RQM: Project areas - team areas - best practice?
We are relativly new to RQM and we are discussing, how to organize all test projects in RQM using project areas or team areas.
On the one hand we have several products which has to be tested.
So I would say: One product - one project area.
On the other hand we sell complete installations based on several products.
One customer project - one project area.
BUT:
If the customer project could use test cases of the product test, they can't use them, cause they reside in an other project area.
The reusebility isn't given.
Or, if customer project A uses producta 1 -5 and project B uses 3 - 8, they can't use the same test cases for 3,4 and 5 because they reside in other project areas.
So the products have a m:n relation to the customer projects.
What would be the best way to organize this in RQM?
Greetings Georg.
On the one hand we have several products which has to be tested.
So I would say: One product - one project area.
On the other hand we sell complete installations based on several products.
One customer project - one project area.
BUT:
If the customer project could use test cases of the product test, they can't use them, cause they reside in an other project area.
The reusebility isn't given.
Or, if customer project A uses producta 1 -5 and project B uses 3 - 8, they can't use the same test cases for 3,4 and 5 because they reside in other project areas.
So the products have a m:n relation to the customer projects.
What would be the best way to organize this in RQM?
Greetings Georg.
Accepted answer
You can use Team Areas in a single project to solve this problem. Each Team can decide which test cases are private and not - ones that are not private can be linked to test plans in either Team Area.
You could also do this with project Areas but you would have to use copy to get a copy in the other project area. The downside of this method is you have 2 copies that will not be in sync, ie, if it is changed in one project area it will not be visible in the other project area and you defeat the idea of re-use
In general if you have teams that need to share artifacts (test cases, test environments, etc) a single project area is the best practice and use Team Areas with the project to partition data.