Category: TestRail Tutorial

TestRail Introduction – TestRail Test Management Tool

TestRail is a test management software used by Testers, Developers, Team Leads to organize software testing efforts and track the progress. In this post, we will go through the TestRail introduction and key benefits of this tool.

In Waterfall Development Model, entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) phase is distributed into different phases and one of the most important phases of SDLC is Testing.

To effectively manage the testing activity, the entire testing phase is also divided into different phases or cycle which is known as Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC).

The different activities that consist of Software Testing Life Cycle are as follows:

  • Requirement Analysis
  • Test Planning
  • Test Case Development
  • Environment Setup
  • Test Case Execution
  • Test Reporting
  • Test Cycle Closure

Now, the question arises how can we efficiently manage the different activities of STLC?

The answer to this question is using some Test Management tool, one of the test management tools is TestRail which is used to manage STLC activities effectively.

TestRail is a web based test management tool developed by German software company known as Gurock Software.

It is used to manage different phases of testing life cycle starting from Test Project Management to Test Reporting. It is very simple to use and has user-friendly GUI.

Some of the key advantages of TestRail are as follows:

  1. Manage Test Suites, Test Cases and Test Cycle efficiently

    With TestRail it becomes very easy to define test suites, test cases, and test cycles. You can organize the test case as per functionality and organize them into different test suites. These test case can then be pulled together and added to test cycle during the execution phase.

  2. Improves Testing Productivity

    Email notifications and TODO list features of TestRail help each member of team aware of what tasks are assigned to them.

    Team Leaders have visibility of workload of each test team member and can assign new tasks to members who have some bandwidth.

  3. Real-Time Insight to Testing Progress

    TestRail provides real time insights into the testing progress, how many test cases are documented.

    The number of test cases which are part of test cycles and percentage of tests passed/failed along with relevant defects.

  4. Organizing and Tracking Testing Efforts

    TestRail is very easy to integrate with other bug tracking tools and helps to manage important software-specific data and structures such as project milestones.

Installing TestRail – TestRail Cloud vs TestRail Server

Test Rail can be installed in two different ways, you can opt for cloud version or in-house server deployment of TestRail.

  • On the Cloud

Test Rail cloud is the cloud version of the TestRail.

Here we just need to create an account on test rail server using the company information. It has a subscription fee based on the number of active users as described in the figure below:

TestRail Subscription options

Clicking on Sign Up option opens a simple form

Test Installation 2

 

After signing up, a new TestRail account will be created on the TestRail server.

The advantage of cloud version is that it has automatic updates and backup of all the versions and it is secure.

  • TestRail Server

We can also install TestRail on our server rather than the cloud.

For the server setup, you need a web server, a database server(SQL Server or MySQL) and a PHP Environment. The subscription fee for TestRail Server is $240/year.

Watch the video below to setup TestRail trial account

Creating TestRail Projects – Steps to create new projects

The project defines the actual work that we need to perform as a part of testing. In this post, we will learn about creating TestRail projects step by step.

Many times we need to work on multiple projects simultaneously. It will be very difficult to monitor the testing activities if projects are not managed properly.

Using Test Rail, we can easily monitor the testing activities of different projects. A project in test rail has five basic components:

  • Todos: Todo list is used to view the number of tests assigned to a particular tester. This is helpful in understanding the workload of the team members.
  • Milestone: A project milestone defines a version release. We can define several milestones for a defined project to define the release process.
  • Test Suite: A Test suite is a collection of Test Cases which will be used to define the test scenarios for the different functionalities.
  • Test Run: A Test Run defines the execution status of the test cases. It can be Passed, Failed, Blocked, Not Run etc.
  • Reporting: Reporting is used to generate different types of report. Reporting is very useful to track the progress of the testing activity.

Note: For creating a project, the user needs to have Administrator access. User Access is explained in later posts.

Steps for creating a project in TestRail:

  1. Login into TestRail with Administrator
  2. Select Project tab and click on “Add Project” buttonCreating Project in TestRail
  3. Provide a proper name of the project and press Enter

This is a sample snapshot of the Project dashboard. There are two types of projects:

  1. Active Projects: The projects for which testing is going on currently and is not released yet.
  2. Completed Projects: The Projects for which testing is completed and is released to the customer.

In the top left of the project dashboard, all the active projects and their recent status have been projected as a graph view.

It includes the recent changes in the last 14 days

In the bottom left of the project dashboard, all the active projects along with the number of test suites, number of active test runs and number of active milestones are displayed.

In the right side of the dashboard total number of projects is displayed.

display projects in testrail
Display all projects in TestRail

Watch the video tutorials below to understand more about TestRail projects

Project Options in TestRail

 

Adding TestRail Users – TestRail Roles and Users Setup

For adding TestRail users or update existing users, you need to log in as an Administrator.

You can add users to TestRail instance which can be either team member or customer.

To add the new user, select Administration -> Users & Roles from the TestRail.

You can add one user at a time or multiple users at a time.

Similarly, you can edit and deactivate the user as well.

Note: Subscription fee is decided based on the number of active users. So, create users as per the requirement only.

When a user is added, by default it is created with “Lead” role. You can change the role as per the user activities.

For example, if the user is a Developer, then the Developer role should be provided. You can change the role by simply selecting the proper value from Role drop-down.

With each role, a set of access rights is automatically provided. So, the user created with a specific Role will automatically inherit the assigned access rights.

Steps for adding a user:

  1. Login into TestRail with Administrator
  2. Click on Administration -> Users & Roles
TestRail Dashboard
TestRail Dashboard
  1. Click on Add User
  2. Provide Full Name and User email address
Adding TestRail Users
Adding TestRail Users
  1. Check the Enable email notification option

After all these steps, the user will receive an email containing a link to activate the account.

Clicking on the link user will be prompted for the password. The user just needs to set the password for his/her account and his TestRail account is ready.

Watch video tutorial about Users and Roles in TestRail

TestRail Dashboard – Dashboard Introduction and Customization

TestRail dashboard is the home page of TestRail. After login into TestRail with a specific account, the first page that is displayed is the Dashboard page.

The dashboard is a summary of available projects and the recent activities. By clicking on a project title, you will be redirected to project details page which includes test suites, active test runs, project activity and so on.

You can switch to another project by clicking the link “Return to Dashboard & Projects”.

[image_frame url=”http://rcvacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/TestRail-Dashboard.png” border_style=”boxed-frame-hover” action=”open-lightbox”]

The project detail view consists of following tabs as depicted in the picture:

Overview:

This tab describes the summary of the project in TestRail

Todo:

ToDo tab displays the list of ToDo’s assigned(if any) to the logged in TestRail user. If no assigned tasks for the user is there, then it will be blank.

Milestones:

Milestones tab displays the no of milestones created for this project. Best practice is to create different milestones for each release.

Test Runs and Results:

This tab describes the no of Active Test Runs and Results for this project and the test case status for this Test Run.

Test Suites & Cases:

This tab describes all the Test Cases that have been designed for this project