'Action' dropdown field and the 'State' field in RQM
3 answers
@Alka Bahirat:
As Helen mentioned, States and Actions are two of the concepts that compose an artifact's workflow. A state represents the status of an artifact in a specific moment in time (e.g. New, Submitted, Draft, Under Review, Approved, etc.) An action is an activity that needs to be executed in order for the state to change (e.g. Approve, Reject, Close, etc.) Those state changes are called state transitions and only valid state transitions are allowed to be performed. The set of valid state transitions is represented in a State Transition table, which can be visualized and/or edited in the Workflow editor in the Project Area administration page.
@Chidambaram Lakshmanan:
Starting in Rational Quality Manager 4.0, you can define custom workflows for Test Plans, Test Cases, Test Scripts, Test Suites and Test Execution Results. This enables you to define the states, actions and transitions that fit your team's processes.
For more information on what's new in RQM 4.0 you can look at:
and
Thanks.
José Marcelo Ramos Barragán
Rational Quality Manager development.
The Action is what moves the artifact from one state to another. For example, if a test plan (or case) is in Draft state, then selecting the action "Ready for Review" will put it into the Review state so it can be reviewed and approved. So in general the states act as the workflow for the test artifacts. There are some additional rules for the state changes that are listed under Admin/System Properties; you should also take a look at those when defining the workflow for your team. I hope that helps.