Associating automated test results with test cases

Associating automated test results with test cases is essential for viewing traceability between requirements, test cases, test results, and any related issues in Helix ALM.

You can automatically or manually associate automated test results with test cases. When possible, we recommend using automatic association, although it requires creating test cases and updating your automated test scripts before running tests and submitting results to Helix ALM.

Automatic association

Automated test results can be automatically associated with test cases when a build is submitted to Helix ALM based on:

• An automated test script ID, which is generated for a specific automation suite and test case.
• A previous manual association between a test result and a test case.

Using automated test script IDs

For automatic association of automated test results and test cases, you use a script ID. This ID helps Helix ALM identify the test case that the result is associated with and automatically establish the association.

For example:

1. An automation suite named Alpha Tests has an ALPHA- script ID prefix.

2. Test case 123 is added to the suite. Helix ALM creates a script ID for the test case using the prefix and test case number: ALPHA-123.

3. You add ALPHA-123 to the related automated test.

4. When the results are submitted to Helix ALM, ALPHA-123 is used to find and automatically associate the results with test case 123 if it is in the automation suite.

See Automatically associating automated test results with test cases for more information.

Note:  If you use the Helix ALM Test Management Jenkins plugin to submit build and test results to Helix ALM, the script ID must be included the test script and written out to the <tags> attribute in the XML results report file for the automatic association to work. If you use the Helix ALM REST API to submit builds and test results, the script ID must be included as a tag or test name property in the code that submits results to Helix ALM.

Manual association

You can see unassociated automated test results on the Automated Test Result Status subtab on the Summary tab when viewing an automation suite. You can easily associate an unassociated test result with a test case.

When you manually associate test results with test cases, you can add the test case to the parent automation suite that contains the build the test result is in. If you use the Jenkins plugin to submit builds and test results to Helix ALM automatically builds a unique name for the automated test from data in the XML report results file. Any time the script runs after the manual association, the test results will be automatically associated with the same test case. No changes to the automated test script are required. Any changes to the script could break the association.

See Manually associating automated test results with test cases.