Test Planning with Rally.
Quality Assurance specialists can achieve significant efficiencies by thinking
through and creating test plans before they begin any of their testing efforts.
Defining and automating functional and integration tests
may require an up-front investment, but the QA cost savings over time,
increased quality, and customer benefits easily justify the effort.
Rally has several structures for organizing and using tests.
Let’s start with the test case itself,
which defines how the system should perform according to the requirements.
You define a test case using a description, objective,
pre-conditions, validation input, expected result, and post conditions.
There are also other attributes and associations that you can
learn about in the Use Rally Test Cases for Acceptance Testing training.
Drilling into the test case, you can define the steps needed to run the test case,
run the steps for that test case, and record the results each time.
You can run the test case by itself or as
part of a collection that includes other test cases.
When you organize test cases for use in various situations,
Rally provides the means to dig into the results from the context in which
the test case was run, for instance, when accepting a story,
or when running a set of regression tests in an iteration.
Let’s take a look at the different ways to organize test cases in Rally.
Although test cases are created on an ongoing basis,
once there’s a group of test cases that you’d like to reuse you can organize them
into a test plan (also called a test folder) according to their function.
This is done from the Test Plan page in Rally, which is located under the Quality menu.
For example, you can organize the checkout tests
into a test folder containing all the test cases needed to test
the checkout function of our shopping cart.
Later, when you need regression tests for this function,
you can easily find all the test cases associated with checkout.
When you organize test cases into folders,
remember that a test case can only live in one folder at a time.
Be sure to name your folders so that it’s easy for you to tell what test cases reside there.
This will help you find them more easily
when you reuse them in test sets, as we demonstrate in the
Using Rally Test Cases and Test Sets for Regression Testing video.
When you run integration or regression tests, you may want to include
test cases from one or more test folders in your test plan.
To schedule all these test cases together, you need to create a
test set and assign it to the appropriate iteration.
In this example, we’ve created two test sets and scheduled them for iteration 16:
one for mobile testing of the checkout process and another for browser testing
of the same checkout functional test cases.
We could have combined these into one test set, but we weren’t sure we’d have the
capacity to schedule them all in the same iteration.
When you drill into each test set you can see that we’re using the same checkout
test cases from our checkout test folder, but we have different tasks
that are relevant for each test set.
You organize test cases on the Quality Management Page.
This page allows you to create folders and subfolders to keep your test
cases organized in a hierarchy that you define.
Within the Quality Management page, the left pane includes
test cases that have not been assigned to a test folder.
The right pane shows test folders and the test cases in each folder.
You can drag a test case into the appropriate folder,
or you can select multiple test cases and place them in the appropriate
folder using the bulk editor.
Now it’s easy to see which test cases are contained in a test folder,
and which standalone test cases remain outside of a test plan.
You may also drag-and-drop to reorganize test cases
within the test folders pane.
The Quality Management page also conveniently
shows you the status of test cases in a test folder.
Hover over the Test Folder Status column on the right
(in the Test Folders section of the page) to see statistics on test case
results for the entire test folder.
The latest status of a test case for a particular software build is what’s relevant.
Congratulations, now you are ready to create test plans in Rally.
To learn more about Rally and agile practices, check out our blog and community.
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