Test Management Blog

Part of an effective QA cycle depends on an efficient test management process. In this webinar we look at ways to allocate work to your team using Software Planner and the ways in which you can analyse how your QA cycle is progressing. Controlling time effectively will allow you to make the most of your resources, whilst a greater awareness of the test status will help you to meet your targets. With the right project management tools you can keep up to date on your project’s progress.

As noted in previous webinars, Software Planner is able to keep track of many aspects of your testing artifacts, including your software requirements, test cases, and defect data. The project tools can be used to show the tasks that are still outstanding and those completed. Essentially giving you the pertinent points from your test plan in a form that’s accessible to everyone in your group. From here you are able to break this down into the individual tests, and allocate the tasks between your group accordingly. This will create a projection of how you are progressing through the QA cycle as a whole, as well as the daily achievements from your team. All of this adds up to help you track the management of your testing throughout the organisation.

For the project features to be effective, however, it is vital that your testers log their hours for you to maintain accurate projections. Using the project tools, they are able to log the hours taken and report how long they estimate the work to take on a time sheet report. This in turn can be used to highlight where a colleague may be struggling to complete their tasks, and for you to apportion work to other team members as necessary. The two-way communication between you and your colleagues through the project management features allows for more successful leadership.

One way that you can prioritise tasks is by analysing the metrics collated by Software Planner. The metrics keep track of how many defects are active, the resolution trending, the severity of the remaining defects, and their priority for repair. If, as part of the test management process, your testers can prioritise defects by severity, those defects that need more time and manpower can be given greater precedence. This will avoid over allocation of resources and help you to meet your targets.

Communication is key to all of this if you and your team are to meet your goals. The simplest way is to meet with your team daily, first thing in the morning, for approximately 15 minutes. This will keep you abreast of test progress and assignment of defects. In short you’ll have a better feel for priorities and for how the QA cycle is progressing. You’ll spot overworked testers sooner and give yourself the opportunity to re-allocate sooner. This style of hands-on leadership will give you a better handle on the job at hand and should shorten your QA cycle.

Using Software Planner is a practical way to organise your staff. The project management features allow you to distribute work appropriately. From the testers perspective it allows them to see how their work is progressing. Overall the metrics should provide greater insight of the whole QA cycle. Ultimately, the right tools provide you with greater control over your test management process.

There are some interesting comparisons between Octopuses and Test Management. For starters did you know that an octopus doesn’t have eight arms? Turns out that it has six arms and two legs (How Many Arms Does an Octopus Have?). Either way that’s a lot of limbs to manage. The management of the test process presents most of us with a similar challenge.

The concepts behind test management are simple. Think up a test case, define the steps, write down the expected results, execute and log the result. It all boils down to this. The larger the product we’re testing the more we need to create. You couldn’t wish for simpler foundation. Simple is great, especially in the software development arena where complexity seems to reign.

Simple as in an Octopus has 8 arms is good too. Only it doesn’t. On closer inspection an Octopus effectively has six arms and two legs. Observations have shown that an Octopus uses the two rear most tentacles to get around the seabed. The other 6 for propulsion when swimming and manipulating objects. Research has also shown that when octopuses get in a tangle they use two specific tentacles to help untangle themselves. Simple on the surface. Not so simple when you start to look a little deeper.

This goes for test management too. The principals of writing and managing the documents are simple on the surface. Scale things up and you’ve got 8 tentacles that frequently seem to get tangled up.

Managing this in practice becomes very complex very quickly. The end result never seeming to be as clear cut as the simple foundation. Sticking with Octopus analogy I’d suggest that there are 8 test management tentacles that result in this complexity:

1. Multiple testers adding, deleting and modifying documents concurrently.

2. Evolution of documents over a period of time requiring version control.

3. Running different versions of a test case against different versions of the product, means multiple different results.

4. Linking results to the requirements in order to track coverage.

5. Some organisations impose a review process covering the written documents.

6. Managing variations of very similar test cases which are written for product or module variations.

7. Tracking the execution against the same version of a product being run on different configurations/environments.

8. The need to Identify which test cases need to be re run when a defect is fixed and requires re-checking.

The concept of one test case, one person, one requirement and one product version is clearly easy to comprehend. It’s the eight tentacles that start to add layers of complexity. What happens when multiple testers are adding, deleting and modifying the repository of data concurrently? This delivers similar issues that developers face with source code control. Only it’s more complicated for us when you add in the next tentacle. That tentacle being the need to run different versions of a test against different versions of the product we’re checking. Then link that in to another tentacle where you need to link those cases back to the requirements that they cover (where the requirements themselves are like shifting sands in their own right). You get the picture. The result is eight legs of a test management octopus that are damn difficult to keep track off.

Octopuses are one of the most intelligent forms of sea life. They can manipulate Rubik’s cubes and learn to open jam jars. Whilst the test management process is hardly as simple as opening a jam jar I would suggest that we’ve got a creature which is far more complex and fascinating than many seem to give it credit for.

In this test management webinar recording we look at how to schedule automated tests to run daily during the QA cycle. Automating the execution of your testing and tracking those results in conjunction with your manual test efforts is key to maximising your resources. Integrating this process into an automated build process brings even more benefits with initiation of the automation coming from the completion of the build. With effective reporting and dashboards you can push back on development teams that deliver poorly unit tested builds to your QA team. Taking this approach is a good way to free up your team to concentrate on what is really important; usually the testing of new features not undertaking the unit testing on behalf of the development team.

To run a full regression set on an automated schedule, you should organise your various test by function within TestComplete. Then using the batch job or scheduled tasks in Software Planner you kick off your automation unaided. With Software Planner and TestComplete integrated, the results of these schedules will automatically be recorded by Software Planner. With the capability to automatically send Pdf reports via email you can even send the automation run results directly to the development team. In this way you can reduce some of the more repetitive tasks your team usually get sucked into and push back that work to the development team.

Key to improving the quality of your testing is the development of well written test steps. Make sure you have defined the tests and expected results in Software Planner. After analysing and recording the results, you can automatically generate the defect, and prioritise them for resolution. You can also send an email notification of these results and a link of the defect to your developer, if you so wish. Again this helps to streamline the test process and reduce the usual administrative tasks your team have to contend with.

One simple tip for effectively recording failures is to manually capture a video of the on-screen test using Jing (available for free at http://www.jingproject.com). With Jing you can set the part of the screen you wish to record, record the action, upload it to the web, and copy the link to Software Planner. Again this is another time saver for your team as you reduce the amount of time you spend typing up defect records.

From here you are able to view the results of your execution runs in various dashboards. You can view progress trends and failure trends. The ability to compare the results of your manual and automated test cases is also a useful feature of the dashboards.

Combining Software Planner and TestComplete gives you the capability to track progress of the whole process. You can complete a wide variety of tests automatically and quickly analyse releases delivered to the team for regression issues. Just a few of these simple steps can make significant improvements in your teams efficiency and save valuable amounts time. All in all small improvements, supported by the right test management tools, can deliver significant improvements to the effectiveness of your team.