Summary Requirements Coverage In Mercury Quality Center
Submitted by John McConda on Mon, 23/10/2006 - 18:18.
functional test tools
This post is aimed at a specific group of us that need to show full test to requirements coverage in Mercury Quality Center or Test Director.
I've always been annoyed that Test Director and now Quality Center will not let you designate a requirement that is just a category for holding real requirements as something that did not need to be covered by a test. This always led to questions by management and processs auditors as to why we didn't have 100% coverage when they looked at our coverage graphs, even though we had all the real requirements covered. If you have a complicated tree, those requirement holders can eventually add up to a high percentage showing as "Not Covered", and it can be difficult to prove quickly that all uncovered requirements are just categories.
To solve this problem, I've written a manual test that has one step verifying that everything under the category requirement is covered in full by its linked tests. You can make it generic for all category requirements or make specialized tests for each category that describe the specific requirements for which you'll be checking coverage. These summary check tests are linked to all the category requirements and run during test execution in the Test Lab so the category requirements are now shown as covered and passed/failed along with the actual requirements.
I hope this technique will add real value for others in similar projects in ensuring no requirements are missed. Management and process auditors will be pleased to see full coverage, but these summary tests also put another check in place to make sure the coverage specified is truly accurate.
I've always been annoyed that Test Director and now Quality Center will not let you designate a requirement that is just a category for holding real requirements as something that did not need to be covered by a test. This always led to questions by management and processs auditors as to why we didn't have 100% coverage when they looked at our coverage graphs, even though we had all the real requirements covered. If you have a complicated tree, those requirement holders can eventually add up to a high percentage showing as "Not Covered", and it can be difficult to prove quickly that all uncovered requirements are just categories.
To solve this problem, I've written a manual test that has one step verifying that everything under the category requirement is covered in full by its linked tests. You can make it generic for all category requirements or make specialized tests for each category that describe the specific requirements for which you'll be checking coverage. These summary check tests are linked to all the category requirements and run during test execution in the Test Lab so the category requirements are now shown as covered and passed/failed along with the actual requirements.
I hope this technique will add real value for others in similar projects in ensuring no requirements are missed. Management and process auditors will be pleased to see full coverage, but these summary tests also put another check in place to make sure the coverage specified is truly accurate.