.webp)
With Test Center 4.0 we enhanced the Test Management capabilities of Test Center by introducing Test Plans. Test Plans will make it easier to organize your manual testing, but are also a cornerstone for the newly introduced Squish test execution feature, which you can learn more about following this link.
To see these new feature additions in action take a look at our release overview video below.
This article will highlight the most important aspects of the test plan feature, what changes this introduces to manual testing.
Test Plans
Test Plans help you to ensure that your testing is complete. They allow you to compile a list of all manual and automated tests that should be run during test cycles. They also contain the information for which configurations the selected tests should be executed for. You can define many different test plans, depending on the type of test cycle, so whether it is regular integration test cycle triggered by changes to the repository, or whether it is a potentially more in-depth testing cycle related to an upcoming release.
Even if you don’t plan to have Test Center execute your automated Squish tests, this will still help you to ensure that your testing, and the results you generated, are complete.
Test Center differentiates between test plan templates, which can be seen as easily reuseable blue prints for a test cycle, and test plan executions, which represent test plans that are currently being executed. Both test plan templates and test plan executions can be managed in the same way, but when you schedule a test plan template and turn it into an execution, additional information gets attached to the test plan, like the linked batch result and potentially an execution date as well as a repository revision for which the tests should be executed.
Overall test plans are a big help for you when organizing manual and automated testing cycles and when verifying their completeness.
Changes to Manual Testing with Test Plans
When adding test plans to Test Center we wanted to leverage the existing manual test management and therefore turned the existing “Manual Testing” area into the “Tests” area, that will from now on host everything related to managing tests, test plans, manual- and automated test execution.
The existing “Test Management” tab got extended to also allow managing automated test. While doing that we also deepened our repository integration feature set and now allow to import Squish tests from the repository, as well as the ability to locate Squish tests within the repository for automated execution.
At the same time we added two new tabs to manage test plan templates and test plan executions.
The “Execution Configuration” tab was removed, but its functionality was retained and can now be found when adding Test Runs to Test Plan Templates or Test Plan Executions. That means manual test plan runs are no longer loosely connected by being associated with the same Batch, but they are connected by belonging to the same Test Plan. That does add another layer of indirection to your manual testing, but it greatly enhances the ability to re-use manual test configurations from previous test cycles and it makes monitoring and browsing manual test results easier for both test managers and testers.
The “Executions Overview” tab was also removed, but most of its functionality was retained and can now be found when browsing a test plan execution.
So in conclusion we have extended the manual testing features in Test Center with test plans, while retaining all of the important functionality and you can now benefit from the improved management of test cycles which comes with the Test Plan feature.
Release Notes
Check out the Test Center 4.0 release notes for a comprehensive list of improvements.
Download and Evaluation
Customers and evaluators can find Test Center 4.0 packages in the Qt Customer Portal. If you have yet to try Test Center, request your free trial here.
