VersionOne Tutorial: All-in-one Agile Project Management Tool Guide

Why and How to do Software Testing with Version One: All-in-one Agile Management Tool

At the current epic of technological exponential development across various domains, the demand for software testing is in its highest state. To proactively respond to the process of iterative delivery of world-class software applications needs, different companies have been introducing a variety of test management tools to the market.

This hands-on will give you an overview of why and how to use Version One, one of the many software project management tools available in the industry. 

Version One Tutorial

What we will cover in this tutorial

We will look at Version One Team Edition V.17.0.1.164 major features with an emphasis on software testing by covering the aspects below:

• Introduction to VersionOne – all-in-one Agile Management Tool
• Installation and setup
• Adding stories and tests to the backlog
• Plan Sprint/iteration
• Log defects as tests get executed
• Tracking Sprint for artifacts status, and
• Wrap up

Version One Introduction

Version One is an all-in-one agile management tool that can quickly adapt to any agile software development methodology.

Indeed, it is an instrument that offers a sound planning and tracking platform to support agile development as a bottom-up approach. VersionOne has embedded Quality Assurance as an essential part of the whole software development process.

Benefits

• VersionOne facilitates an end-to-end agile platform to plan and track all of your stories, defects, tasks and tests.
• It gives you easy access and visibility to work with several teams and many projects at the same time.
• It has unified software development, delivery, and workflow settings in a single package for its users.
• Also, it supports the integration with many different programs such as Bugzilla, Cruise Control, Eclipse, HP QuickTestPro, JIRA, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

Also read: Using JIRA for Agile project management

All Editions

You can use any of the four Version One Editions that suit your software project management, testing style and needs.

The significant and specific features of each of the four editions are consolidated below figure.

• Team: A maximum of 10 members can work on one project.
• Catalyst: A team of up to 20 users can work on several projects.
• Enterprise: Many users and teams can work on different on-going projects.
• Ultimate: We have full access to what an enterprise level organization might need.

Version One All Four Editions:

(Note: Click on any image for an enlarged view)

As far as acceptance and regression tests are concerned, the Ultimate Edition of Version One is designed to integrate them. Version One tracks the acceptance tests based on their status, time and result. You can use regression tests as templates for acceptance tests.

Version One Installation/Setup

You have a cloud set up of all four editions for the trial. To sign up, click on the Team edition from here

When you submit your sign up information, you will be given the URL to sign into Version One Team Edition. You can follow the same process to gain access to the other three editions – Catalyst, Enterprise, and the Ultimate.

Login

After installation/setup, you will need to enter your ID and Password.

Login page

Getting Stated

The first tab you see in Version One is Getting Started. It gives you an overview of the major features of product planning, release planning, sprint planning, and sprint tracking.

Specifically, it highlights what you would do as you go through the execution of the test. You add stories, create and plan releases, sprint planning, and track your daily progress.

The administration setting is on the right side of the application for easy reach of the users (the administrators and the team members). There are also many standard Agile reporting metrics such as Release Burndown, Sprint Burndown, Velocity Trend and Test Trend.

Getting Started Screen

Admin

As you are at the beginning of your project/test setup, you can add additional members/users as you need to the member’s list by clicking on the Add Member tab. A new member gets added, who you can assign to any specific task later as you work with sprints on the stories and defects.

Add Members

Project Settings

Once you insert the members, click on the project to create a new one. You can provide a Title for the project, specify the Level of the project by adding Description, Begin Date, End Date, Owner, Total Estimate Points and any other information you may need at this stage.

New Project Creation Page:

Member Name

You will see your name as a member on the right side of the application. When you click on your name, you will see the below functions

• Member Details: It has all the details about your stories, cases and the projects on which application you are currently working on it.
• Password: You can change your access password to VersionOne
• Applications: This function offers you the facility to add any application that you want to have access to via Version One. Once you add the application, the system will give you the Access Token for it
• Logout: Normally, this is for you to log out from the application

When you complete the preparation and setup, you are ready to go into the core testing activities by clicking on the product planning page.

Core Project Management Activities

#1) Product Planning

This is your first practical step towards organizing your backlogs and ranking the stories you need for executing tests.

You can build your backlog by managing stories, test sets, and defects as you keep updating your work items. Product planning gives you helpful resources such as estimation, associating your work to an Epic, ranking backlog when there are numerous such stories, defects, and tests.

You can add as many stories and defects as you need or access them from any project or sprint. Filtering allows you to drag and drop any item from the backlog for prioritization purposes.  Stories can be imported from excel sheets or created directly from the Add Story Inline menu situated on the right side of the Product Planning page.

The picture below shows the main page of the backlog where you can organize the stories by title, ID, Priority, Estimation point and project.

Product Planning Screen – Backlog

Backlog Importing Page:

Download the Excel Template by clicking Import from the Product Planning tab. You can fill it out with your test scenarios, test cases, test data, and other relevant columns based on the needs of each module of the Application under Test (AUT).

You can go through the same steps for Defects and Issues. If there are any issues while uploading your excel sheet, VersionOne tells you what particular column or row has to be corrected to complete the upload process.

