Best Practices

Version Control

Although Touchstone does detect changes to uploaded test scripts and its dependenct resources, the versioning in Touchstone is rudimentary. You should not rely on Touchstone as the sole repository for your test scripts.

It is highly recommended to manage your test scripts in a proper Version Control system (e.g. Git, Subversion, TFVC, etc.) outside of Touchstone. These tools are specifically engineered to manage versioning, conflicts, branching, concurrent commits, etc.

In the event that your test group gets corrupted in Toucshtone through concurrent uploads by different users, you could re-upload the test group using the right version in your Version Control system.

Location

It is recommended to store the fixtures and rules for your test scripts in a separate folder and call the folder “_references”. This will make it easier to tell apart these definitions from test scripts when browsing.

Paths to resources

For resources that your test scripts are depending on and that are specific to the test scripts in the test group you’re uploading, it is highly recommended to use relative paths to reference those resources. Doing so will allow you to change the location of your test groups much more easily.

If you used absolute paths, then you’d have to go through all your test scripts and change the paths of the referenced fixtures. That can be time-consuming and error prone.

In the test script snippet below where a fixture is defined, we’re using a relative path:

If you’re defining resources that are going to be used across many test groups (especially test groups shared among different Org Group members), it would be better to define the resources in a separate test group and use absolute paths to refer to those resources.

In the test script snippet below where a rule is defined, we’re using an abolute path. The rule is used across many test groups in Touchstone.