There are many test management tools available in the market. How do you choose the right one?
Before you start examining different tools, make sure you are clear on the needs of your organization or project. It is wise to involve all stakeholders, both IT and business, in this inventory. Especially as the role of end-users in testing and acceptance is increasing. For example, testing with end-users is different from testing with test professionals. Once you have identified all your needs, you can start checking and comparing the features of various software packages.
Test management refers to the activity of managing a software testing process. That process starts with defining requirements and risks, designing test cases, and plan the milestones and test runs. After the design phase, the actual testers can run the tests. After testing, the analyze phase starts with investigating the test results, create and manage the issues, and make the reports for your stakeholders. A test management tool is a software solution used to achieve these phases.
A test management tool must maintain all the manual testing activities (or to gather data out of an automated test). As said, these are to define requirements and risks, design test cases, plan test runs, analyze test results, and manage related issues. The whole process is managed by a test management tool to make your work easier and reusable. These are the most outstanding selection criteria in choosing test management software. By clicking on the topic, you can read more about the options test management tools offer.
Being able to use a test management tool easily is essential. In practice, we often hear that it takes so much extra work to use a test tool. You must, therefore, learn and organize the tool completely. That you have to learn the tool makes sense, but an excellent test management tool is intuitive. And that it is much work to set up the tool is of course nonsense. You still have to test, so in principle, you have the designs and planning ready, or you still have to make it. TestMonitor is up and running in 30 seconds, and you can get started right away.
Having a single source of truth for all problem types helps to set the right priorities. Bug and problem tracking software help to follow these issues. Everyone in the team must be aware of their status and impact. TestMonitor offers an integrated bug tracker solution so that you can manage all problems immediately in addition to quick and easy testing. In addition to the integrated solution, there are various links with external parties. For example, Zapier, Jira, Topdesk, DoneDone, Asana, DevOps, Mantis, etc. And the best thing of all is that you can automatically or manually send each problem to different external parties. How nice is that? You work in a project with three partners, where partner A uses Jira, partner B Mantis and partner C does not have an internal system. Everyone covered.
Communication is the basis of a successful project. With a test management tool, you must be able to communicate with your stakeholders easily. And there are quite a few during a complex test process. Consider the testers themselves. They can test at different locations in different time zones. Consider the project managers. They want real-time information about the status and impact of the test results and open issues. You also have the owners of the outstanding issues and can be people from different organizations. How often do partners not participate in an IT project?
A test management tool must be able to present the correct information at all these different levels quickly.
In practice, we often see that especially issues outside the test management tool are provided with comments. And usually via mail or an Excel with 25 columns. How difficult is it to get a grip on that. In this way, impossible. TestMonitor has come up with a solution for this: a complete communication platform integrated into the issue manager. Any authorized person can comment on the issue or reply to a previous comment made.
TestMonitor used the same technique for test results. How easy is it as a test manager to post a comment on a test result, where the tester in question immediately receives a notification.
In this way, you not only have control over your status and impact of your test results and issues but also on all communication around it.
In every test process, everyone must be aware of what is going on. Whether you have a complex process or a simple process: communication is the basis of success. There is a complete notification center within TestMonitor. Do you want notifications about planning, about changes to issues that you have created, or do you want all notifications? In your settings, you can switch the notification type on or off per subject. You can also choose how you to be informed. By email, Slack, or solely in TestMonitor itself.
In addition to functionalities, authorization options are also relevant when choosing a test management tool. The most important question is whether you have predefined permissions or roles that you cannot change yourself. Or you can compile your roles.
If you cannot set the roles yourself, what are the roles? You have two roles: the admin and the tester. Or is there still variation?
Within TestMonitor, you get several standard roles, with which you can easily and quickly have the most critical authorizations, such as a tester, manager, and auditor who can only read. You can also define your roles in TestMonitor. For example, you can give someone the right to view the requirements and risks, to act as a tester, and to provide issues with comments. And you do not have access to the analysis section and the reports. TestMonitor gives much flexibility for your authorizations in your project.
It is so evident that there is an excellent support. Is there? TestMonitor has a team of specialists who are waiting for a question to be asked. Also, there is second line support, which also includes the development team to resolve specific problems quickly. So, when selecting a test management tool, also look at the support possibilities.
Real-time insight into your testing status and progress. Track the workload of your entire team with real-time status and progress reports for test runs, test cases, and issues. TestMonitor integrated reports for requirements, risks, test runs, test results, and issues. View traceability, progress, and coverage reports. View issue reports per status, impact, category, priority, or organization. The powerful filter options for report generation offers real-time insights. Filter, for example, on your defined requirements and risks, planned milestones, or by the tester.
As indicated, learning a test management tool is part of the starting process. TestMonitor is so intuitive and user-friendly that every tester (end-user or professional) knows within 30 seconds how he or she should record results, whether or not supported with attachments and comments. The manager who has to make the designs and planning has a little more work, but here, too, user-friendliness is decisive. The time must, therefore, be spent on making good designs and schedules and not on setting them up in the test management tool. And once a good design and planning have been set up, how easy is it to reuse it continuously. That will generate much time (and money).
Testing on any device. TestMonitor is built on the state of art web platforms. TestMonitor is fully compatible with any device. So you can test on your desktop with an iPad next to you.
The licensing model is also an important criterium. There are different possible models: Pay per ticket or test result; Pay per project or per report. Pay per named user or concurrent user. TestMonitor has an active user model. We believe that everyone should be able to test, but that you do not have to buy a separate license for everyone. So it cannot be that you are going to test a complex IT project acceptance test, where tester one and tester two have tested. And where tester1 is actually "corrupted" Jason, Carel, and Barbara. In addition to the fact that this is not correct for traceability, reporting, and history, the potential auditor or auditor will also question this. TestMonitor can set up Jason, Carel, and Barbara as testers. Your number of users is based on active testers. Clear and straightforward plans for teams and businesses, in every stage and of every size.
Maintainability is no longer the highest priority in the cloud world because everyone has already become so used to automatic updates and releases. That everyone is used to it is still independent of the vendor of the software. How many releases are there per month or year. How innovative is the vendor with changes to the software? TestMonitor has released an average of 24 releases per year in recent years.
Traceability is an essential criterium in a test management tool. It is important to maintain relationships how and when specific test results were achieved and which derived this caused issues. Besides, you always want to know what impact, status changes, comments, and so forth. Have taken place to resolve the issues. You want to see this information related to people, but also to dates and times. If a problem has a retest status, you want to quickly schedule a retest with the right test cases and correct testers. In the event of a fail, you can immediately ask the owners of the issue. And with a pass, you can close the problem quickly.
Security, guaranteed. For our software, security is par for the course. All communication between our customers and TestMonitor is encrypted with an RSA 2048-bit encryption (Thawte SSL). Each customer has their domain name and database; our Support department only views the data at the customer's request. We run an encrypted backup every four hours. TestMonitor's infrastructure is provided by a third-party, which is ISO 9001, 27001, 14001, NEN 7510, and PCI DDS certified.
Connect your favorite apps with TestMonitor. Automatically create issues in Jira, Mantis, or Asana. Receive Slack notifications when a test run is complete. These are some examples of the options for linking with external parties. Also, there is an open API, with which your entire database can be accessed for accessing data or adding data.
You can import requirements and risks. Or import complete test cases. Can you import your issues in addition to the related issues from the test results? And vice versa: which data can you export? TestMonitor has import and export options for all components so that you can quickly set up the existing data. Besides, with our open API, the data can be set up or extracted.
With this checklist, you will be able to choose the right test management software. For detailed information per tool also check out the comparisons with other test management software on our website.
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