30 Days of Agile Testing, Day 21: How are you managing your testing?

When I saw todays task, my initial response was “probably badly”.

In my previous role I used to use a test case management board in JIRA (It wasn’t Zephyr but I can’t think what the implementation was). I would write a test case, it would be reviewed by someone on the team and deemed suitable to execute. I would then execute each one and give it a pass/fail/blocked status. I then moved to a checklist style of tracking so I could manage my time better around testing. This worked much better for me and the visibility for upper management was clearer. Or at least they were getting metrics that made more sense!

When I moved to my new company they had a really old Zephyr suite that nobody had given love to in quite a while. I haven’t had the time to go back and bring it up to speed yet.

Now I don’t feel I’m managing so much as firefighting :sweat_smile: I pretty much go on instinct from story to story and hope for the best. I realise it’s not the best way to manage my testing and I am working to improve that.

I’m hoping to use some of your suggestions for managing testing to guide me :smile:

On that note: how are you managing your testing? Is it a fluid process or are there a lot of stages to it? Do you feel like you are managing it well or are you more like me and feeling that it’s just not right? Are you using a tool like Zephyr or TestRail?

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I tried out TestRail try and I fell in love! Trying to get my company to purchase and give it a shot on some of our bigger releases.

Overall, I don’t think we’re managing our test cases well. We definitely need more organization and a one public place where all devs, PMs and QA can go and view whats being tested and what has failed/passed.

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Hello,

I used different tools to handle testing (Quality Center, SquashTM, Jira, Redmine, TestRails, HipTest, qTest, Office suite).
It depends on the value you expect from documentation level, or test execution followup in itself.
I find it quite hard to estimate the time spent testing activities, but having a definition of done helps me a lot.
For a while, my product owner used to wait until QA Team has considered the story “Ready for Demo”.
Now, we let him having a look at the changes as soon as they are in the test environments.
We got rid of any test case management tool and we do not feel like we miss one.

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Amazing job by @davewesterveld blogging his way through this challenge!

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