Test Configuration Overview

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) provides data awareness capabilities that enable you to determine which datasets to use when running your test. One of these data awareness capabilities is the ability to define test configurations.

Test configurations:

Facilitate Test Reuse

Test configurations essentially unbind the data from the test, making the test generic and facilitating the test's reuse. Using test configurations, you can:

• Share common data sources across different tests.

• Test various use-cases, each time with a different set of data.

  Example:  

  A test configuration can specify a subset of data or a run-time environment that the test should use.

  You may want to check the same test in a Windows environment and again in a UNIX environment. In this case, you can define one test with two test configurations. The parameter values for the Windows configuration would contain Windows-specific values (for example, backslashes in a path name) while the UNIX configuration would contain UNIX-specific values (for example, forward slashes in a path name).

For conceptual information about the ways you can associate data with a test configuration, see Data for Test Configurations.

Improve Requirement Coverage

Test configurations provide finer granularity for requirement coverage. Instead of covering each requirement only at the level of the test, you can link a requirement to a specific test configuration.

This topic also includes: Data for Test Configurations.

For task details, see How to Work with Test Configurations.