How to test
Test management with TestDirector involves four phases:
Specify Requirements: Analyze your application and determine your testing requirements.
Plan Tests: Create a test plan, based on your testing requirements.
Execute Tests: Create test sets and perform test runs.
Track Defects: Report defects detected in your application and track how repairs are progressing.
Throughout each phase, you can analyze data by generating detailed reports and graphs.
Specifying Requirements
Analyze your application and determine your testing requirements.
Define Testing Scope: Examine application documentation in order to determine your testing scope—test goals, objectives, and strategies.
The test team begins the testing process by gathering all available documentation on the application under test, such as marketing and business requirements documents, system requirements specifications, and design documents.
Use these documents to obtain a thorough understanding of the application under test and determine your testing scope — test goals, objectives, and strategies.
You should ask the following questions when determining your testing scope:
· What is the main purpose and direction of the application?
· What are the major features of the application?
· What is the relative importance of each element in the application functionality?
· What are the critical or high-risk functions of the application?
· What are your testing priorities?
· Do your customers/end-users agree with your testing priorities?
· What are your overall quality goals?
reate Requirements: Build a requirements tree to define your overall testing requirements.
Requirement topics are recorded in the Requirements module by creating a requirements tree. The requirements tree is a graphical representation of your requirements specification, displaying the hierarchical relationship between different requirements.
Detail Requirements: For each requirement topic in the requirements tree, create a list of detailed testing requirements. Describe each requirement, assign it a priority level, and add attachments if necessary.
Defining Requirements
For each requirement topic, a QA tester creates a list of detailed testing requirements in the requirements tree. For example, the requirement topic Application Security may be broken down into the following requirements:
Analyze Requirements Specification: Generate reports and graphs to assist in analyzing your testing requirements. Review your requirements to ensure they meet your testing scope.
Create a test plan, based on your testing requirements.
Define Testing Strategy: Examine your application, system environment, and testing resources in order to determine your testing goals.
Define Test Subjects: Divide your application into modules or functions to be tested. Build a test plan tree to hierarchically divide your application into testing units, or subjects.
Define Tests: Determine the types of tests you need for each module. Add a basic definition of each test to the test plan tree.
Create Requirements Coverage: Link each test with a testing requirement(s).
Design Test Steps: Develop manual tests by adding steps to the tests in your test plan tree. Test steps describe the test operations, the points to check, and the expected outcome of each test. Decide which tests to automate.
Automate Tests: For tests that you decide to automate, create test scripts with a Mercury Interactive testing tool, or a custom or third-party testing tool.
Analyze Test Plan: Generate reports and graphs to assist in analyzing test planning data. Review your tests to determine their suitability to your testing goals.
Create test sets and perform test runs.
Create Test Sets: Define groups of tests to meet the various testing goals in your project. These might include, for example, testing a new application version or a specific function in an application. Determine which tests to include in each test set.
Schedule Runs: Schedule test execution and assign tasks to application testers.
Run Tests: Execute the tests in your test set automatically or manually.
Analyze Test Results: View the results of your test runs in order to determine whether a defect has been detected in your application. Generate reports and graphs to help analyze these results.
Report defects detected in your application and track how repairs are progressing.
Add Defects: Report new defects detected in your application. Quality assurance testers, developers, project managers, and end users can add defects during any phase in the testing process.
Review New Defects: Review new defects and determine which ones should be fixed.
Repair Open Defects: Correct the defects that you decided to fix.
Test New Build: Test a new build of your application. Continue this process until defects are repaired.
Analyze Defect Data: Generate reports and graphs to assist in analyzing the progress of defect repairs, and to help determine when to release the application.