A test cycle brings testers together to test a build of your product with all the testing instructions for a specific amount of time that you would like the testing to be active.
As you test your Products in the Applause platform, test cycles will be created, activated, executed, locked and ultimately closed. So, it is important to learn about the test cycle life cycle.
There are two test cycle types in the Applause platform:
- Community test cycle - Executed by the Applause community testers
- Internal test cycle - Executed by the internal QA team of a customer. Not available for Applause community testers
Community Test Cycle vs Internal Test Cycle
The distinctive features of a Community test cycle are:
- Executed by the community of testers on uTest
- The Applause team helps run the cycle and triage the results
- Test cases can be grouped together for efficient execution and streamlining the testing and improving coverage
- Can also be run for exploratory-only testing without test cases
Internal test cycles have the following characteristics:
- Executed by the internal QA team of the customer
- No triage of bug reports, i.e. no need to approve or reject bug reports
- Since it’s the main part of the Applause Test Case Management system, it must have test cases. If any bugs are found during the test case execution, testers can report them
- Test cases need to be assigned to a Test Run for execution
- Test Runs are a specific stream of execution under specific environments
Test Cycles List
In addition to listing all the test cycles you have access to, the test cycles list includes the following features:
- The list shows both Community and Internal test cycles.
- Test cycles that are not activated beyond the start date or test cycles that are not closed after the end date are marked with dates in red.
- Progress in test cycles show how many test cases have been Completed, In Progress or Not Started.
- Results show how many test cases are Passed, Failed, Blocked or Done.
- Number of issues reported in each test cycle is shown under the Issues column.
- A bulk action is available to select test cycles and export test cycle details in CSV.