Understanding Execution Time

What do time elapsed, time taken and average execution time mean?

Vishal Vaswani avatar
Written by Vishal Vaswani
Updated over a week ago

One of the key analysis in test planning is knowing how much time is spent on executing test cases.

The managers would be able to analyse:

  • Is there any test case that takes unusually long to get executed, then your test case may require refactoring as far as the steps to be followed are concerned

  • Is there any tester that takes too long to execute a test case than the other testers

  • The execution time may also vary depending on the configuration chosen

Let us know the key terms we would come across :

Time Elapsed

When a test case is being run, a timer shown on run panel indicates the time elapsed since the execution of current test case has started and it helps in logging the time it took to run a test case under a particular configuration by a tester. Tester however has a flexibility to pause and resume this timer.

Time Taken

This is associated with the executed test case to indicate how much time it has taken to run a test case under a particular configuration. It is available on test plan's test cases list page and can also be used to filter the test cases.

Average Execution Time

When a test case has been through more than one execution cycles, during this it may be associated with more than one test plans, this term is used to know how much time it takes in average to execute this test case. This average execution time can form basis of anticipating the time it might take to run a particular test case if it is being added to a test plan, and as discussed if the execution time is higher than the expectation then a refactoring of test cases may become necessary.

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