Custom Properties on test cases and test runs

Hello,

I have been using SpiraTest for quite some time now and have recently created some custom properties on test cases. I wanted to use them to make it easier to detect the test coverage of my application. Using those properties, I can see clearly which components have been tested thoroughly in one of the iterations that we ran. I was happy to see that those properties also appear on the reporting page which makes it very easy to create pivot tables based on a list of the test cases that we ran.

As I was preparing my reports for my monthly deep dive with management, I wanted to generate a report and this time I ran the Test Run Summary report. I was surprised to see hardly any of my custom properties on the test cases that are in the report. After some investigation I found out that even though you have properly defined and filled out the custom properties on your test cases, this is not reflected in the test run report. As a matter of fact, testers need to enter those custom properties once again when performing the test cases, i.e. when creating a test run.

I am wondering why Spira does not simply take the properties as they are set in the test cases to include them in the test run. By not doing so, testers are forced - in my case - to change their way of testing. If you want to have a clean test run report, you'd have to group similar test cases (i.e. test cases whose custom properties - 4 in our case - are completely identical) so you can have clean test runs. Furthermore, testers need to enter those custom properties once again.

I'd like to understand the rationale behind this way of working in Spira. Wouldn't it be easier to just take the custom properties from the test case and use those in the test run?

Thank you

Gert