Test Management Blog

Like it or not the most effective way to build automated tests is with code. Yes drag and drop, icon based, user friendly IDE's can be productive. Just that they'll never be as effective or productive as developing automated tests in code. This is why languages like Python are critical to a lot of test automation projects. So in a series of courses that will cover Python, Java Script and C# we start by taking you through the basics of Python. In a series of 14 modules You'll learn about Python …. Module 1 – Operations Module 2 – Variables Module 3 – Operators Module 4 – Lists Module 5 – Loops Module 6 – Functions Module 7 – Modules...

Create a Continuous Testing Environment with the TestComplete REST Api and Virtual Machines Stability and productivity are everything with automated testing. If you're going to be productive with TestComplete you must have a way to test and run your automated tests outside of your development machine. As your tests grow you cannot afford to waste time tying up your development machine as you run your automated tests. It’s crucial that you have separate environments where you can execute tests independently. We’re going to walk you through a simple'ish setup where you develop on one machine and run on a separate virtual machine using TestExecute. Execute a script, your tests run on a VM, results available on your development machine. What...

Introduction The Microsoft Azure DevOps Test Management component offers the possibility of a fully integrated development and test capability for QA and Development teams. It gives agile teams the capability of collaborating in one tool for all the different disciplines. Again, in this review of the test management component, we’ll be focusing on 7 of the most prominent features and assessing Azure DevOps against them. These features are: Assignment Version Control Parameterisation Libraries Results Aggregation Retesting Configurations and Releases Assignment When implementing a process or selecting a test management tool, you’ll always need to assign a test to a tester at some point. Question is do you need to assign at the step, case or cycle level. Do you need to allocate...

Introduction In our test management tool side-by-side feature comparison we identified well over 100 features that you can use to compare the different tools. Not all of the features are significant though. In this review we pick a few of those features and take a look looking at how Zephyr Scale addresses 7 complexities of test management. Those complexities and core features are: Assignment Version Control Parameterisation Libraries Results Aggregation Retesting Configurations and Releases Assignment Test cases are executed in cycles within Zephyr Scale. The cycle has an owner at the top level. Then you can assign individual test cases can to specific testers for execution. This is also supported with an 'Executed by' field that shows who actually ran...

Introduction The functional analysis of test management tools can be broken down into more than 100 separate features. In fact, our our side-by-side test management tool feature comparison has identified well over 100 features. Having lots of features isn’t always a good thing. Let’s face it not all of them are significant. However, there are 7 core and complex features that every test management solution has to address in one way or another. The core features are: Assignment Version Control Parameterization Libraries Results Aggregation Retesting Configurations and Releases In this write-up, we’ll be seeing how Xray stands up to the 7 criteria listed above. Assignment Xray implements test cases as Jira issue types. When you start out with Xray, you...

Introduction QMetry is a test management tool that enables users to increase efficiency in managing their testing. Yes it delivers the basics of creating test cases but QMetry also has some clever ways to help with test case reuse.There are lots of aspects to a test management solution and our side-by-side test management tool feature comparison has identified more than 100 of them. However, there are 7 core and complex features that every test management solution must address in some way. The 7 core and complex features are: Assignment Version Control Libraries Results Aggregation Retesting Configurations and Releases In the following sections we look at how QMetry addresses each of these 7 features. Assignment The two ways to assign tests in...

Sometimes it’s worth revisiting the basics. Some things you think you know, then when you scratch the surface you realise you didn’t know them quite as well as you thought you did. That’s how it was when I started looking at the fundamentals of REST API’s. I’ve been testing REST API’s for years but I didn’t really know what REST stood for. Do you? There might be 6 architectural principles defining REST (more on those later) but the fundamentals come down to just two things. Funnily enough those two things are highlighted in the name, REST.  REpresentational and  State Transfer Each of these concpets is introduced the following short video:  In short then, Representational means that it should be...

In our series on Test Automation at scale, our first session looks at the architecture of a data driven automation framework running GUI front end tests across large numbers of client machines. We walk you through the architecture of a system that minimises script and code complexity. A system that increases reliability and speeds up test execution.  Critical in this setup is the concept of test case execution isolation. The concept of making sure that each test is run in isolation so that one failure doesn’t cause the whole test run to collapse. With the execution of each test isolated it’s easier to identify and investigate failures. This also makes it easier to scale, as more scenarios and more...

Custom Dashboards and Filters There’s no point putting all this data in and organising everything if you can’t see where you’re up to on your projects. Jira provides you with dashboards that can be customized to your requirements and filters you can setup and save. Both dashboards and filters allow you to see exactly where you are with your particular project. The start of all this is then is the System Dashboard. This is the dashboard you’re presented with when you log in and when you select the ‘View System Dashboard’ option. Each dashboard is just a one page container for a number of gadgets. Where a gadget is a panel that displays a particular set of informations. Some dashboards...

Versions & Components The other major features in Jira that lets us group and categorise our issues are Versions and Components. Both of these features provide us with useful ways to visualise the status of our projects and the work/issues that we need to be focusing on. Each Project you define in Jira can contain many ‘Versions’ and many ‘Components’. Before we look at what Versions and Components are though lets just recap on what a project is. A project in Jira is just a container for a lot of issues. It’s the top level container. Every issue must be assigned to one (and only one) project. With a project we can also create Component and Version identifiers. The issues...