Test Management Terminology: What is a Test Point?

I was just getting started on what I intended to be my next post on this blog when I realized that the topic in that post would be much easier to discuss and understand if I first wrote about Test Points.  A Test Point is an object in our TCM Object Model that isn’t really explained or directly surfaced in the UI anywhere, the reason is that the user doesn’t necessarily need to know they’re working with a “Test Point” when they are. 

A Test Point represents a Test Case to be run against a Test Configuration in a Test Suite.

In MTLM, if you go to the Testing Center –> Plan tab –> Contents, you see the list of Test Case’s in each suite.  One of the columns in the grid is “Configurations” which shows a count of how many Test Configurations that Test Case is tested against in that suite.  When you go to Testing Center –> Test tab –> Run Tests and click on the same suite you will see an entry in the grid there for each Test Case / Test Configuration combination.  These are Test Points.

Knowing this terminology shouldn’t fundamentally change the way you use the Test Management product, but it should help make future posts easier for me :)

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2011
  thnaks for explaining this. it is in fact important for the metric to be defined in the reports interfaces. when you are sharing the reports with others who may not be familiar with MTM lingo. (honestly it's a bit annoying when designers/developers presume what user don't need to know :)

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2014
  Thanks for explaining what is TestPoint. This seems to be the only place on net where Test Point is explained.