Organizations and projects

Testmode has two levels. An organization is your team. It holds members, their roles and the credit balance. A project covers one application. It holds everything you need to test that application, from environments and credentials to test cases, test plans and runs.

• Organization
  Members, their roles and the credit balance
  • Project
    Everything you need to test one application
    • Environments
      The sites your tests run against, such as production and staging
    • Credentials
      Logins that tests and explorations use automatically
    • Variables
      Reusable values for steps
    • Test cases
      Tests written in plain English
    • Test plans
      Groups of test cases, with their schedules
    • Explorations
      Agent visits to one environment that propose changes to the project
    • Runs
      Each run uses one environment and holds test executions
      • Test executions
        One test case run once, with its own result

Everything under a project is on the same level. A test case isn’t stored inside an environment, and a credential isn’t stored inside a test case. They come together when you use them, for example when you run a test plan against an environment.

In the demo workspace, the organization Pellbrook Digital has a project called Toolshop Storefront. That project has the environments Production and Staging (known bugs), the credential “Jane Doe – demo customer”, variables such as {{Search Term}}, and test plans such as “Storefront smoke”.

An organization is the workspace for a team or company. It holds:

• its members, and the role each one has
• its credit balance, which runs in all of its projects use
• its projects

One person can belong to several organizations, with a different role in each. You switch between them from the organization menu at the bottom of the sidebar.

A project holds one application’s environments, credentials, variables, test cases, test plans, schedules, explorations and runs. Its General settings also hold the Default test duration (minutes), the time limit for test cases that don’t set their own.

Every member of the organization sees every project. What a member can change depends on their role in the organization, not on the project.

These three describe where and how tests run. You set them up once and reuse them in any test in the project.

Item	What it holds	Toolshop example
Environment	A name and a Base URL. It can be marked as production.	Production, https://practicesoftwaretesting.com
Credential	A username, a password, an optional Login URL and an optional limit on parallel browser sessions	“Jane Doe – demo customer”
Variable	A name and a plain-text value, written as {{Name}}	{{Search Term}} with the value hammer

A test case doesn’t store an environment. You choose the environment each time you run, so the same test works against production and staging.

A credential also keeps a saved login: the cookies and site storage from its last successful sign-in. Tests and explorations that use the credential start from it, so they don’t each sign in again.

A test case is one test written in plain English: steps and an Expected Outcome, plus an optional Start Path, Login Credential and Maximum duration.

A test plan groups test cases so you can run them together. A test case can belong to many plans. Inside a plan, a test case can have a Credential Override, which applies only when that plan runs.

A schedule belongs to a test plan and runs that plan against one environment. A plan can have several schedules, for example one for production and one for staging.

A run is one batch of tests started by you or by a schedule. It uses one environment and holds one test execution for each enabled test case it covers that has steps or an Expected Outcome.

For example, running the “Checkout regression” plan against Production creates one run. That run holds a test execution for each enabled test case in the plan, and each test execution has its own status, screenshots and logs.

An exploration sends an agent through one environment of a project. The agent visits pages and proposes changes to that project, such as new test cases. Nothing changes until someone applies the proposals.

A role is set per organization and covers every project in it. You can be an Owner in one organization and an Editor in another. There are no project-level roles.