Test Management Tools for large system

Hi all,

I’m starting to look into test management tools for my team and just looking for some advice from people who may have been through a similar process and any tips on which tools to look into.

We’re a team of about 16 QA’s split over the company working on a monolith of a system. We currently use Confluence to document our testing activities and while this has kind of worked for us up until now, I know there are better ways this could be done to make us more productive.

Our system is split into a ‘core’ base system and then we have multiple client projects that are built off of this. A client may only take a subset of these core features and then they will have their own client specific features on top as well.

Confluence pages make it difficult to track changes made between releases, and how core changes will impact different clients. Also because our system is so big, it can take anyone new joining the team months to get the hang of it so it would be nice to have a better way of documenting how it should be working.

The way I’m seeing this tool working is to have scenarios written for all the core features and some how relate these to the clients which use them, and then have the client specific ones on top. So when I come to run a test I have a list of what needs to be included in my regression.

I hope that made some sort of sense.

I’ve found with some tools it doesn’t seem possible to reuse steps between projects which doesn’t seem to fit with how i was wanting it to work above. Does anyone know of any tools that would work with how I’m expecting above or am I going about this the wrong way?

What activities do you document? Why would you need to document them? Is some manager asking you to document things for them? Or are you doing it for yourselves? Are you re-using these documented activities regularly?

Changes are made in a product. You get the changes from reviewing the code yourselves, or through devs & business requiring and implementing the features.
If you don’t understand how the changes impact different parts of the applications you have some knowledge gap you have to catch up with. Get a few developers to explain you the architecture of the application. Explore the code yourself to understand how modules or different projects are being used.

With the new people, that’s normal everywhere. I think you could sketch some high level things. The more in depth you go the more useless your documentation will get over time(as things change). I’ve seen people working for 3-5 years on the same product and not deeply understanding it. They knew a few parts of it well. Some people are not made for learning, exploring, experimenting with products, so they might not fit that well into some teams. You can’t force them…

I’m not sure a tool would help you. I’d consider investing in more learning, collaboration between testers, integration with the developers.

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