XStudio User guide

Tools

The Tools menu includes a few tools to:
  • Import data from third-parties
  • Verify that your system is working as expected
  • Optimize it
  • Fix some potential issues
  • Track very specific information in the history of the action executed on the system

Import from Excel

You can import some data from Excel to XStudio if you're respecting a particular format.
There is a dedicated chapter in the tutorial section explaining how to import data from Excel.
Please refer to it for more details.

Import from CSV

You can import some data from CSV to XStudio if you're respecting a particular format.
There is a dedicated chapter in the tutorial section explaining how to import data from CSV.
Please refer to it for more details.

Import from XML

You can import some data from XML to XStudio if you're respecting a particular format.
There is a dedicated chapter in the tutorial section explaining how to import data from XML.
Please refer to it for more details.

Check database integrity

XStudio is using a database to store all its data.
When you update your version of XStudio, an automatic schema update may occur.

If at one point you want to verify the integrity of your database schema you can use this tool.

WARNING: even if your install is correct the system can report some errors!

This can happens for example if your database server adds automatically some table(s) for monitoring or if you added yourself manually some tables.
This can also happens if you tampered the structure of one or several tables (i.e. changing the data type of a field).

Note that changing the structure of any table in XStudio is strictly forbidden.

Check coverage integrity

You can run this tool to verify and correct any problem in the coverage metrics in the whole system.

Check statistics entries

You can run this tool to check all the statistics entries and correct any potential problem.
Statistics and history are used for instance to store the data used for progression metrics reporting.

Check formatted strings (XHTML compliance)

You can use rich-text in many fields in XStudio (in particular all the description fields). The format is based on proprietary tags - to ensure having an easily parse-able plain texts with the pros of rich-text: ability to includes styles, colored sections, images, clickable links etc.

However, since this is at the end pure plain-text, a user could corrupt by mistake the structure of the document.
This is not really a problem in terms of rendering as XStudio includes a pretty robust mechanism to protect against this.

But, when you generate some paper reports you can choose to generate the report in DOCX format. In this case, XStudio first generates an XHTML document, then convert it to DOCX. This conversion is very strict about the input format as it MUST be 100% XHTML compliant.

Hence, you can run this tool to check that ALL the rich texts in XStudio are appropriately formatted and XHTML compliant.

Check Timeshifting data

Timeshiting requires a lot of data to be stored and linked to objects, versioned objects or versioned links.
You can run this tool to check that ALL the Timeshifting data in XStudio are valid and pointing to existing objects.

Search and delete orphan images

One beautiful thing in XStudio is that you can insert attachments (images, screenshots, binary files etc.) on different objects without having to duplicate the content of the file.

Hence, the content can just be referenced using tags and ids on multiple objects.

The cons of this method is that when you delete all the objects referencing the same attachment (which should be a pretty rare case), the attachment itself is not automatically deleted.

Hopefully, you can run this tool to search and delete all the orphan attachments/images:
Orphan Image Orphan Image

Run checks when enabling specifications tree server side

The specifications management module is optional in XStudio.
If you use it or not is a really impacting decision as it changes the whole way to link SUTs with the tests.

if you change your mind on the way after you inserted a lot of data and while already you have a traceability matrix up and running, some tasks must be executed to fix the linkages in the traceability matrix.

If you decide to enable the specification management module, all the links in between requirements and tests must be erased. This is what running this tool will do.

Run checks when disabling specifications tree server side

The specifications management module is optional in XStudio.
If you use it or not is a really impacting decision as it changes the whole way to link SUTs with the tests.

if you change your mind on the way after you inserted a lot of data and while already you have a traceability matrix up and running, some tasks must be executed to fix the linkages in the traceability matrix.

If you decide to disable the specification management module, all the links in between requirements and specifications must be erased. The links in between the specifications and the tests must be erased as well. This is what running this tool will do. In addition, it will create automatically the links in between the requirements and the tests based on the former links.

Cleanup

If you want to delete some old data/history to save some space, this tool will do it automatically for you.
You'll need to provide which type of data you want to delete and what the limit date is.

Audit log

The Audit log is a tool that you can use to track ANY operation that occurred in the system. It includes details such as who did what and when.