Has anyone used any tools (not excel) be useful for QA Planning to determine Timelines and resources needed?

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As a QA Manager, I have worked on projects within gaming industry with QA teams consisting of both external testing outsource vendors (temporary) & internal QA (permanent hires). Typically consisting of 80+ testers in total.

Internal QA would have more experience with higher seniority that would design tests & execute higher risk and technically complex testing and delegate lower risk testing to QA vendors.

QA Vendors (externally) typically had very little/no experience with testing (sometimes being their very first job/project in QA) would execute test case and conduct any manual regression (smoke, sanity, E2E regression packs).

Here below are challenges/problems I faced with this setup, which I used various of spreadsheets to maintain which was very time consuming process.

So I am wondering if anyone has used any tools (not a spreadsheet) to address these problems/challenges?

1.) To collect data on how much manual regression effect is required. For an example, smoke regression pack - How much tests in smoke test? How people needed to complete to by when? 10 tests, one hour, 2 testers per platform. Or end to end regression of 600 tests, 4 days, 8 testers per platform.

2.) To plan out the effect required to test a feature for STLC. Feature 1 takes QA 3 days - half day to collect requirements, half day to write tests, one day to execute tests & one day to retest if there is bugs needed to fix.

3.) Average time per test activity for across all features. For an example, bug re-testing activity takes longest. You as manager can figure out why that is - Developers can fixing bugs or QA not putting up bugs quick enough?

4.) QA Vendors typically don’t want to be transparent who is working on, who is available for work to assign tasks nor to communicate how long tasks took to execute. Is there a tool used to assign tasks at scale of 60 testers & visibility who is working on what or who is free for work?

Typically I would create multiple spreadsheets to achieve but it is alot work with mixed results. Just wondering if there is other alternative tools that I can use to save time on sheet creation & maintenance?

Any thoughts is much appreciated. Thanks,

Chris

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I have used TestRail to generate similar reports. Takes a bit of effort setting up the test cases to include labels and times etc but reporting is decent once it is done.

You can see the report examples here - TestRail Reports

Isn’t the cheapest tool though.

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@a_mcanirn Thank you for your insight. Funny you say that because I’ve used Testrail before and I had to export out the data as spreadsheet import into another sheet to create graphs (to cross data that I wanted) due to the limited report options.

Also the problem was the time wasn’t accurate I found as TR didn’t know when QA has stopped working. Then again QA didn’t use the time function per TC to get accurate reading nor did we assign TCs function to team members either.

I felt that Testrail was a good Test management tool (middle man) for small simple waterfall projects to manage small amount of tests (600 tests) but it didn’t scale for a big complex projects (8000 tests) nor designed for customize reporting for context for people outside of QA.

It has a year now since we were using TR, so perhaps TR has changed since or we were not using in right way. I still haven’t seen test tool that can give a bigger overview to make decisions at this scale as yet.