Latest revision as of 07:58, 24 March 2011

Testplanner

Testplanner is a simple tool for creating and editing test plan files and can be used in test planning as presented in test management overview. The key features include:

• Create and edit test plan files through graphical UI
• Access and edit test plans stored in Gitorious version control system
• Easy reordering of test suites, test sets and test cases
• Open the test plan directly in Testrunner

For a quick overview, check our demo videos at Youtube:

• Demo of version 0.2.2
• Git support demo
• MeeGo QA tools Youtube channel

Installation

Testplanner can be installed as a stand-alone application on MeeGo Netbook UX, Ubuntu 10.04 (and newer), and Fedora 13 or as a plug-in for Qt Creator.

To install Testplanner as a stand-alone application do the following:

1. Set up the repository
2. Install Testplanner:

MeeGo Netbook 1.1:

sudo zypper install testplanner

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install testplanner

Fedora 13:

# yum install testplanner

Usage

Test case planning is done on one screen. The screen is divided into two parts: on the left side is a tree view of suite/set/case hierarchy, and on the right side an editor for values. As suites, sets, and cases have partially different properties the editors also are different. Adding and removing test suites, sets, and cases can be done via context menu on the tree view or using the buttons provided in the bottom of the editors.

Test definition

The highest level of a test plan is test definition. You can give a description for the whole plan.

To add a test suite, either click the corresponding button or select the item from the tree view context menu.

Test suite

Select the newly added suite from the tree view and the test suite editor opens up. You can again set a description but also define some attributes. These attributes are inherited by set and case unless not overridden. This is an important feature and you should take this into consideration when deciding how to group the cases! To change a certain attribute for a bunch of test cases from suite level is definitely faster than doing the same for each test case separately.

To add the first test set to your test suite, again click either the button or the corresponding context menu item from the tree view.

Test set

The general settings of a test set are similar to those of test suite. If you set some of the general attributes on suite level you will notice that those values are visible on set level as well, and that they can be overridden.

Test set editor however contains two additional tabs that hold test set specific things – Pre and Post Steps and Files. In pre and post steps you can define test steps, usually commands, that are executed before/after test case execution. These are handy for setting up the environment and cleaning it up afterwards.

On the tab Files you can define files to fetch from device after test execution.

Test case

Test cases are added to sets the same way sets to suites etc. The test case general editor is again similar to suite and set editors. Test case has one additional tab for defining the test steps.

If the test case’s manual attribute is set to true, the case may contain both manual and automatic steps. Test steps are what testrunner-lite finally executes. For automatic steps these are commands that are executed in the device under test whereas a manual step usually describes in writing what the test engineer is expected to do upon execution.

The expected result of a step is currently valid for automatic steps only. In regular testing this is usually 0 (zero) since binaries return a zero if nothing went wrong. You may also be writing negative tests and want to set this to something else than zero when the step really should fail. So for example if you want to test that command ls works (or that some folder exists or does not exist) you could create a step ls /proc/ with expected result 0, and another step ls /blob/ with expected result 2. Your test case would then pass when /proc/ exists and /blob/ does not.

Execution

Tests can be executed with Testrunner which can be launched directly from Testplanner either by clicking the Play-icon from the toolbar or from the Tools-menu.

Notice also that this tool uses the test plan format common for all MeeGo QA Tools, so you can use the same plans with the yet-to-be-released Open Test Service.

Git integration

One new feature of Testplanner is the git integration. This means that test designers and test managers can keep their test plans in git version control repository and manage them directly with Testplanner. Git functions can be found from Tools / Git menu.

MeeGo QA team offers a bunch of tests that you can use. These include MeeGo Core Test Suite, Handset-UX tests, and MeeGo Netbook UX Test Suite. If you need to edit the tests (and if you wish to some day merge your changes to the main asset) you need to create a personal clone on gitorious.

After you have cloned the project Testplanner will open up a dialog for you to choose a file to open. When you open a file from a git clone Testplanner will enable also the other Git options: Pull (for updating your clone), Push (for pushing your changes to the server), and Commit (for locally committing your changes) – check the video from Youtube about these features. The editing is otherwise the same as usual.

Other features

Undo/Redo functionality is available in Testplanner. It works as you’d expect, that is, either from the Edit menu or using the common keyboard shortcuts.

Drag-and-drop is enabled in the tree view. You can reorder suites, sets, and cases by dragging or move sets under different suites, or cases under different sets, by dragging them.

Once you’ve created your test plan, you will most likely want to save it for further use. Testplanner, when installed from the repository, drags with it the test-definition package that contains a schema for the test XMLs. Upon saving Testplanner will validate the file created against the schema to ensure that it can be finally run with testrunner.

Original source: Description of basic usage in team blog

Contact

Testplanner is developed by QA tools team. You can contact us and contribute via the following channels:

• #meego-qa IRC channel on irc.freenode.net
• File new bugs or improvement ideas to Bugzilla
• Leave a comment or vote the items in our backlog
• meego-qa@lists.meego.com mailing list
• Source codes in Gitorious