Author: Bill Echlin

That week flew by and we’re already on the last 10 ideas to help improve your test management process. Hopefully you’ll get some inspiration from the last 10 ideas this week. Provide a portal for external parties – There are many other stakeholders interested in the QA process. If they’re interested, then the question is just how involved are they? Would their involvement benefit or hinder your QA efforts? In many cases the actual involvement of dev in helping asses areas for testing is a huge benefit. The involvement of project managers we’d all probably agree is a bit of a pain. There are many other parties (e.g. end users) that can contribute to help you get the most out...

Another 10 test management ideas for you to consider over the coming months. Integrate with automation tools – If you already have automation in place but haven’t looked at sync’ing this into your test management system yet then this is an easy win. Even if you have tools from different vendors you’ll find you have access to API’s that allow you to link tools. Might be a few days effort writing some glue code but the effort is well worth it. The benefit being that you’ll have consolidated reporting of status across but automated and manual testing. True integration, however, really only comes if you have automation and test management tools out of the same stable. As always though that’ll...

So here we go for the next 10 ideas on enhancing your test management process. Split things up differently – Maybe you currently assign your staff based on projects. What about if you looked at a completely different approach and had a sub team that focuses on integration testing, some QA engineers that concentrated solely on user acceptance. Or maybe it’s time to embrace the agile way of life and embed QA engineers directly with the development team. Nobody says we have to be one big QA team where each member is focused on only his or her project. Experiment with something new. Check availability stats – How much time did you waste last year because of system down time?...

So, to part 2. Another 10 ideas on how you might improve your test management process. No point waffling. So here we go. Write a usage guide – Often writing things down helps clarify the process. Processes grow up over time and morph into something that we never really expected. Something that’s never really efficient either. Now it does take a bit of effort and time but it’s worth it. Trust me. Sit down and take an afternoon to document the processes you follow (the real ones, not ones think you’d like to be following) and the way in which you use your test management system. This is an undertaking that will not only help you clarify what your team...

We’re a month or two into 2013 now and with our new years resolutions some way behind us we thought we’d take a look at how you might improve your test management process over the remaining 10 months of the year. So over the next 5 days we’re going to look at 50 improvement ideas that you can consider for implementation. Here’s the first 10 1. Review your reports – one of the main purposes for capturing data in a test management tool is so that you can report on aspects of your projects like progress, resource utilisation and goals. If the reports you’re currently creating don’t trigger changes where necessary then you should start questioning the purpose of those...

One critical aspect of test management involves completing the loop with defect fixes and source code control. It’s all very well raising bugs as part of the QA process. And it’s good to know that those bugs have been fixed. To be totally in control though you need to know what and how it was fixed. Typically this means linking your issue tracking system into your source code control system. In the example below we look at an example of how to integrate QAComplete/ALMComplete into SubVersion. Specifically we see how you can. raise a bug as part of the QA effort. when developers fix the bug and check the code/fixes in see the traceability of files changed linked to the...

The implementation of a Test Management or Application Life Cycle (ALM) tool should be approached in the same way as any other IT project. These tools, once setup, will touch on, not only the software engineering team, but operations, project management, customer support and many other aspects of the business. Getting the implementation wrong can be a costly exercise. Not only will you fail to see the expected return on investment but ultimately you’ll impact the quality of the products you’re releasing to your customers. And there are countless examples of companies whose reputations have been adversely affected by bad product releases. Fundamentally you need to approach the implementation of a test management or ALM tool as a project. That...

Sharing project artifacts across different projects within a test management tool tends to be difficult. For example, you create a project space within your tool of choice, develop lots of test cases and run them. However, you have another project running concurrently and they want to use the same test cases within a separate project space. Try to use the same test cases or artifacts across different projects and typically you end up copying the artifacts to the other projects. The big problem with this approach is that you then have two instances of the same artifact. Update one in one project and the other is no longer a direct copy. Few tools seem to cater for these scenarios very...

At some point in the test management process you’ll need to re-test fixes that have been made to resolve issues. This re-test process needs to be approached from two angles. Firstly, identifying failed test cases from previous test runs and then re-running those test cases in a subsequent cycle. Secondly, identifying defects that have been resolved and running tests to confirm that those defects have been fixed. Our test management tool, in this case Quality Center, needs to support us in these endeavors. In this video we look at how QC can be used to pull together a test set which includes test cases that have failed in the past. The video also covers how we can identify fixed defects,...

No test team can run every single test case on every single release of a product. So being able to aggregate results from different views or areas in your test management tool is essential when it comes to seeing the whole picture. However, how your test management tool deals with that aggregation might not be quite so simple. This partly depends on how the QA team have set things up and partly on how well the tool you use deals with this. In this video we look at how Quality Center deals with result aggregation. Ultimately we’re looking for accurate reporting that demonstrates the quality of the product at a point in time. The very nature of this aggregation though...