Test Management using TestLink – Pt II

In the previous part of the tutorial we installed and configured our TestLink installation. Now it’s time to create a Test Project and its requirements.

Browse to your TestLink URL and log in. As you see, TestLink needs you to create at least one project before you can start working with it.

Test Project Creation

Some information on the “Enhanced features”

  • Requirements: Check if you want to use requirements tracing
  • Testing Priority: Check if you want to have testcases have priority over others
  • Test Automation: Check if you want to have an API available (e.g. for Jenkins or Python scripts)
  • Inventory: Check if you want to have a section where you can track servers, items, …

The next step is to input the requirements for your product. Click on Requirement Specification

Requirements are grouped by Specifications in TestLink, you could think of them as folders to group requirements that belong together. For the purpose of this tutorial let’s make two Specifications, called Level Designer and Audiovisual.

Now click on Audiovisual in the document tree on the left. To create a requirement click on the create button under Requirement Operations (hit the cogwheel if the buttons are not visible).

Manually adding requirements is a tedious process, many projects have documents or spreadsheets that contain the requirements. TestLink supports importing requirements in CSV or Excel files. Let’s create a couple of requirements manually for now though. This is what I ended up with:

Requirements Tree

 Congratulations! You’ve just accomplished requirements traceability in your project, well, the first step of it at least. It’s a good start and now you’ll need a Test Plan with Test Cases that can be executed to see if those requirements are being met or not.

Hop over to Test Plan Management and let’s create our first Test Plan.

Test Plan creation

Okay we’re nearly there on the management side of things. Let’s continue by creation a couple of Test Cases. TestLink allows you to generate Test Cases based upon the Requirements if you would like to do that. However, in this tutorial we’ll go full manual for now, visit Test Specification.

Here we find something that is most likely familiar to you if you have been involved in software testing. The use of Test Suites that hold several relevant Test Cases. These can also be imported from an XML file with the correct structure. You can find out more on how to arrange your Test Suites and Test Cases in such an XML by reading the File Formats Documentation document in TestLink. Let’s create a couple manually for now:

Test Case List

You might think this new Test Case creation form is pretty limited in what you can specify. However when you click on a Test Case in the tree on the left you can supply more information such as execution type (manual or automatic, select the latter if you’d like Jenkins to execute it later on) and execution steps.

Test Case Detailed

Now the most important part, linking these Test Cases to the Requirements we created earlier. This will allow for Requirements Traceability once we’re going to execute these Test Cases. So let’s check out the Add Requirements page.

Here you can either bulk assign requirements to tests in a Test Suite or manually pick them for a selected Test Case. Let’s mix and match the ones we’ve made. It’s pretty obvious to do, an example:

Requirement Assignment

Note that you can also assign test cases to Requirements in two other places, namely in the Edit Requirement view and the Edit Test Case view.

The second last step we need to take is assigning these Test Cases to our previously created Test Plan, so that when we want to execute the Test Plan we get a list of all the TCs we need to process. Click on Add/Remove Test Cases on the main page. Select a Test Suite and enable the TCs in the list. Active Test Cases for the selected plan will be highlighted.

Add/Remove TCs

You need a defined version of your software to test against. In TestLink these are called Builds (cfr Jenkins builds). So the last thing we need to do now is add a build in TestLink, do so by going to Builds / Releases.

Build Creation

Phew! That was quite a bit of work don’t you think? But we’re there! We can now have fun testing our product, using our test plan as a guide and executing test cases based on the steps we’ve defined in each of them.

In the next tutorial I’ll explain how to automate test case execution using Jenkins. But for now have a look at Metrics Dashboard and Test Reports and Metrics > Requirement Based Report

Requirements Based ReportNeat isn’t it? We get a nice overview of all our requirements, all linked test cases and whether they have been run, have passed or have failed. I do have to say that it is unfortunate that you cannot add Requirements to a Test Plan. The requirements that show up here are the ones which have test cases that are active in the selected Test Plan.

You do need to be careful that if you have a set of requirements for a Test Plan that each and every of those requirements have at least one test case linked to them that is active in that particular Test Plan else it will not show up in this overview at all.

Next time is sure going to be interesting… Test automation using Jenkins based on your Test Plans in TestLink!