Month: May 2011

Using a test management tool to control different versions of your testcases can seem like quite an innocuous point on the surface. However, there are many complexities to consider when you get below the surface. These complexities can have a serious impact your QA process. Ultimately you need to be able to ensure that the testcase you ran, and the associated result, is an accurate record of what actually happened. What we mean by this is that if you execute a testcase and then log a result, any future changes should not get applied to the occurrence of the testcase that you have already run. If the changes are applied to the already run instance then you invalidate the result....

Choosing a test management solution is easy. Implementing a solution is hard. It’s easy to select and configure one of the many great test management applications on the market today. We all understand the technology, the features are easy to evaluate and the configuration easy to set up (perhaps with a bit of trial and error). Implementation is a different ball game though. Getting your QA team to use the application can be difficult. Getting them to use it consistently can be almost impossible. Yet the success or failure of your chosen solution depends mainly on how the whole of your team interact with the tools you provide them with. Business objective clarity – the test management tool you select...

We all know that there’s never enough time to execute all of the testcases defined in our test management system. You can’t do everything when you’ve only got a finite amount of time. For this reason experts always seem to recommend prioritising your testing. Whilst prioritising seems like the obvious thing to do, the concept of de-prioritising is never quite as obvious. Some refer to this idea of de-prioritising as setting posteriorities. This is the concept of picking tasks that you consciously put at the bottom of your list. Tasks you plan to do later and which you may not even start. Essentially though the goal is to free you and your team up so that you can focus on...