Stand-Alone Test Management for an Independent QA Team

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Good morning, colleagues! Our testing team is in need of a stand-alone Test Case Management tool. I’ve reviewed similar topics, and usually the first response is “describe your team”, so I’ve included some details here because our setup is a bit complicated. If you can relate to our story, I would love to hear about what tool your team is using and why you think it’s great.

Here’s the backstory:

Once upon a time, we used MTM in conjunction with TFS to write tests, track them, report on them - it was beautifully integrated with development processes and our three-man QA team was productive and content. As often happens, however, one day It Was Decided by far-off Corporate that we would replace TFS with JIRA, and our testing team has been frustrated ever since.

Our project and development teams are using the Atlassian products. Currently, QA enters bugs and defects in JIRA and works them from there. For various reasons, we can’t integrate a third-party test tool with JIRA, which renders a majority of the most common test management tools useless. I’ve had a difficult time finding a tool that isn’t dependent on maintaining the entire project within their own system, i.e. User Stories, Tasks and Bugs. We need a tool designed specifically for QA teams, to run and track our QA testing activities.

I’m looking for a tool that will help us do the following:

• Create Test Plans for manual testing
• Organize test cases in suites under these test plans
• Upload test cases with test steps and expected results in bulk from a spreadsheet/csv (very important)
• Copy repeatable test cases to multiple suites
• Execute test cases/test plans, whether as a one-off or as a set
• View and record test results
• Re-run test cases for regression testing
• Create a library of test cases, accessible by anyone on the team
• Objects are centralized so it’s easy to collaborate
• Analyze test runs (progress charts, pass/failed/blocked, etc.)
• Create somewhat useful reports for stakeholders, devs and managers, for example:

  1. Who has tested what
  2. Where the bottlenecks are
  3. How much we still have left to do
  4. What percentage of the tests have passed/failed

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Thank you,
Lizz

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Hi! Take a look at TestLink. It’s easy to setup, has nice reporting capabilities, simple UI, and you can even create bugs in Jira right from its UI. The only downside is that it’s not being supported anymore.

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Definitely check out TestLodge too. I think it ticks everything on your list, and is really flexible/easy to use. The team over there is really great/responsive as well.

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You may give a look at Xray which may be especially relevant in your case if you’re using Jira. Xray lives inside Jira and leverage Jira concepts in order to deal with some testing related concepts. This will give you many benefits if you’re familiar with Jira ecosystem, that you can take advantage of also for your testing related assets.
You can give it a try as it free (no matter what tool you end up with, I would highly recommend you to give them a try).

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I’m not sure it will be fulfilled all your requirements but worth giving attention: https://qase.io/ it’s quite useful in all my projects.

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