יום שבת, 12 באוקטובר 2013

Test managing tool within the budget limit

At the beginning of our project (as with other projects) we wrote and managed our test in Excel files. It was great at the beginning, when we had small test sets that were all run manually by the same person who represented the entire QA team.
As time passed and our test sets grew , the number of our test cases increased to more than 500, some of which were run manually and some of which were automated on different platforms. Our team grew as well and it became impossible to manage everything via  Excel files. Producing test documents such as ATP, STP and STR became a nightmare and the chaos grew in leaps and bounds.
We needed a test management tool for our project - a tool that would integrate with the different frameworks we already worked with and wouldn’t upset the entire system. This tool would help us control the version quality development and status and provide us with an option to communicate the relevant information to the stakeholders (managers, customers, others) within minutes.
We didn’t want to spend too much of our project’s budget on the tool, since we needed the budget for the development of automation and to support the  manpower that comprised our team. In addition,  if the tool was simple, we wouldn’t have to spend more of our budget on  training the tester to work with the new tool.

Our criteria included the following:
·      Write and organize test cases according to our module and testing phase.
·      Plan test sets and execute them.
·      Tractability between the requirement, tests and bugs.
·      Generate reports.
·      Support custom dashboards to control project quality.
·      Integration with JIRA as our bug tracker.
·      Integration with the different frameworks we were using (QTP, Telerik Test Studio, Soap UI, Jenkins, etc.).
·      And the bottom line: price.

We tried five management tools:
·      Quality Center
·      PractiTest
·      Zephyr
·      Zephyr for JIRA
·      Xstudio


In the end, we decided to go with PractiTest. Besides the fair price and trivial functionality we were looking for, which constituted our basic criteria, we liked the idea of the Filters. This feature presented out-of-the-box thinking of how to organize and reuse test cases via hierarchical filters, instead of the classic hierarchical folders. The filter is a superb implementation of the Agile theory in the software testing world.

And there was also one more small advantage -  the satisfactory patriotic feeling I experienced after the purchase was approved, since being an Israeli,  I of course like to support our home-grown industries.

2 תגובות:

  1. HI
    If the price was a criteria, why didn't you try opensource products like TestLink that gives you for free all your requirements?

    השבמחק
  2. the point was to give another alternative to QC, which is very expensive. we were still looking for a tool that will have available support, and updated versions.
    i was working with testlink in the past, nice but it isn't a real alternative for QC. .

    השבמחק