Tool Mentor: Testing with Rational Team Concert

Synopsis

Stories are tested in appropriate test environments.

Value

In Scrum, progress is measured by delivering tested capabilities into the product. This ensures that real progress is taking place. Rational Team Concert can be used with many different test environments and tools. The value of Rational Team Concert is tracking the progress of work, specifically which stories are ready for testing, and which stories have been successfully tested. You can also link to test cases and/or scripts for traceability.

Pre-requisites

The following pre-requisites are assumed:

1. The testing environment is set up.

In this tool mentor we do not make any assumptions about the testing tools being used, but instead focus on how you use Rational Team Concert.

You have installed the Rational Team Concert client (Installing Rational Team Concert clients).
You are connected to the server and have joined the project (see Getting started: Team member).
You are familiar with using the Rational Team Concert web client to navigate your project area (see Using the web client).

When selecting testing tools, you may wish to consider IBM Rational Quality Manager, as it integrates with Rational Team Concert to provide various test management capabilities, including test planning, execution, and reporting. In turn Rational Quality Manager integrates with other Rational and 3rd party tools.

If you are using Rational Quality Manager then see this more detailed overview of how to do Testing.

2. The team has agreed on how testing work is allocated and tracked.

If you are using Rational Quality Manager, then you can plan, allocate, and track testing work using it's features.

However, this tool mentor assumes you are just using Rational Team Concert to manage your testing. Some work items may be assigned specifically for testing, but most of the testing work is an ongoing activity with no work item assignment performed in the tool. Progress is reported on the individual story work item:

The Developer changes the state of a user story from "In Development" to "In Testing" to indicate that the story is ready to be tested
The Tester changes the state of the user story to "Done" if it passes all tests, otherwise back to "In Development" if it fails, with comments and/or links to defects.

Steps

Perform the following steps.

For more information on this topic,

1. Decide what to test Generally you should start testing user stories based on the ranked order specified in the Sprint backlog. You may also have work items assigned specifically for you to address.	Use the web client to display the Ranked List view of the Release Backlog. Click Plans > All Plans >[Release name] Set View As to Ranked List. Hover over each work item to display key information without having to leave the ranked list. Use the Rational Team Concert Eclipse client to view your assigned work items. They will appear in the Current Work section of your My Work view. See Managing work items in My Work view. Triage work items from your inbox to the Current Work and Future Work sections. See Managing my new work. Double-click on work items to open them. Mouse-over or click on the parent link to review the parent Story for a task. See Viewing work items in a plan in the Eclipse client. You can also view your work items in your team dashboard (web or Eclipse client), or personal dashboard (web client only).
2. Develop a test / add to test suite The acceptance criteria for a user story is the best starting point for defining test cases. Develop test scripts and test data that satisfy the acceptance criteria. Optionally link these to the user story. Create test suites for each environment to be tested.	Click the Acceptance tab on a user story to view the criteria of acceptance. Click the Links tab and click Links > Add > Related Artifacts to link test cases or other artifacts to the user story.
3. Deploy to test environments This may involve promoting an existing build, or creating a new build based on the code that is ready to be tested.	Create and deploy builds as described in Building with Rational Team Concert.
4. Run test suite Run tests for stories that are ready for test (in the "In Testing" state). Alternatively, run all tests, and use test pass/fail criteria to track test progress.	View stories that are ready for testing on the team dashboard (web client). Click Project Dashboards > All [Project name] Dashboards > [Team Name] Click the Product Owner tab to view stories ready for testing.
5. Report results If all tests for a user story are passing, then change the state from "In Testing" to "Done".	View stories ready for testing as described previously. Click on a work item (in the actions column) to edit. Click Complete Testing to set the state to Done.