What is a follow up alert? How to create follow up alerts in test director?

Test director is mercury interactive’s test management tool. 

- It helps in creating a quality assurance personnel plan and organizing the whole testing process usually termed as the test director testing process.

- It lets you build a data base consisting of the manual as well as automated test cases, test cycles, run tests, reports of the tracking defects and so on. 

- The test director instructs to create alerts automatically and notify the responsible people whenever some changes are encountered by the project. 

- Alerts are generated for the changes that affect the project in one or more than one ways. 

- For generating automatic alerts, the administrator can activate the trace-ability notification rules based on the associations made among the requirements, defects and test.

What is a Follow Up Alert?

- Test director allows to add own follow up flag to a defect, test instance or a specific test so as  to remind oneself to follow up on an issue. 

- When the date of actual follow up arrives, an e – mail is send to the person’s mail box. 

- Test director notifies the tester by adding a trace that changes the flag to the changed entity or by mailing a notification whenever a change is made to the requirement, defect or test in the project. 

- Creating follow-up alerts is always useful since you are always reminded whenever it is required to follow up on some issues. 

Requirements for Follow up Alert

- Test director 8.0 should be installed on your system. 

- You must have access to all the four modules of the test director namely requirements, test plan, test lab and defects. 

- You must have either a sample project or an actual project on which you carry out the exercise.

- Work with a new copy of the project. 

- You should also have either a sample application or an actual application.  

Now we shall discuss the procedure to add a follow up flag to a defect whose status requires to be checked. 

When the follow up date comes, the flag icon is turned to red color and the test director sends a notification via e – mail. One thing that you should always take care of is that the flags have a specific user name which means only the user whose name is on the flag will be able to see it. 

Steps to create a Follow-up Alert

Follow the steps mentioned below to create a follow up alert:

1. Click on the defects tab so as to turn on the defects module.
2. From the defects grid select the defect for which you want to set up a flag to follow  up.
3. Now for creating a follow up alert click on the ‘flag for follow up’ button and a flag for follow up dialog box will open up. Fill in the following details:

a)   Follow up by: select the date.

b)   Description: type:

Once done with filling up the details click ok. A flag icon will be added to the      defect record by the test director.

4. To display the information bar for your follow up alert, double click with the follow up flag on the defect. A defect details dialog box will pop up and will display a yellow information bar with the follow up alert.
5. To close the dialog box click on cancel button.