Forum Discussion

Bob_C's avatar
Bob_C
Contributor
9 months ago

Determine Amount of Effort (time) Remaining

I think this relates to a quesion that Butch had in this discussion:  https://community.smartbear.com/discussions/zephyrscale/how-to-view-estimated-time-effort-in-reports/262576

Is there a way to determine how much effort there is remaining for a test cycle/plan?

At the start of a cycle, you can look at estimated time, and know where you are at.

If you are executing the cycle there are reports to see how many cases are at each staus (pass/fail/not-execucted).

However, I would like to see how much time/effort is remaining based on the estimate.  

example:  There is a cycle with 100 test cases.  The total estimate is 100 hours for simple math. However, half the cases take 1.5 hours, and the other half take .5 hours. The engineer responsible for estimating is not always accurate.  The test cycle now has half the cases excecuted, and there are 50 hours used.  Is it going to be complete early, late, or on-time?   That would depend on which test cases had been executed.  It also could be that all the 'quick' ones were done first, but were misestimated and it is going to be REALLY late, or all the long ones were done first and it is going to be done REALLY early.

alternate example:  I have 4 test cycles with varying numbers of test cases in them.  We have decided to SKIP (state that we use) 70% of the test cases in 2 of the cycles, as these tests were decided to be not required to validate the software on this hardware change.  How can I recalculate the estimated time for these cycles?  In this situation, there are 30 test cases that take a total of 6 hours, however one case takes 3 hours to run.   Do we really need to look at 30 individual test cases and add them up manually (or not) to see how long this is going to take?

 

 

 

 

  • MisterB's avatar
    MisterB
    Champion Level 3
    9 months ago

    Hi Bob,

    This is basic stuff I expect from a test management tool, and your post clearly describes what level of data and analysis is needed.  Unfortunately, Zephyr Scale does not have this level of sophistication with effort reporting, but, we can still get some useful data.  For example, this dashboard shows stats in:

    • Row 1 - execution completion
    • Row 2 - execution effort 
    • Row 3 - execution by status

    This was achieved by assigning an Effort value to each test case using a custom field that contained single choices for Low, Med, High - more on how that is setup below.

    Dashboard:

    Dashboard setup: this is a simple example of a dashboard part from the dashboard above using only Test Case criteria.  In reality you may need to include Test Plan &/or Test Cycle filters in your criteria so that your results are more specific to them.

    Custom field creation:

    Test case, custom field use: can be applied at time of creation, import, or by bulk edit

     

  • Bob_C's avatar
    Bob_C
    Contributor
    9 months ago


    Andy,

    Thanks for the response.  I thought I missed something, as I would expect to see this basic info available in the Zephyr reporting tools.    

    What you proposed is an OK workaround for a deficiency in Zephyr reporting capability.