Organizing with categories

In IBM® Rational® Quality Manager, a category is essentially an attribute of a test asset. Categories can be used as a grouping mechanism to organize a test project into logical hierarchies. If you migrate test assets from other products that typically use a hierarchical organization, the container elements in those hierarchies are represented as categories in Rational Quality Manager.

Overview

You can use categories with the test plans, test cases, and test suites in your project. By assigning attributes, or categories, to your assets, you can more easily manage a high volume of test assets. Assume, for example, that you are working on the test plan for version 8.0 of the Classics CD application. You can assign categories to the test plan to help distinguish the current test plan from all others in your project. For example:

Now, assume that some team members are working on the tests cases for version 8.0 of the Classics CD application. These team members can use test case categories to help distinguish the test cases from others. For example, the team can use categories to group test cases in these ways:

Later on, team members can search for all of the test cases that pertain to logging, purchasing, usability, or performance, or various combinations of those categories.

Categories and category types

Product, Release, Function, and Theme are examples of category types. The actual values of these category types - Classics CD, 8.0, Log in, and usability, are the categories themselves.

For example, test plans have the following default category types:

Each category type can include one or several categories, and each category can be assigned an owner. You can use the category types and categories that come with the product or you can create your own. The following table shows the default test plan category types, along with several user-defined categories and an additional user-defined category type named Location. .

Table 1.
Category Types Category Owner
Product RQM Lucy
RFT Ashish
Release 1.0 Mary
2.0 Todd
8.0 Kiran
8.0.1 Antonio
Location RTP Unassigned
  Shanghai Mei-yu

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