Test Management Tools – Are they Useful or Not?

[Ronan Healy]

I read a recent discussion on test management tools and features that should be included in them One comment sparked my interest.

The poster said that test management tools should not exist at all as they add another layer of admin for testers that they don’t need, add little value to their work and are more for management to report pass/failure rates.

What do you think? Are they just for large companies or would you say that test management tools are useful for everyone whatever size company.

Are test management one that test managers are fond of but testers are not? I would be interested in what you think about this.

[Jesper]

it depends – but usually yes. 🙂
A test management tool can be anything from a white board to HPQC, postits, email or handcoded in sharepoint. If there is room for test management then there is need for a tool. and it’s not about pass/fail rates – as even HPQC can be used for session based test management.

[Alex]

I agree with Jesper, it depends.

If the project is big and so are the development and testing teams, a test management tool is useful for managing test scripts, test cases, bugs, requirements, etc.

But for a small project, the only thing that a test management tool brings is overhead.

I have worked in many small projects where excel was more than adequate for managing testing.

Alex

[Ron]

For large projects most definitely. For smaller projects, I think Alex nailed it with regards to his comment about Excel.

[marzio]

Agree: excel rocks most of the time!
for the rest… there are tricks in every trade!

[Avinash]

For one liner code change and a couple of test cases, you may not need a TM tool to be used. However if you need to manage multiple testcases, multiple people, multiple runs of the same tests, large number of defects – a test management tool becomes inevitable. It saves a lot of tester’s time in managing them
However requirement traceability – not helped much since in our scenario, testers enter the requirements. So it becomes an overhead to update them.
We use HPQC.

[Matthias]

Excel is nice, OK. But think about what Excel is and is not!

Please don`t forget projects where you are committed to test documentation because of laws. In this case there is no alternate option for using a test management tool (Excel is not a test management tool). Each test management tool is also helpful for test specification. So you can save time for more important and interesting things.
I’ve seen many projects which have started with Excel and came to a point where Excel was not scalable even more (often months or years later).

The point is: Be aware of your needs (what are your requirements?) and look always for your probable needs in the future (will Excel really fit your requirements if your project gets bigger and bigger?).

[a]

There’s no one tool to rule them all.. A test management tool helps handle the “meta-data” in an organization. The degree to which you need control over these meta-data dictates how heavy or lightweight a solution you need. I work in med device and there’s no question that a good process supported by a good heavyweight enterprise-grade TM tool reduces overhead and gives the test team a competitive edge.

[Author]

Posts