Managing Your Testing Life Cycle

In this section, you will get to know how you can leverage Provar Manager to structure your testing activities and record any relevant piece of information.

Requirement Analysis

Software development teams often use Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) apps to organise and track their work (e.g. JIRA, Azure DevOps, Micro Focus, etc.). This work usually gets broken down into epics, features, and user stories which your QA team needs to understand in order to consider how to test them properly. Provar Manager currently integrates with JIRA and can integrate with your ALM. 

Using Provar Manager, you can record your findings and the outcome of your decisions in the following way:

• Create a Test Project record to start organising the information gathered around a central point.
  • Create a Test Plan record under the test project to start documenting the objectives, types of tests to be performed, etc. Depending on the size and complexity of the project, you may choose to create multiple test plans under the same project.
• Create Environment and System records to document the different systems that will be involved in the testing endeavour.

Test Planning

After analysing the requirements, your team will have a better idea of what strategy should be used, who should be involved in the project, how much effort will be required, and what risks have been identified.

The Test Plan record created previously will serve as the hub to organise all this information, either by storing your findings and decision outcomes in the record itself or by using any of the other objects related to it:

• Create related Feature records to define high-level items and rough effort estimates.
• Create related Team Member and Person records to specify roles and responsibilities.
• Create related Risk records to capture any identified risk related to the plan.
• Define which Environment records are considered under the plan.
• Use Activities to schedule milestones.
• Use Files to attach diagrams, documents, etc.

Test Case Design

Once your team knows on a high level what needs to be done and how, Provar Manager can also support you and your team with the design of test cases. You can:

• Create Test Case records with their corresponding Test Steps.
  • Attach helpful Files to Test Steps (e.g. screenshots, documentation, etc.)
• Link test cases with related Requirements.
• Attach test data that could be used during the test.
• Create Test Suite records to group and organize test cases.

Tip: The easiest way to include test suites in your test plans is by using the Manage button located on the Test Suites card on the test plan record.

Above: Snapshot of Test Suites card on Test Plan record.

Managing Test Steps

You can easily add, remove, and reorder test steps using the Test Steps Manager found on the test case record page.

 Above: Snapshot of the right-hand side of Test Steps Manager.

1. The Cancel button cancels any changes not saved.
2. The Add Step button adds a new step at the bottom of the list.
3. The Save button saves any changes made to the list.
4. Hovering between steps reveals a Plus button which, when clicked, adds a new step at the same hierarchical level as the step above it.
5. The Up and Down arrow buttons can be used to change the order of the step within the same hierarchical level.

 Above: Snapshot of the left-hand side of Test Steps Manager.

6. The Bin button deletes the step.
7. The Clip button shows/hides the section where you can manage the step’s attachments.
8. The Down and Right arrow buttons expand/collapse the step’s child steps.
9. The Level Down button creates a child step.

Test Environment Setup

Before starting the execution of test suites within a test plan, it is essential to make sure the test environments are ready.

As briefly mentioned in the Requirement Analysis section, Provar Manager allows you to create Environment and System records.

You can use the Status picklist on the environment record to register its availability.

Salesforce System Setup

Provar Manager allows you to set up connections to Salesforce orgs in order to run Apex unit tests present in them and bring the results back into Provar Manager.

Follow these steps to set up a connection to Salesforce:

1. Open the System record of System Type equal to “Salesforce”.
2. On the right-hand side of the page, you will find the Salesforce Connection Assistant card.
   
   
3. Select the right Org Type and click Request Authorization.
   
   
4. Follow the instructions on the screen:
   1. Open the link, enter the user code, and click Connect.
      
      
   2. Log into the Salesforce org and click Allow.
   3. Then click Continue.
5. Once you have authorized Provar Manager to access the Salesforce org, the Salesforce Connection Assistant will automatically refresh to indicate that the connection has been established.
6. Follow the final steps shown in the assistant to add the Remote Site Setting which will allow Provar Manager to communicate with the other Salesforce org.

API System Setup

With Provar Manager you can define a System record of type API to represent an external API which you may want to call at some point (see Scheduling Tests > Generic API Settings).

When setting up this type of System, it’s essential to specify the following:

• API Endpoint
• Authentication Type
  • No Authentication
  • Basic Authentication, which requires the fields Username and Password to be filled.
  • Named Credential (recommended), which requires the field Named Credential to be filled with the name of a Salesforce Named Credential.
    
    Named Credentials allow you to authenticate using Username/Password, OAuth 2.0, JWT, JWT Token Exchange, and AWS Signature Version 4.
    
    Salesforce documentation on how to define a Named Credential.
• API Paths

Note: remember to add the API Endpoint URL to the Salesforce Remote Site Settings (more info) if you’re not using the Named Credential authentication type.