Test Management Tools
In a software development life cycle, various phases are as below
- Requirement and Analysis phase – In this phase product team and business owner will collect requirements from the client and analysis on what is required by the clients in an application.
- Design phase – During this phase, the product team along with project manager and principal architect creates or identify a framework to adopt, technology to select and programming language and tools to select to design the prototype of the system or application, based on information gathered from clients.
- Implementation or Coding phase – Based on the decision and suggestion received from project and engineering team, the development team will break the system requirement into user stories which can be accomplished in sprint interval, the testing team will test the requirement in parallel and verify the requirement with features developed and log defects in case of any deviation.
- Testing phase – This phase starts as soon as the requirement is collected and brainstorming sessions on these requirement starts in every project meets. design test scenarios, test cases, execute these test cases manually and write scripts that automate regression tests and various features of user interface elements used in software, security, performance as well as testing web services and protocols used in transferring secured and safe data transfers between interfaces.
- Deployment phase -During this phase, installation team integrates the various pieces of modules developed by a team of developers and released for testing and after every release subjected to regression tests, it is released as production build and sent to clients as incremental releases that gradually adds various features, deploy the build at a client site, with a note of what features are accomplished in the released build.
- Maintenance – In an agile environment, incremental releases are deployed in short intervals called sprint which is usually of two weeks, after all, agreed functionalities are met with and deployed at a client site, a team is deployed for maintenance of the software that trains end-users to operate the software, identify the defects that surface after the software is deployed and end-users start using the application and understands the features. change requests and various shortcomings are resolved by the maintenance team, with the help of developers and testers who understands domain and requirements.
What and Why is test management required?
In order to manage activities related to testing applications, are called such as
- test lead or manager can define Test plan documents
- test lead can Create requirement traceability matrix which can be mapped to the requirements
- testers can design test cases and scenarios based on the requirement document
- testers can execute these test cases that are created and reviewed
- Schedule and plan test activities, assign tests to testers for execution.
- Bug tracking software such as Bugzilla or Jira can be integrated with test management tools
Tools used for test management
Testing tools are differentiated based on
- What is the purpose for which particular testing tool has been selected
- Which are the tasks that tester want to achieve using the testing tool
- What test type or level that supports the tool
- The type of license whether Open source, freeware, or commercial, that depends on an organization’s willingness to spend after and client’s requirement
- The technology used in creating the testing tool, GUI or IDE that tester is able to understand
Some of the most often used test management tools in software industry
TestRail is a proprietary web-based test case management software that can be hosted on private or public cloud servers, we can use their custom templates to design test plans and write test cases. we can integrate Jira, GitHub, Rally, and Visual Studio with TestRail. TestRail can be downloaded via link https://www.gurock.com/testrail/
Zephyr comes with inbuilt Cucumber Jira integration, for creating and executing test plans, test case automation tools, help with reports that display mapping with end to end traceability. Zephyr can be downloaded via link https://www.getzephyr.com/
TestFLO is a JIRA add on that creates test plan, and can be used as test case repository, can map with traceability metrics and give extensive reports including JIRA metrics and statistics, TestFLO can be integrated with CI tools like Jenkins and Bamboo for automated tests, executes tests from JIRA as well publish test results in real-time. TestFLO can be downloaded via link https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211393/testflo-test-management-for-jira
JIRA can be used as test management tool, it has add-ons such as Zephyr for creating tests/ test suites/test cycles/bugs/reports and Go2Group SynapseRT where traceability plays importance, JIRA can be downloaded via link https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
QAComplete is a flexible and powerful test management tool for listing and analyzing requirements, test execution, and defect logging, QAComplete can be integrated with Selenium, TestComplete, SOAPUI as well as manual testing. QAComplete can be downloaded via link https://smartbear.com/product/qacomplete/overview/
TestLink is an open-source test management tool that is web-based with features like requirement management, creation, and maintenance of test cases, test run, tracking bugs, test reports. TestLink can be downloaded via link http://testlink.org/
Conclusion
Test management is an important activity in order to maintain the test plan, map requirement tracking matrix against requirements, creation of test cases, execution, and bug tracking with test reports. Test management tools are extremely helpful to the testing team to manage testing tasks overcloud or on the private servers, this can be integrated with integration tools like Jenkins and GitHub, also with automation testing tools like selenium, SOAPUI and defect reporting tools like Bugzilla and Jira to receive real-time testing reports for management and project team.
Testing management tools like TestRail, Zephyr, TestFLO, TestComplete, JIRA, and TestLink can be utilized for such test management activities.
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Good Info
Thanks Sreedhar, for your comments, let me know what was expected from the article? This will provide me reader’s expectations.