Project Clearcase-embedded Offline Test Reporting
Context:
There are several geographically distributed development teams working on different components and layers of a large software system. ClearCase is used as version control system; VOBs are replicated across the different sites on a daily or shorter basis. During development phases of projects, offline test suites are used both as a means to ensure correctness and as a metric for the progress of the implementation.
Problem:
As developement teams are distributed and different test suites and environments are used to perform the tests, it was difficult to get an overview of the current status of a project.
Solution:
As it was not really an option to standardize all test environments in use, we instead standardized the test results. A common reporting format (XML-based with a customizeable DTD) was defined that was easy to produce in all environments.
The responsibility for generating the correct format lies with the local development teams. The format can be checked easily by a standard validating XML parser.
A scripting environment to generate views for arbitrary project configurations is used as framework for nightly test runs at all development sites. The test result reports are then centrally collected and the data stored in a database, where they can be accessed via a simple HTTP server application.
For convenience and integration with existing MS Office infrastructure, all data can also be downloaded as CSV files that can easily be imported by all spreadsheet programs.
