Why you should use folders to organize your tests

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Every testing process is different, and every team faces their own challenges. There is, however, one thing that all testers benefit from, and that is a well-organized working space. And what is a better way to achieve this than by using humanity’s simplest and most flexible digital management invention? 

You guessed it, we’re talking about folders!

 They can be used in multiple different ways and serve multiple different purposes, while at the same time being incredibly easy to manage and navigate. No wonder many test management apps have folders included on their list of features. One of them is QAlity Plus - Test Management for Jira, and today we’ll demonstrate a few effective ways in which you can apply QAlity Plus folders to your use case. 

Prepare recurring tests folders

One of the most popular use cases of the folder feature is organizing test cases for regression testing. Its recurring nature makes it really easy to get all tangled up in creating countless, essentially identical test cases, a new set for each regression. In effect, your testers can waste a lot of time trying to navigate through this chaos, and the process of preparing for each and every regression testing takes way longer than it should. 

Using folders is a simple yet effective fix for all of the above problems. It allows you to create one folder, gather all your regression test cases inside, and bulk add them to a regression test cycle to get ready for execution. 

And when the time for the next regression comes, you just repeat the process - open your regression folder and bulk add test cases to a new regression test cycle. There is no need to clone test cases or test cycles. Your folder serves as a template, well-organized, easily accessible, and always ready to be reused.

Divide your tests by the app’s features

If you’re working on a whole application there are probably multiple features that you need to test regularly. Organizing all of these tests in a clear and transparent manner might be a challenge. You can’t be further from effectiveness than by digging though dozens of test cases in search for the ones you currently need.

So, what do you do? Put them in folders, of course! Depending on your situation, there are several different ways you can go about this, one of them being:

1. Create a folder for your application.

2. Inside the folder create subfolders dedicated to specific features.

3. Organize test cases in your folders.

And, that’s it! Now, you can easily access test cases related to a specific feature. If you need an even more granular structure, all you have to do is create more nested subfolders. There is no limit to their number.

Gather test cases from your whole application in one place

But what if your application is being developed in multiple different projects? How can you ever get a full picture of its testing if you have to jump between a number of spaces, and examine your app in such a fragmented way? 

Well, you could just stop overcomplicating it for yourself, and use folders instead! As you might have already noticed, the main section of the Test Case Repository is called All Test Cases, and for a good reason. It actually displays all test cases from your instance, no matter which project they belong to. Thanks to that feature you can not only browse through test cases from multiple different projects, all gathered in one place, but also organize them into folders according to your needs.

It works exactly the same as any other test cases organization process - you create folders and add test cases to them. It doesn’t matter if the test cases you want to add to a folder belong to one project or multiple projects. The only thing you must keep in mind is permission management.

When creating a folder, you will be asked to type its name and choose the main project. The main project that you choose is exactly what the new folder’s permissions will be based on. 

What does it mean in practice? Let’s say you created a folder, and added to it test cases from two different projects with different permissions: Project A and Project B. Then you chose Project A to be the main project. What is the result?

If you have permission to view both projects, the whole folder will be visible to you. But if someone with permission to view Project A, but without permission to view Project B will open the folder, the following message will be displayed.

On the other hand, if someone has permission to view Project B, but doesn’t have permission to view Project A, the folder you’ve just created won’t be visible to them, since Project A is the main project.

Therefore, if you organize test cases from multiple different projects into one folder, always make sure that people who will need the access to this folder have the right permissions.

With the help of folders, managing testing of your whole application, even if it spans across multiple different projects, is much easier, and allows you to monitor all testing from the bird’s eye view, increasing efficiency and coherent approach to the current and future development of your application.

Overview tests from multiple projects at once

But maybe you don’t develop just one application but manage multiple separate projects, and still want to gain a wider view on their testing? Monitoring testing for a few completely different things at the same time can quickly get quite confusing. The problem, however, is easily solvable with folders.

Just create as many folders as you need, and name them with the names of the projects. Then add test cases. To do that easily, you can filter your Test Case Repository by project, select what you need, and bulk add to a folder. 

Notice that there are in total 83 test cases belonging to the filtered project, but only 50 of them were selected.

That’s because by default the app loads the first 50 test cases. Bulk select checks only the currently loaded test cases. If you want to load more of them, just scroll down. Once they are loaded, you can continue your bulk selection.

If you require a more detailed organization of your test cases, you can create a limitless number of subfolders to contain different areas of testing. Remember that permissions of a subfolder always reflect the permissions of the main folder it belongs to.

Summary

Folders are an intuitive tool that is easy to introduce and can serve multiple different purposes. They allow you to plan your regression testing, organize test cases by the components of the application, and gather test cases from multiple projects in one place. These few use cases, however, are just examples. There are plenty more ways in which you can integrate folders into your work to make the most out of this feature.

[Laurie Sciutti]

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