Associating test plans with requirement collections, modules, and module views in the Requirements Management application

When the applications of Engineering Lifecycle Management are integrated, you can link test plans to requirement collections, modules, and module views in the Requirements Management application. Later, you can assign each requirement in the collection to a test case and link to the test case from the test plan to ensure that the requirements have complete testing coverage.

About this task

Limitations: If you do not enable configuration management, when you create a link to external artifacts in the Engineering Lifecycle Management application, a link is automatically created back to the source artifact, which is called a back link. However, the synchronization between bidirectional links and the traceability between source and target artifacts might be unavailable depending on certain transactional operations in the source or target application.
Learn more about bi-directional links:

When you can navigate from the target of a link back to the source of the link, this is known as bidirectional linking.

If the configuration management is enabled in the Quality Management project, the links are stored in the source artifact repository and back-links are discovered by the target artifact server making queries on the source artifact servers or LDX.

If configuration management is not enabled, the source and target applications store their links in separate databases, and the source application does not have access to the database in the target application. Certain transactional operations, such as when artifacts are copied or deleted, can occur on the source application server. In these cases, corresponding back links in artifacts in the target application are not automatically added or removed. Also, instances occur where back links are intentionally removed from the target application without removing the corresponding link from the source application. As a result, if bidirectional links are not in a state of synchronization, traceability between the source and target artifacts can appear different based on your starting viewpoint.

To add or remove target artifact links to or from the source artifact, you do not need permission to save the target artifacts.

Procedure

  1. Open or create a test plan, and in sections, click Requirement Collection Links.
  2. If there is more than one requirement provider application, click the Requirements Management tab.
  3. Click the Add new links icon (Add). The Collection Selection page opens.
  4. The requirement projects and views are displayed. Expand the project that contains the requirement collections or modules under folder or view. Artifacts that are available for association with test plans are displayed.
    Note: If you are adding an existing requirement collection or module, make sure to first define the requirement view in the Requirements Management application so they can be validated by a test plan. See Defining requirements.
  5. Select the requirement collection, requirement module, or module view to associate with the test plan. To link to a module view, the module view type must be Shared and the view must not be used in other modules. See Filters and views in modules for more information.
  6. Scroll to the end of the window, and click OK.
  7. Click Save to save the changes that you made to the test plan.

    A link to the requirement collection is displayed in the Summary column.

  8. Point the cursor over one of the links.

    Information about the requirement collection is displayed in rich hover text.

  9. Click Show More to see additional information about the requirement collection.
  10. Close the rich hover text.
  11. Click the link itself to open the requirement collection in the Requirement Management application.
  12. After the requirement collection opens, you can review the requirements in the collection and return to the test plan by clicking the link in the Links tab.

What to do next

You can also create links directly from the Requirements Management application artifacts to test plans. As you link collections, modules, and module views to test plans, the link types define the traceability relationships. After creating links, you can display a summary of the linked artifact or navigate to the artifact. You can also add a widget to your dashboard to monitor the status of linked artifacts.

You can reconcile the test plan with the requirements in the associated requirement collections to add test coverage for the requirements. During a reconcile operation, requirements without test coverage in the test plan are identified and you can choose to associate the requirements with existing test cases or to generate test cases for the requirements.