When you click on Add Story Inline, you will see a drop down menu that has the functions to add stories and defects.

After you click on Add a defect, the below window will pop up to log the defect where you can add the title, sprint, description, estimate points, owner, status, priority, and type.

Add New Defect Page

For reporting purposes of the backlog items, there are various types of reporting templates you can generate, as needed.

A few of the main types of metrics are as follows:

• Road Map
• Portfolio level
• Story Velocity
• Work Items

#2) Release Planning

With this feature of Version One, you can move any backlog story to any of the releases. Release planning offers two approaches namely, Tactical and Strategic. In the tactical release plan, you schedule each item, defect, and test individually at backlog level. While in a strategic approach, you anticipate a backlog at the portfolio level.

This feature also offers the possibility of regression planning that lets you describe and map out coordinated sets of testing activities to make sure your existing functionality continues to work.

It is always recommended to have your schedules short in duration by using as many sprints as you can. One of the primary rationales behind the release plan is to be able to track the teams and release deadlines via effective communication.

There are two methods you can move backlog items

• Check the check box for multiple stories at a time from Move to project
• Drag and drop them where you want

Simultaneously, you can add new releases to the project as you work on the current ones. Project Burndown shows the overall status of the release in terms of time.

Release Planning Page

For Sprint release, you can view the test report metrics to measure your progress towards the completion of the sprint.

They are mentioned below:

• Portfolio Item Dependencies Report
• Release Forecasting Report
• Standup Dashboard Report

#3) Sprint/Iteration Planning

Here is where you can choose what items from the backlog are to be worked on for a particular sprint based on your priorities. Then, you break them into specific tests and estimate the efforts to get them completed.

An effective estimate is to look into the team’s past performance levels and progress and get an idea of the current work to be done. The primary functions at this stage are mentioned below

• Activating and Deactivating Sprint
• Closing Sprint
• Creating/Adding a Sprint
• Deleting Sprint
• Managing Sprint Relationships

After you schedule your work using Sprint/Iteration scheduling and planning capacity, the team members get tasks assigned to them. The team can decide which items in the backlog should be worked on first and schedule execution.

You can drag/drop each item you want, or you can do that by going through multiple selections of the item, and you move them together into a sprint or a project. You will see the details of the prioritized items under the product backlog schedule as shown in the below screen.

Sprint Scheduling

There are various types of reporting metrics for sprint tracking that are helpful for Scrum Masters, Team Leads, Team members, and stakeholders. The major types consist of the following

• Cumulative Flow with Status Report
• Member Load Trend Report
• Pipeline Run Content Report
• Quick list Reports
• Sprint/Iteration Dashboard Report
• Standup Dashboard Report
• Test Runs Report
• Velocity Trend Report
• Work item Cycle Time Report.

By clicking on the sprint tracking tab, we step into the execution of the tests.

#4) Sprint/Iteration Tracking

Once you create the tests, it is now time to execute your tests. You will see what you have to test and update stories, tests and the defects on a daily basis. You can go through the dashboards to view the status and progress. Key agile metrics, the status of each story and defect are available for viewing in the standard dashboard.

You can just drag and drop each of the stories and defects as you execute them.  It gives an overall picture of how the team is doing regarding running the tasks and the tests. The following describes what you can do in the Sprint Iteration section.

a) Detail Tracking

You will see all your open work in this selected sprint including the updated time and status.

b) Member Tracking

This page shows the list of all team members assigned to their specific sprint. It is a list that indicates the relationship between the testers and the assigned tasks.

Sprint Summary for Member Tracking:

c) Storyboard

This page displays a visual view of all stories included in a sprint. It provides you with a clear picture of the stories which have them in the columns of None, Future, In-progress, Done and Accepted.

Storyboard Page

d) Taskboard

It shows the visual status of the tasks grouped by defects and/or by tasks. You can display the view below during the team’s daily meeting to give a clear picture of the overall progress of the work.

e) Test board

This page displays acceptance tests grouped by backlog item for e.g. defect or test status. It shows the individual test status during the testing cycle.

The reporting metrics for sprint tracking include the following:

• Member Load Trends
• Work item Cycle Time
• Velocity Trends
• Sprint/Iteration Burndown
• Standup Dashboard
• Test Trends
• Test Runs
• Cumulative Flow
• Effort Quick list

Velocity Trends

It displays the status of two established sprints for testing. You can produce the reports by showing the Team, Feature Group, Start Sprint, End Sprint, Work-items and Aggregation type. Then you can turn it into a PDF or you can print it.

Wrap up

Version One is a single platform where you can plan and track all your testing work items with greater visibility across different teams, projects, portfolios, and stakeholders. It offers DevOps enabled Application Lifecycle Management Solutions.

The figure below illustrates the overall workflow and the main features of VersionOne.

Version One Workflow at Glimpse:

Conclusion

We do have many Agile Project Management Tools available in the market. VerisonOne is one of the best among them.

By going through this article we will get a clear idea of the Version One tool.

About the Authors: This is a guest post by Haroon and Noorullah, both having extensive experience working on Agile projects.

Please leave a comment if you experience any problems during this process.