At the heart of Test Management lie organization, planning, authoring, execution, and reporting. In the contemporary times where teams are geographically distributed, operating in different time zones and functioning collaboratively - working on multiple projects & different modules, testing in tandem with various other tools, it is totally inhuman to ask the testing team to sit and draft the statistically representable and comprehendible status summary by the end of the day, for their higher ups for their perusal.

Reporting is a very vital feature of a test management tool which enables the testing team to focus on what they are best at – Testing! The gratuitous efforts spend on summarizing the status report and making them presentable can be eliminated by an efficient reporting facility provided in a test management tool.

Reporting comprises mainly of graphically summarized information as well as detailed reports which are either replicas of are Excel/word/pdf.

A good reporting system should provide:

The Dashboards: graphical summary of the statistics

• Information in an easy to use/comprehend format
• Should exhibit live/dynamically updated data
• Should show data/stats on mouse over
• Graphs/chart in relevant structure (for e.g):
  • Pie chart for distribution
  • Bar charts for comparison
  • Line graphs for timeline comparison

• Ability to view the information/metrics in the desired format – graphical/tabular
• Complete drill down to fetch the information/data lying behind the graph on a click of a button on the graph
• Ability to remember the charts most frequently visited
• Metrics that can be downloaded and distributed to the team members/managers
• Base to pull out multiple charts at one time for comparison of information across parameters i.e. timelines/components/team members working on it etc.

Reports: detailed information viewed/downloaded for reference:

• Should be viewable/downloadable in desired format (xls, rtf, pdf)
• Should provide an interface to modify/ write commands to pull out any relevant/required information from the tool for reporting purposes
• Should be easy to use and maintain

So, the bottom line is that, the reporting should be so easy that even our Managers should be able to get it and comprehend it.

At QMetry we have kept the reporting very SIMPLE to use, Easy to comprehend and Flexible to customize.

Uncategorized Dashboard, QA, Quality Assurance, Reports, test management, Testing