Issam’s Blog

Are you still using Excel to manage your testcases? Granted Excel is powerful, but as spreadsheet software, not as a fully fledged test management tool. Due to the extravagant cost of commercial test management tools or the lack of features in the existing tools, Excel has been repurposed to become the de facto test management system for a lot of the small companies and some of the larger ones as well.

Excel is no longer the way to do things, excel does not have the following :

• Access from anywhere in the world with any browser
• Concurrent user access with no data access issues
• Version controlling of changes with easy rollback features
• Real-time metrics and stats regarding testing

Zephyr test management system allows for all these features and much more, in addition to making it easy to migrate from Excel by providing robust importation capabilities to help ease the move.

Offshore or not to offshore? That is a very important question and depending on how you handle it could make or break the Quality of your product. I’ve heard a lot of my peers and industry QA managers saying that offshoring is plagued with problems in effectiveness, productivity and communication, and if they could choose again between offshoring or not, they would not go through with it.

In every business there is always pressure to drive Dev and QA costs down and that is typically achieved by offshoring portions if not all the work to India, China or South America. In those situations, you try and put all the necessary processes in place to manage it and keep it sane unfortunately to no avail. Reporting, communication, competency and productivity problems always arise, that make you wish you never gotten into offshoring.

Do not be disheartened, you can still get a handle on these problems. Zephyr Test Management System helps you manage a lot of those aspects with dashboards offering real-time metrics and reports, clear and open communication and collaboration between onsite and offshore, document management and versioning, and easy assignments and scheduling capabilities.

There is a constant quest for the latest update on what the Quality Assurance group is doing during a release or test cycle. I used to be asked that question on a regular basis and the information I had most of the time was generic, incomplete, unsatisfactory, or a few hours old. I used to spend 2-4 hours of my day building reports in Excel and Word to present to executives. I used to also wonder what my QA folks are doing or if they are doing anything at all specially when dealing with outsourced offshore delivery centers.

No more…

By far, the best (and my favorite) feature in Zephyr is the dynamic Live Dashboards. One glance and you’re mesmerized, not only by the fancy looking charts but by the abundance of information provided in them and the real-time data being pushed to update those charts and tables on the fly. There is no more need to go looking for information to collate and write up in a report. The reports and dashboards are ready and self updating as things change in the system (test cases being created/executed and bugs being filed/resolved/closed, etc.). You don’t need to wait till the end of the day to get a status from your leads/testers, it’s all in-front of you and available faster than on-demand.

Check this feature out here

I’ve been in Quality Assurance for over 12 years and have used or tried out many tools that were supposedly designed to help with test management and organization. I’ve ended up most of the time getting back to Excel as my preferred tool of choice. The majority of these tools promote intuitive UI, excellent built-in reporting, “ease of use”, and flexibility, only to find out that these are features they really lack. These tools have been designed and built by developers and product mangers that have no idea how QA functions and what makes life easier for us.

Then comes Zephyr, a tool designed by QA for QA. We’ve built Zephyr from the ground up with the latest technologies to adapt to how we ourselves have run or seen other QA organizations managed. It is designed around the daily activities of the QA Manager, Leads and Testers. We’ve tried to keep it simple in providing individual desktops with the necessary tools for each one of these roles. These desktops all share the same framework that encompasses built-in collaboration IM, live dashboards and integrations with existing defect tracking tools and automation systems. We use it ourselves in-house and have integrated it with our internal Bugzilla system for defect tracking.

We’ve also wanted something cool in addition to being functional; most tools out there look clunky and boring. QA is already a very monotonous task and we wanted the tools that we use and look at all the time to have some pizzazz. So we’ve added Skins/Themes, RSS feeds and other cool features to it.

Oh yeah and we’re also not as pricy as some of those other folks

The GA is coming out pretty soon, however we’re currently in Beta and adding new cool features all the time. You can sign-up for it here.