“Tags” plugin for Confluence

Exploratory Testing is an approach that I use a lot while testing a feature, and part of it is taking good notes while doing it. For years I used to take notes with pen and paper but eventually I evolved to do it directly on the computer (mainly because it's way easier if I am taking lots of screen shots and video).

My preferred tool is OneNote, primarily because it does a good job for staying out of my way and it is very flexible (the sync feature is also nice for collaboration). When I joined Atlassian, everything is written on an internal wiki using Confluence. For the most part, it does a good job for test note taking except that I really missed the “tags” feature of OneNote. I used to rely heavily on it for my own organization of test tasks, so I decided to take some 20% time and write a Confluence plug-in to add this.

Overview
Confluence 4 plug-in that creates a status list created from "tags" added to the content of pages.
- Bitbucket project
- Download (.jar)

 

Features

Tag Content
Use any of the built in emoticons to "tag" a line while typing in Confluence. For fast editing, you can use short cuts:
- (/): check mark
- (x): error
- (?): question mark
- (!): exclamation mark
- (on): light bulb
"Tags" can have any meaning that you want, it is a way of marking content for follow up.

Tag summary
On a parent page, add the "Tag Summary" macro to view a tree that summarizes all the tags available on child pages.


Page hierarchy
The tag summary becomes really useful when there are many hierarchical pages of content and the author needs to keep track of action items across them.

Filter tags
Filter which tags to show on the tree to quickly identify the items that you care about.

Preview
Click on a tag icon on the tree to open a preview window that loads the content of the child page, scrolled to the section where the tag is located.

Clear tags
When an item is resolved you can clear the tag directly from the tree. This will remove the icon from the target page. Right click on a tree node to bring up the context dialog.

 

- Federico