Organizing items with folders

Use folders to organize items in Helix ALM. Folders can help you manage products, releases, iterations, backlogs, tests, and teams more effectively. You can create a hierarchical folder structure to visually represent and manage any part of a project.

To work with folders, choose View > Folders. From the Folders list window, you can manage existing folders and items in them, and create new folders. See Using the Folders list window. In the Folders list window, you can view a list of items in a folder, subfolders in a folder, or a task board, which is a more visual, interactive view of folder contents. See Using task boards.

Most folder types can contain any combination of issues, requirements, requirement documents, test cases, and manual test runs. An item can also be added to multiple folders. Adding items to a folder tags a group of related items, which is useful for reporting and filtering on items of different types. See Adding items to folders.

The only exceptions to combining items in folders are test case and manual test run suite folders, which are exclusively for test case management. Test case suites can only contain test cases and other test case suites. Manual test run suites can only contain manual test runs or other manual test run suites. See Using test suites to manage manual tests.

Folders can be public or private.

  • Public folders can be accessed by other users and are helpful for organizing items for your team. Access to see specific public folders can be limited to specific security groups. Access to work with specific public folders can be limited using permissions and folder locking. See Managing access to folders.
  • Private folders cannot be accessed by other users and are helpful for organizing items related to your work. See Adding folders.

You may also be able to create different folder types to control the appearance of folders and the type of data displayed for a group of folders. See Adding folder types.

See Folder usage examples for examples of using folders to organize items.