How to Choose a Proper Test Cases Management System?
To choose test cases management system correctly you need to understand a fundamental problem with test cases management systems on this Planet.
What’s the problem and what’s the solution? Keep on reading!
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark…
A few years ago I faced a question that stucks in minds of software engineers, who deal with test cases management tools: why are test case management tools so ugly and hard to use?
And then, on summer 2016, was published an interview statistics results about the “Popularity of the manual test cases management tools in CIS”:
— MS Excel and MS Word on the top of this chart (plus Google Docs and Confluence in the middle!) — is a clear indicator of inability of existing test cases management tools to address the challenging issues of test cases management process.
Just think about it: existing test cases management tools can’t help you in test cases management! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why so? Because they have been designed by people who don’t ask smart enough questions! Why so? Because they don’t use these systems themselves!
Something really goes wrong in Software Quality Assurance…
Characteristics of Test Cases Management System Done Right
Characteristics of a proper test cases management tool will become obvious for you, if you dig deeper answering one simple question: “What the job do you hire test cases management tool to do?”
And the answer, in most cases is: to help you to verify software quality as fast and as cheap as possible. As fast. As cheap. As possible.
Software is verified with tests, which are created during test cases design process — a challenging, intellectual, analytical work. And the better test cases management tool supports test cases design — the faster and cheaper this process, the faster and cheaper you verify your software.
What test cases design analytical work is all about? It’s all about questions, answers and notes about them! These notes are called test cases — they are instructions about modelling of the questions to software in order to get answers on them from software.
I.e. the faster and more error-prone you’ll be able to create, modify, categorize, structurize, search and whatsoever your test cases — the better test cases management system you have. Right?
And now, from this point of view, it should be clear why MS Word and MS Excel, along with Google Docs and Confluence, are so popular: they help to manage notes fast.
Of course, MS Word and MS Excel have not been designed for test cases management purposes, but their abnormal popularity clearly indicates, that test cases management tools — are not about charts, statistics and fancy UI, but about a flexible, easy-to-use and user-friendly… editor and search!
Do we have an Incredible Test Cases Editor on Earth?
Every single day we build it. Continuous Discovery and Continuous Delivery — are our close friends here.
We started to create a completely new test cases management system, that mixes the power of both MS Word and MS Excel and aims to help QA Engineers to spend as less as possible resources on test cases management — so they could focus on the tested product itself.
We called it Software Quality Assurance’s Mate — and it’s a real helping hand in test cases management process. Now it’s open for everyone to try — so, if you haven’t yet tried, then welcome!
We are also eager to see your thoughts in comments for this article! Let us know what you think about the problem, criterias and solution!
