Working on implementing TestLink at work for better testing process flow. Very few complaints about the product as a whole – it can feel ponderous at times, but testing is a big problem, and TestLink is the best tool I’ve found for addressing them all.

The only real negative feedback I’ve received so far is regarding the display of steps from individual test cases. By default, the entire table is the same color, and it’s very difficult to visually track which row is which. It seems like such an obvious problem that I assumed I had missed a knob to tweak, but I can’t find anything about it in the docs, the forums, or the bug tracker.

I poked around a bit tonight and the solution turned out to be ridiculously (but pleasingly) simple.

Update 2012-05-08: There is a usable-with-the-patch-command patch available that incorporates all of these changes and more. See the README at the base of the github repo for more details on what’s in that patch.

First, add the following to gui/themes/default/css/custom.css:

.row_color_1 {
    background-color:   #DDDDDD;
}
.row_color_2 {
    background-color:   #CCCCCC;
}

Then, patch the following two files in gui/templates/testcases/ like so (original files were from 1.9.3):

--- inc_steps.tpl.dist  2011-08-22 21:08:21.000000000 -0500
+++ inc_steps.tpl       2011-08-22 21:13:02.000000000 -0500
@@ -45,7 +45,7 @@
        </tr>
        {* BUGID 3376 *}
        {foreach from=$steps item=step_info}
-       <tr id="step_row_{$step_info.step_number}">
+       <tr id="step_row_{$step_info.step_number}" class="{cycle values="row_color_1,row_color_2"}">
                <td style="text-align:left;">
                        <span class="order_info" style='display:none'>
                        <input type="text" name="step_set[{$step_info.id}]" id="step_set_{$step_info.id}"

--- tcStepEdit.tpl.dist 2011-09-22 10:27:23.000000000 -0500
+++ tcStepEdit.tpl      2011-09-22 10:39:55.000000000 -0500
@@ -197,7 +197,7 @@
   {* this means we have steps to display *}
   {if $gui->tcaseSteps != ''}
        {foreach from=$gui->tcaseSteps item=step_info}
-         <tr id="step_row_{$step_info.step_number}">
+         <tr id="step_row_{$step_info.step_number}" class="{cycle values="row_color_1,row_color_2"}">
       {if $step_info.step_number == $gui->step_number}
                    <td style="text-align:left;">{$gui->step_number}</td>
                  <td>{$steps}</td>

Blow away the cached .css files, and voila! Alternating background colors for test steps in TestLink.

Before:

After:

I tried to post this as a hint in the TestLink forum but I honestly couldn’t figure out how to register a forum account. I did post a comment on a related bug in their issue tracker, ticket 3583

EDIT 2011-09-22: The original version of this post only included a change to inc_steps.tpl. Added the patch to tcStepsEdit.tpl to apply alternation to the rows in the test case step edit view also.

EDIT 2011-09-26: Updated to include the correct full path to custom.css