Navigation

One sidebar carries everything outside workspace settings. It is on screen on Home, on Projects and inside every project, and it is the same sidebar throughout — the projects you pinned are still there when you step into one, and the project you are working in never leaves it.

There is no bar across the top. Everything you navigate with is in this one sidebar, and each surface names itself in a breadcrumb above its own content.

The sidebar, top to bottom

The workspace menu

Clicking the workspace name opens a menu headed by the workspace and its plan, then up to four destinations. Each one appears only if your role can actually reach it, so the menu never offers a page that would turn you away:

Home and Projects

Home is your workspace landing page — setup progress, a row of workspace facts, and the projects you opened most recently. See Workspace Home.

Projects opens the full list of everything you can get into. It carries a count only when the sidebar is not already showing you every project you have — a number that matched the rows above it would say nothing. On a workspace of six projects showing three in the sidebar it reads 6; on a workspace of five showing all five it carries no count at all. See Projects.

Your projects

How the sidebar lists your projects depends on how many you have. The switch is at six.

Those caps are the point: a hundred-project workspace and a ten-project workspace produce a sidebar of the same height. It does not grow with the workspace.

Each group heading is a control. Click Pinned or Recent to fold that group away and click it again to bring it back; the answer is kept on your account, so a group you folded is still folded on your next machine.

Pinned

A pin is a position you chose, and it holds. Pin a project from its row menu in the sidebar, or from its row menu on the Projects page — Pin to sidebar — and it appears in the sidebar straight away, in the order you pinned them. Unpin from sidebar in either menu takes it back out.

Pinning is a personal act, not an administrative one: everyone in the workspace can pin, including people who cannot edit a project at all.

In a workspace small enough for one Your projects group, a pinned row carries a small star beside its name, announced as Pinned to the sidebar — and it appears the moment you pin, as the row moves up to sit with the other pinned ones. Once the list splits into Pinned and Recent the star goes away again: the heading above the row already says it.

Recent

Recent is earned by work, not by clicking. It lists the projects you have actually done something in, most recent first, and a pinned project is never repeated in it. Merely opening a project does not put it here.

These are the acts that earn a project its place, each counted for you alone:

• creating or editing a test case;
• creating a test run;
• recording a result;
• adding a note, finding or result to an exploration;
• uploading an attachment.

Because the list is kept on your account rather than in the browser, it is the same list wherever you sign in — and it is yours: two people working in the same workspace see different Recent groups.

Before you have worked anywhere: Newest. A brand-new account has no activity to order, and rather than show you five projects that have not earned the word, the group renames itself Newest and lists the most recently created active projects instead. The heading changes to Recent the first time you do work in a project, and that project leads it.

Completed projects are not hidden here. Completing a project takes it out of the project switcher and out of new runs, but Pinned and Recent are not a roster of where you may work — one is what you chose, the other is where you worked. A completed project stays in either group, drawn greyed and italic, and its name is announced with (completed). The Newest fallback is the exception: it leaves completed projects out, because created-order is not earned.

A project row unfolds

A project in the sidebar is not a link. Clicking its name unfolds it — the caret sits against the name, and turns as the row opens — revealing the five places you work inside that project:

• Dashboard — the project’s own summary of cycles, runs and explorations
• Cycles
• Test Cases
• Test Runs
• Explorations

Those five are the destinations, so the row itself does not navigate — going through a project dashboard you did not ask for costs a page load and a trip back. Unfold as many rows as you like; each one remembers whether you left it open.

The five entries are filtered by your permissions for the project you are inside. On any other row all five are listed, because permissions are read for one project at a time; the surfaces themselves still refuse anyone who should not be there.

The row menu

Each project row carries the same short menu its row on the Projects page does. It appears at the end of the row when you hover it or reach it with the keyboard, so twenty rows are not twenty permanent controls, and it is announced as Actions for <name>:

Someone who cannot edit projects gets a menu of exactly one entry, Pin to sidebar. Every entry takes effect as you watch: pin, and the row moves to its pinned position immediately; mark a project completed, and it is greyed here and out of the Active views without a reload, with Undo beside the confirmation.

The menu is not drawn in the collapsed sidebar — there is no room beside a centred chip, and the row there is already nothing but the chip.

Inside a project

The project you are viewing is always on the sidebar, and it is marked where it already sits rather than lifted out into a group of its own:

• If it is pinned, it stays exactly where you pinned it.
• If it is in Recent, it stays where its activity puts it.
• If it is in neither — a project you reached from the Projects page, say — it is added below the earned groups, so the row you just arrived at cannot disappear behind you.

Those added rows stay for as long as the tab is open, in the order you opened them, and going back to Home or Projects does not clear them — a row you were just using is still there when you turn round. Each one takes its place in Recent proper the first time you do work in that project.

They are a courtesy for the session, not a record: they are not saved to your account, and a new tab starts without them unless you worked there. Nothing is ever pushed above Pinned, and no unlabelled row appears at the top of the sidebar.

The current project’s row is unfolded when you arrive, and the surface you are on is highlighted inside it. Leaving for another project does not fold it again — the rows you have opened stay as you left them, so the sidebar does not rearrange itself underneath the pointer. Folding one away yourself is allowed, and that answer is remembered.

Nothing goes blank while a page loads

The sidebar stays exactly where it is on every navigation — on screen, in the same scroll position, still clickable. So does the page you are leaving: it holds until the next one is ready to take its place, instead of being cleared to an empty panel first. There is no blank flash, and no skeleton that only appears to tell you a fast page was fast.

What acknowledges the click is the sidebar itself: the row you clicked shows a small dot while its page is on the way, and the dot goes out when the page arrives.

So you can keep going: click a project row, and while its dashboard is still arriving, unfold another project and pick the surface you actually wanted. Going back to a project you were in a moment ago does not fetch it again: what the app already has is reused, so the return is not a second wait.

Collapsing and resizing

The control beside the workspace name collapses the sidebar to a narrow strip of icons. Collapsed:

• the workspace mark becomes a link to Home;
• the project you are in keeps its five surfaces, stacked as icons under its chip, so every destination is still one click away;
• every other project becomes one click straight to its dashboard — Open <name>.

Drag the sidebar’s right edge to resize it instead. On a narrow screen it becomes a drawer, opened from the control beside the page heading.

What is remembered, and where

Three different kinds of memory, and the difference matters if you use TestOrchestrator on more than one machine:

Everything in the first row is yours alone. Pinning a project changes nobody else’s sidebar.

The account menu

Clicking your avatar at the foot of the sidebar opens Settings, Notifications, a Theme switch reading Light or Dark, and Log out.

The avatar is also where background saves report in. Most edits across the product apply the moment you make them and persist behind you, with no Save button; a small dot appears on the avatar while a save is in flight, and changes colour if one fails. See Background saves.

Settings has its own sidebar

Everything configurable — your own profile and the whole of workspace administration — lives behind Settings. Open it from the account menu (which lands on your profile) or from Workspace settings in the workspace menu.

Settings replaces the sidebar rather than adding to it. In place of your projects you get a Search settings… box, your Personal sections first — Profile, Preferences, Notifications, API keys — and then the workspace groups you are allowed to administer:

‹ Back to app at the top returns you to the surface you came from, with your projects back in the sidebar.

An empty group is not shown at all. The list is built from the permissions you actually hold, so a group whose every section is out of reach disappears, heading included, rather than sitting there greyed out. A section you cannot see is a section you could not have opened; hiding it grants and denies nothing. Throughout these guides a path written as Settings → Fields means that section of this list.