Author: Bill Echlin

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...

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...

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...

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...

[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...

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...

Part of an effective QA cycle depends on an efficient test management process. In this webinar we look at ways to allocate work to your team using Software Planner and the ways in which you can analyse how your QA cycle is progressing. Controlling time effectively will allow you to make the most of your resources, whilst a greater awareness of the test status will help you to meet your targets. With the right project management tools you can keep up to date on your project’s progress. As noted in previous webinars, Software Planner is able to keep track of many aspects of your testing artifacts, including your software requirements, test cases, and defect data. The project tools can be...

There are some interesting comparisons between Octopuses and Test Management. For starters did you know that an octopus doesn’t have eight arms? Turns out that it has six arms and two legs (How Many Arms Does an Octopus Have?). Either way that’s a lot of limbs to manage. The management of the test process presents most of us with a similar challenge. The concepts behind test management are simple. Think up a test case, define the steps, write down the expected results, execute and log the result. It all boils down to this. The larger the product we’re testing the more we need to create. You couldn’t wish for simpler foundation. Simple is great, especially in the software development arena...