XStudio 1.8: Enriched report's graphics

One of the improvement in the next version of XStudio (1.8) will be enriched testplans. When you generate a "paper" testplan, all the graphics you get in XStudio's GUI will be included.

For instance, if you generate a testplan from the root node of the test tree in XStudio you will get something similar to this in the graphics section of the document:

This includes data about the history of the results obtained from those tests, dependencies between tests and functional coverage.

If you generate a testplan from a test category:

This includes data about the history of the results obtained from those tests, the history of how much were automated and functional coverage.

If you generate a testplan from any folder containing tests:

This includes data about the history of the results obtained from those tests and functional coverage.

XStudio 1.8: Grid Editor

The Procedure Tree is extremely powerful because of its recursive aspect when it's about verifications (you can specify complex boolean expressions including several verifications). When verifying algorithms or APIs it is definitely the best way to optimize execution time as useless verifications will be skipped.

However, we noticed many people were just using the test case description field to script their scenario. This is much simpler and flexible because of the formatting tool but the drawback is it misses the detailed structure of a step/verification model.

We added in XStudio 1.8 a new editor allowing to write test case scenarii in a simple 2 dimensions grid (Excel-like). We called it the Procedure Grid.

Hence, you'll have 3 options:

• use only the test case formatted description field (for simplest scenario)
• the description field + the procedure tree (for the most complex verifications/decision tables)
• the description field + the procedure grid (for the usual cases requiring a detailed but flexible script)

Here is the current version of the Grid Editor:

 

A toolbar will allow to easily:

• move a step (with its expected results) up of down
• delete a step
• insert a new step before or after the selected row

As you can see, we also added the possibility to format the content of a step or an expected result (with the usual bold, italic, underline, list, tables etc. styling). For now the tags needs to be written manually though (the toolbar will come in a future version).

It's also easy enough to move through the cells using Ctrl-Tab (to go forward) or Ctrl-Maj-Tab (to go backward) (the Tab key can be useful in the text content itself hence the usage of the Ctrl modifier key).

It will be possible to choose the Tree or the Grid editor per test case and just clicking the other radio button will convert "at best" the current scenario - i.e. when switching from Tree to Grid, all the Checks in the boolean expression will be automatically converted in one simple Expected Results cell.

A new option has been added to the Settings to specify the default editor.

The "Use description as testplan" check box has been removed as it became useless (whatever launcher you're using, the description + the procedure are shown to the user).

The manual launchers have also been modified to take advantage of this new presentation. For a test case that has been described using the Grid Editor, at runtime it will look like:


 
The tree editor has also been improved to accept formatting tags. CR/LF are also now accepted in the steps, parameters and checks (but will not be rendered as a tree node must fit one single line):

 

The rendering of the tree test cases has also been modified to be consistent with the grid test cases:

 
 
Of course the usage of Params (to feed the test case with data from a dataset) is still possible (and advised) in any part of a test case description (description field, step, parameter, check, expected result).

Hope you'll like it!