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

Top 7 parameters for evaluating a test management tool

1. Real-Time updates that can be accessed from a centralized repository

Your QA team should not be spending countless hours in the morning trying to gather and compile the data from multiple sources and send you a report. Every member of your should be able to access all relevant test case information from anywhere in the world and be sure that it is current and updated, allowing your QA Team to be on the same page.

Test execution progress, test cases, requirements, and defect tracking charts should be all at the tips of your fingers. Testers should spend less time answering questions such as what percentage of tests are completed, where are we in the testing cycle, and how many critical bugs are there and more time on doing what they do best, that is ‘testing’!

2. Manage your Requirements

Managing requirements and respective changes is at the core of successful testing effort. A test management tool should provide an extensive capability to manage requirements and link them to test cases as well as defects for traceability analysis. By defining requirements, you can plan and manage tests that are more focused on your specific business needs.

Requirements should be associated to tests and defects to provide complete traceability and to aid the decision-making process.

3. Manage your Test Plans

A test management tool should provide an interface to create a test plan template that uses a step-by-step wizard format to make it simple and user friendly. The pre-defined stages of a test plan allow simple input giving you a comprehensive and complete test plan in a matter of minutes. The Test Plans will help you capture important test planning related information about testing your project. You should be able to import test plan into any word processor of your choice and should be version controlled allowing you to track changes globally.

4. Manage your test cases

Testcases are the fundamental building blocks for a seamless and predictable testing effort. An effective test management tool should provide a very simple yet intuitive interface to write the details of testcases and link them to the requirements and associated defects. Also, it should be able to adopt a customizable workflow to enable various compliance criteria.

5. Manage your Defects

The time effectiveness of testing team is measured by the number of defects that it discovered during testing process. An effective test management tool should provide a flexible defect management module that can be customized to meet the QA team’s and management’s needs. It should also provide a Web services based API to integrate external Defect and/or Issue Management systems in the testing process. Defect tracking should be simple & efficient while reporting on quality metrics. The metrics should be live so the bugs can be tracked and charted the moment they are submitted. This saves your team the time by not having to create a report and send you defects status every day.

6. Criteria based Search and Filter

To react effectively against business risks it is important to quickly find the details and changes associated with the test assets. An effective test management tool should provide a keyword based and field-value based extensive search as well as filter capability to mitigate risks effectively. The search and filter feature is extremely efficient as it allows you to identify what you need and hone in on it based off of parameters that you can set.

7. Role Based Security

The modern day software development lifecycle demands different roles and access control to effectively manage the testing process. An effective test management tool should provide a granular access control to mimic real-world team composition as well as role/user classification. Role management helps you to manage authorization, which enables you to specify the resources that users in your application are allowed to access. Role management lets you treat groups of users as a unit by assigning users to roles such as testers, QA Manager, Business Analyst and so on. Roles give you flexibility to change permissions and add and remove users without having to make changes throughout the site. As you define more access rules for your application, roles become a more convenient way to apply the changes to groups of users.

Uncategorized QA, QMetry, Quality Assurance, SaaS, test case, test management tool