SQA Mate is no longer a prototype
Software Quality Assurance’s Mate — a tool, that has been designed to help Quality Assurance Engineers all over the world to do their hard routine work much faster and easier, now is going to switch from beta to production.
Currently available design served to us as a UI/UX prototype for a long time:
This already a bit overwhelmed design helped me a lot to understand what UI and UX do really help QA Engineers at their daily work. And what would we, as a QA wanted in future.
I found an initial commit to SQA Mate repo in mid-2015! That’s crazy! I thought the project was 2 years old or so… but it’s already 3 and a half years! Look what it looked like through the years:
Tens of teams around the World dared to use this evolving prototype design on their real projects, supporting me as a developer to continue my work on the project. Thank you all, guys! I remember and value everyone! Your constant feedback has been driven this tool development all these years. Every thought, every complain has been heard and deeply understood.
That’s why there’s a part of you in this tool! Because users ARE contributors!
Learned lessons, feature requests, made design mistakes, etc., etc. reached a critical mass and this evolved into SQA Mate architecture redesign for both frontend and backend. And that means, that SQA Mate release is coming!
What will be in SQA Mate 1.0?
UI Plugin Architecture
First of all, I decided to redesign UI architecture to a thing that I call “a plugin architecture”. Now everything is a plugin: working area — is a plugin, menu — is a plugin, tree, test case details rendering, skin — are plugins:
These plugins would be:
- default, built-in plugins — you can enable and disable plugins for your whole company account or only for yourself;
- custom, self-written plugins — same, as above, but now you can create UI JavaScript plugins for SQA Mate right in SQA Mate. Nothing to install — just write and experiment to get what you need of the system;
- custom, 3-rd party plugins — are plugins, that other companies promoted as being published in the “market” to be available for another companies to be used.
UI Plugin architecture, I believe, will significantly improve UI without overwhelming it and without disturbing UX when new feature goes in, because it will go as a plugin and most of the time as a disabled-by-default plugin.
Container-based backend
Backend is switched to containers to let self-hosted delivery of the system for those companies that wanted to keep their test cases in their datacenters. This change will allow SQA Mate to be installed anywhere fast and easy!
Pricing change
Important: none of existing accounts will be affected by this!
SQA Mate now is in “Public Beta” stage. But with a new SQA Mate 1.0 delivery (Spring 2019) the price and a trial period will be added for new signups. Starting prices are still under discussion and will be available later.
That’s why, if you plan to use the system sometime — harry up: try and signup SQA Mate for free!
P.S.: If you found this article useful, please, don’t hesitate to give it some claps — to let more people to know about it! Thank you!
