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

Agile techniques: Many organizations have begun to use agile development techniques. These practices put a premium value on collaboration and alter the development cycle because requirements are changing and being completed incrementally as the project is under way. Agile methods also focus on the drive to push quality upstream through techniques such as unit testing and code reviews. Agile practices are encouraging vendors in the tool market to build tools that recognize these process changes and address the shift from isolated specialist tools to coordinated suites that share information and manage and update each other in a complementary fashion. For example, leading tool support integration between software requirements and test plans, and as requirements grow or change, will force a vendor to update its test plan. This collaborative capability is especially important for globally dispersed organizations to keep information loss among groups to a minimum.

Source: Gartner

Uncategorized Agile, Quality Assurance, test management, Waterfall

The overall distributed testing tool market is valued at more than $1 billion and has been growing consistently at 10% to 12% during the past five years. Gartner expects this growth to accelerate due to the demands of SOA and replacement of legacy applications with new packages and custom solutions. New companies continue to enter the market, as established vendors continue to fill out suites through acquisitions. As organizations seek to better manage software assets and face increased complexity, competition and regulations, they are finding that quality management tools and practices provide a fundamental baseline to drive positive results. This need will be especially acute as organizations shift from early Web services implementations to developing SOA, and as packages expand to become service-oriented business applications. SAAS based tool is an answer to companies trying to minimize their investments in tools.

Source: Gartner

Uncategorized Quality Assurance, SaaS, test management

Creating an organized test plan has become extremely important for software companies because of the hyper competitive software industry. The time, capabilities, bandwidth and other resources are limited, so it is critical to make sure that testing professionals are extremely comprehensive while executing their test scripts. However, in tough economic times like today, having a solid test plan is not enough; a more dynamic approach is required to cut costs by eliminating unwanted tests without compromising on a comprehensive risk and security testing. To ensure this “Just Enough” approach to testing, test management becomes critical. Test Management involves leveraging a collection of processes and tools that enables testers to take a more strategic approach to testing, prioritizing key test functions, accounting for risk, planning for coverage, and controlling test execution. By employing effective test management, software development companies will ensure that they run the right tests, and avoid releasing an application that is not ready for prime time. There are several test management tools available, each with their own set of capabilities, limitations and complexities. Also, most tools available today are costly in terms of license fee and the hardware and software resources required. It becomes paramount to find the best tool that meets all your needs.

Why QMetry?

QMetry is the most comprehensive, flexible and affordable test management tool available in the market. It caters to QA teams of all sizes. It has brought test management to masses by offering a SaaS based delivery model. It draws all advantages of the SaaS features, and enhances the overall test management experience. QMetry drives a more effective and efficient global application testing process and supports high levels of communication and collaboration among geographically distributed testing teams. QMetry seamlessly integrates with your existing defect tracking systems like Bugzilla, JIRA and Mantis and test automation tools like Silktest and Quicktest, further enhancing their usability of yourexisting tool investments. It helps in involving analysts more directly in overall quality efforts, along with a shift in focus from finding defects to validation; to ensuring business objectives are being met. QMetry provides a user friendly interface, with powerful capabilities that help QA teams to integrate, communicate and co-ordinate the entire testing process in the most effective manner. QMetry provides a greater visibility of the entire testing process to geographically distributed teams and clients.

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

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