for release one of an online banking system.
The test plan is linked to iterations. So, for release one, there'll be three iterations
of testing.
The test plan is linked to test cases, 10 test cases in particular, and these test cases
will need to be executed against multiple operating system and browser combinations,
which are expressed as test environments.
We're now going to illustrate how critical and fundamental test case execution records
are to how RQM expresses execution of test cases.
To illustrate this, we're going to run an execution report against the Release 1 Test
Plan.
In particular, we're going to run the Execution Status Using TCER, which is short for test
case execution record, Count. And this report allows us to filter on a plan, which we'll
do, we want to see the execution status for the Release 1 Test plan.
We run it and we see that it returns no data. And the reason it returns no data is because
whenever you ask RQM what has been planned for execution and has been executed, RQM does
not count test cases, it counts test case execution records that have been created for
test cases. So in order for this report, and any report in Quality Manager that reports
execution, to show data, we need to generate execution records.
In this video, you were introduced to test case execution records in Rational Quality
Manager and why they are so important.
In part 2 of this video series, you will look at some test case execution records in Rational
Quality Manager and see how they affect test status reporting.