November 11, 2011
A lot of companies that are evaluating test management tools say the tool must be easy to use. A reasonable request. It’s what’s behind this request that is interesting. In many cases it is the fact that the tool needs to be used by people that are not software testers. The reason for this? Companies supplement their QA team with people from the business or their QA team is comprised completely of people that come from the business. In a few cases companies opt not to take on testers with formal QA experience but decide to use people who know the business inside out as testers. Usually in this case the team have little or no experience of using test...
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November 3, 2011
The 31st Test Management forum took place in the UK last week. For those of you based in the UK who have a fascination with this area of our discipline this is well worth attending. Attended by a number of prominent test mangers and consultants it makes for some very stimulating discussions (and in some instances quite heated debate). One of the topics that struck home in this latest session was a simple question about the difference between a project manager (PM) and a test manager (TM). On the surface a simple question. Dig a little deeper though and this question is more interesting than it would at first appear. For example what stops a test manager becoming a project...
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October 12, 2011
When evaluating test management applications it’s easy to get carried away with the focus on the technology. Technology isn’t every thing though. Especially these days when the different products all seem to offer a similar feature set. Let’s face it most of the solutions these days cover pretty much the same ground. You may even consider the price more important than the technology. Even so you’re still missing one very important factor. Probably the most important factor. That factor influences the success of your project like no other. That factor is the choice you make on who implements the product. Most companies have requirements to integrate their test management solution into their existing process and environment. This means configuring the...
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October 11, 2011
We’re two weeks away from the 31st Test Management forum in London this month. Usually a great live forum for picking up on some of the latest concepts and ideas surrounding this specialist discipline. Line up for this meeting are sessions on: Innovations in Test Automation – putting the case forward for IT innovations that deliver cost savings through the implementation of automation. Covering the cost challenges normally associated with implementation this session aims to identify the benefits of looking beyond just the price of purchasing the tools. The Agile Pretence – in this session the speaker is looking to challenge that often spoken statement that ‘we’re agile’. Are we really agile? Is this phrase being slightly overused these days...
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October 5, 2011
Finding the right test management tool is difficult. Finding the right tool with the features you need to deliver the benefits you need to manage your process is even more difficult. Perhaps… Quality Center is costing you too much? You’ve outgrown TestLink? Excel and Word are not scaling up for you? If this is the case then take a look at the latest 9.7 release of QAComplete. Test Management with QAComplete The latest release of QAComplete now delivers… Dynamic test-step management Create test-steps with easy to drag and drop features. Build your cases with the simplicity of Excel yet keep the traceability that Excel can never deliver. An easy to reuse library Hundreds, thousand or even hundreds of thousands of...
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September 22, 2011
For many these days, the almost unlimited budgets to spend on test management tools are long gone. However the importance of getting the right solution is no less diminished. If you’re looking to cut costs with implementing the right system then these suggestions may help. Do you really need a new application – many organisations already have a solution in place. That may be the top end market leading product or an excel/word based framework. Perhaps it’s this existing setup that isn’t working well for you. The temptation is to rip it out and migrate to a shiny new system. Before you do that however look at the options associated with re-implementing what you already have in place. This will...
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September 2, 2011
The art of test management can be considered a niche topic within the realm of Software Testing. Yet we can drill down on test management further and look at the development of reports and dashboards as a topic in it’s own right too. All manner of data, statistics and information can be reported on. The more data we enter as part of our process the more information we have to report on. We have tools capable of collecting everything from pass/fail ratios to the exact time taken for execution. In short we’re spoilt for choice when it comes to creating dashboards and reports. The trick is sorting through all of this data to report on what is important. And to...
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August 29, 2011
If you’re reading this I expect you’ve got a test management system in place in some form or another. The question is, how much value is that system delivering for you and your team. The answers to the following five questions should give you a pretty good idea. 1. What reports do you use? Reports are a key tool to support your business process. Yes we all get enticed by those smart and flashy 3D pie charts most solutions produce these days. Ask though if the data in those chart of any use? If you’re not using those reports on a daily, or at least weekly, basis then you’ve probably got problems. Reports are supposed to guide your decision making...
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June 6, 2011
[jwplayer mediaid=”1281″] After the QA cycle there remains one stage that is vital to the test management process. That is a retrospective look at the testing process. Essentially, a retrospective is a post mortem, highlighting the positives and negatives of the testing. This may be useful to forthcoming releases and new projects. The post of this five-part series shows how to perform a retrospective – applying the data collected by Software Planner combined with contributions from your team – and a way you can record this information in a reference document. The first stage of the post mortem is to analyse the task variances. This is the difference between how long a task is estimated to take and long it...
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May 26, 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....
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