Test management in Agile Teams
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1) CollabNet TeamForge provides continuous feedback loops through all phases of the software development life cycle including planning, coding, building, testing, and deployment. With its integration of TestLink, it allows users to create test case trackers, execute test cases, and store test results. 2) An example is described of how an agile team developing a mobile product uses TestLink integrated with TeamForge and Jenkins for continuous integration to build and run tests multiple times per day. 3) Test cases are organized into test suites associated with user stories. Test plans are created for each sprint to pull in test cases to execute, with results available by sprint. The team automated most test cases using tools.
Test management in Agile Teams
- 1. Agile Teams Test Management By Janardhanam Venkat CollabNetTeamForgeprovidescontinuousfeedback loops through all phases of the software life cycle from plan, code, build and test to deploy. TestLink, a widely adopted open source product for test management, now tightly integrated with TeamForge provides the ability to create test case trackers and associate them with requirements. With TeamForge, users can execute test cases and store test results. TestLink utilizes a tracker to store test cases and also tie Test Plans into builds. With this integration, the testmanagementfeaturesare available in TeamForge providing a comprehensive end- to-end ALMsolution. For more information, see the blog “Test Management in TeamForge”. This article describes how the traditional practice of managing test cases and plans has shifted in the agile world. Here’s anillustrationof how Agile teams can benefit from adopting the Test Management feature as they manage the full software development life cycle. There is a company X is building a mobile productina release cycle that’splannedforfive sprints. A sprint typically spans over two weeks and the last sprint is a “hardening sprint” in which the team stabilizes the product. There is a planning week tostart with,whichis followedby four feature development sprints and a final hardening sprint. Here’s a picture that shows the release plan in timeline view. The Scrum team works on one story per sprint. Each story has a Test Suite which is a container for Test Cases.The Test Caseshave differentscenariosandisattachedto TestSuite. The scenarios can be happy path or negative testcases.Inthe diagram below you can see Story A, Story B, Story C and Story D with TestSuite A,Test Suite B,TestSuite C and TestSuite D respectively.Individual testcases are attached to Test Suites based on the complexity of the stories.
- 2. In this example, the team uses Jenkins with TestLink for Continuous Integration (CI) to build and run tests multiple times a day to provide early feedback to the Scrum teams. Then, creates a Test Plan for every sprint and the plans name in our case is Sprint 1, Sprint 2, Sprint 3 and Sprint 4.There will be multiple buildsperdayandseveral builds duringthe twoweek sprint. The picture below illustrates the process. When the sprint is in progress there may be test cases that need to be executed for the stories in the currentsprint,but sometimesthere maybe few testcasesfromthe past release orpastsprintthat need to be executedforregression. The test cases will be assigned to a plan and the tests in the plan will be executedduringthe twoweekssprint. Considerbothscenarios;see Sprint1has fourtestcases assigned to the test plan to execute but in Sprint 4 there are two test cases that belong to Sprint 4 and one test case from Sprint 1. This means you can reuse test cases of prior sprints in any test plan. During the hardening sprint there are specific test cases for the sprint and one test case from prior release. The diagram below describes the merging of plans with Test Cases.
- 3. The Scrum teams can easily create new plans sprint over sprint to pull test cases that they need to execute and the results are available by sprint. The Scrum team was executing all test cases manually and marked them PASS/FAIL. Later, the scrum team decided to automate most of the test cases and it was accomplished using automated tools as shown in the following illustration.
- 4. If we pull areport byTest Plan,we geta consolidatedreportof automatedtestand manual test results. Some agile teamswouldliketochange testcasesmany timeswithinasprintandhavingone TestPlan persprintmightbe traditional.Forthiscase youcan have multiple TestPlanswithinasprintlike Sprint 1.1, Sprint1.2, Sprint1.3 and Sprint1.4 as show below.The testcasescan be unique ineachone of this planor reusedbetweenplansorcumulative fromplan1.1to 1.4. Summary The CollabNetTeamForge-TestLink integration builds on top of TeamForge’ s capability to support the software development life cycle from plan, code, build and test to deploy. With TestLink integration, TeamForge now has the extended capability to create test case trackers and associate them with requirements andprovide traceabilityand test management right from requirements through release. Thisarticle illustrated howtestscanbe managed in an agile team and how automation is embedded in the execution of Test Cases. I’d like to hear what you think and what features you would like to see added. Please let me know venkatj@collab.net .