Month: March 2012

Successful test management is about improving processes, technology and teams. However, if you don’t keep your eye on the end goal it’s easy to spend time and effort improving these areas yet see little difference in the quality of products you’re working on. And that’s the key. Any improvement efforts need to be targeted towards delivering an improvement in the quality of the products you are testing. Too many projects fail to deliver those improvements because they lose sight of this. The following 7 rules will help you focus on delivering a successful test management solution. Rule 1: Focus on the Product Quality Goal This is all ultimately about improving product quality. It’s not about technology. Improving tracking, reporting and...

Retesting is a key part of the test management process. However, there is a right and a wrong way to approach this. You run some testcases as part of one cycle. Some fail and you look to run them again as part of the next cycle. When they pass the temptation is to go back to the original testcase record and change the result to a pass. This is especially true where there was just a small fix or config change required to resolve the issue. This is the wrong way to approach this. It’s imperative as part of the test management cycle to make sure each execution is tracked and recorded independently. The scenario is this. 1. You execute...

There are a number of core test management activities that you will be performing as part of any QA process.  What we cover here is good software testing practice and should form the bedrock of any QA teams setup.  The activities we’ll look at are : Test Management Activities 1. Developing testcases in a library. 2. Defining releases and configurations that we’ll use during the execution. 3. Grouping into sets ready for execution. 4. Execution. In this discussion we’re going to look specifically at carrying out those activities with QAComplete. With QAComplete we’ll see how we can streamline this approach. We’ll see how this can improve on the process that we’d normally see with an excel based approach. The first part...

This is a follow up to the previous post on Approaches to User Training for Test Management Systems. We thought we’d take a look at one of the most important reasons for training. That is increasing user adoption. Getting your QA team to use your test management system, and use it correctly, is key to your success. Increasing user adoption with training does, however, depend on a few significant elements. It’s about the process – a lot of test management training is based around the functionality of the system. We track this piece of data, at this point in the process, in this field. We record the results in this field and log the environment tested against here, etc, etc....