Maintaining your manual test cases in SAP Cloud ALM via Excel upload and download

In this blog I will highlight a new functionality from the testing capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM.

Along with the automated testing capabilities described in this blog: Integrating SAP Cloud ALM and the test automation tool for SAP S/4 HANA Cloud | SAP Blogs, we also offer manual testing in SAP Cloud ALM. We just enriched the testing capabilities by enabling the maintenance of the manual test cases via Microsoft Excel download and upload capabilities.

You can download an existing test case from SAP Cloud ALM into an Excel format, maintain it in Excel and then upload your changes.

For any manual test case (regardless if it is created based on a Solution Process Flow Diagram or not), you can now download the test case using the button here below:

Test Case Download

Once downloaded the test case can be opened with Microsoft Excel. It will look like this:

Downloaded Test Case

Here are a few tips on what can be done (and what cannot be done):

• Basic Rules:
  • The column header for all the mandatory fields have a ‘*’ character at the end:
    • Test Case Name
    • Activity Title
    • Action Title
    • Action Instructions
    • …
  • All the columns with a column header between ‘[…]’ should not be changed. Changes done in these columns will be ignored. For instance, the scope name or the scope GUID cannot be changed via the upload mechanism.
• What you can do:
  • If you want to add a new activity, just insert the lines. It can be at any place: at the beginning, between other activities or at the end.
  • In the same way you can add actions with:
    • Action title
    • Instructions
    • Expected results
  • At the moment, you always upload the definition of a test case in Excel into an existing test case. The test case creation is not supported via this mechanism
• What you cannot do:
  • Inserting a new activity in the middle of an existing one will not work:
    • Existing Activity 1 …
    • Existing Activity 1 …
    • New Activity 2 ….
    • Existing Activity 1…
  • As a general rule of thumb don’t mess around with GUIDs. If there is a GUID, it means that the entity existed when the test case has been downloaded, if you want to add a new activity or a new action, just don’t provide any GUID and the entities will be created.
  • The same rules apply when uploading a test case as when editing one in the UI directly:
    • The action instructions cannot be empty for instance.
  • You cannot change neither the scope assignment nor the solution process assignment of the test case via the upload.
  • Manage images: You can download a test case which contains an image, but upon upload the image content will be lost. We will improve this in the future by introducing a new image management service, but this is currently an important limitation.

I hope that this functionality will ease the way you maintain the test cases in SAP Cloud ALM. This would also be an easy way to upload an existing test case to a different scope, until copy functions of test cases are made available.

Please feel free to post comments on this blog, I will be happy to get feedback and also ideas and suggestions for improvements.

More information can also be found in this blog: https://blogs.sap.com/2022/02/08/excel-upload-of-test-case-into-sap-cloud-alm/