Planning vs Testing (Part 2)

In a previous blog post, I mentioned some of the reasons why the Planning and Testing views in MTM look very similar but behave differently. Today, in this post, I will continue talking about this.

As you can see when playing around with the product, activity pages contain toolbars, with buttons which invoke specific actions. There are certain actions that are needed for planning purposes, and others –very different for execution. Since we have limited space in these toolbars (and because planning actions are very different from execution actions), we decided to have two separate views.

Look at the toolbars in the Planning view:

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We have the following actions:

  • New – to create static or query-based suites
  • Add requirements – to add existing requirements
  • Copy test suites – to copy test suites from other existing test plans
  • Delete – To delete existing suites
  • Open – to open an existing test case
  • Add – to add one or multiple test cases to any given suite
  • New – to create a new test case and add it to a suite
  • Copy test case – to make a copy of a selected test case
  • Remove – to remove a test case from the suite
  • Assign – to assign testers to test cases in the suite
  • Configurations – to assign one or more configurations to the test cases in the suite
  • Order – to give test cases an order of execution

Now compare these planning actions to those actions in toolbars that live in the Testing view:

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  • Run – to run all active tests in a given suite
  • Filter – to filter whatever is shown in this activity (based on ‘tester’ and/or ‘configurations’)
  • Run/Run with options – to run one or more test cases in a suite
  • View results – to view the latest results of a selected test case
  • Open test case – to open the selected test case
  • Block – to block the selected test case
  • Reset – to reset the selected test case to an active state

As you can see, actions that can be taken on suites/test cases in each view are very different. Many of these actions will also affect how test cases appear in each view, and I will be talking about this in a later post.

Thanks,
David Gorena Elizondo