Atlas Best Practices
2 min read
These tips help you build a map your team actually opens when someone asks “what do we retest?” — without spending days on it.
For the order to build your map in, see Where to start.
Name Items for a Tester, Not a Folder
Section titled “Name Items for a Tester, Not a Folder”Sync names items after your test folders, which are often named for how your team works rather than what the app is. Sprint 14 regression is a folder; Password reset is a part of the app.
Rename freely — Sync won’t undo your renames. See Re-syncing keeps your edits.
Keep Nesting Shallow
Section titled “Keep Nesting Shallow”- Don’t nest just because you can. Area → Feature → Screen is usually enough. A map five levels deep is a map nobody expands.
- A Behaviour that needs items inside it is really a Feature. Atlas won’t let a Behaviour have children.
- Use Note for context that isn’t part of the app, so it doesn’t sit in the structure as if it were.
Draw Only the Routes That Matter
Section titled “Draw Only the Routes That Matter”Every route is a claim about your app. A wrong claim makes impact analysis give wrong answers.
Worth drawing:
- Dependency routes into shared services — login, payments, notifications, anything several parts of the app use
- Navigation routes along your critical journeys
- Routes to an Integration item, where your app talks to another system
Not worth drawing:
- Every possible click in the app. The map becomes unreadable.
- Routes between an item and what it’s nested in. Nesting already shows that.
Mark Only Real Critical Journeys
Section titled “Mark Only Real Critical Journeys”Set a journey to Critical only if its failure would stop a release. Tests on critical journeys go straight into Must retest, so marking everything critical makes that tier useless. See Journeys.
Common Mistakes
Section titled “Common Mistakes”| Mistake | Why it hurts |
|---|---|
| Building the map by hand before syncing | Sync then adds a second copy of the same parts that you have to merge |
| Applying a whole Canon suggestion without reviewing it | Suggestions vary from run to run; unreviewed items add noise |
| Never linking items to requirements or folders | Coverage and impact analysis have nothing to work with |
| Drawing every navigation route | The map becomes unreadable |
| Drawing dependency routes backwards | Impact analysis points at the wrong tests |
| Deleting items to tidy up | Deleted items never come back through Sync |
| Marking every journey Critical | Must retest fills up and stops meaning anything |
| Using Reset instead of Sync | Reset throws away all your edits, routes and journeys |