I currently work as a freelance developer with a few smaller startups and companies. When it comes to QA and testing, these companies are usually all over the place. I’ve made sure to boost our test coverage and automation, but I’m typically hired to quickly build some new feature or fix bugs left by other developers no longer at the company. I can’t really go as deep as I’d like, so there’s still a lot of manual and exploratory testing that needs to take place.
Since there’s no dedicated testers on board at these places, they have a very rough test plan, usually written down in a shared document or spreadsheet. Testing is done ad-hoc, with multiple people testing different things without any sense of who’s testing what. It’s just really unorganized and leads to missed coverage that’s noticed only after deploying to production.
These organizations aren’t in a spot to hire dedicated QA (or have a strong desire to hire, to be honest), so I thought a good stop-gap would be to organize their testing efforts a bit more. I’ve done some work for mid-sized companies in the past and many used test case management tools for QA and it helped a lot with organizing their testing efforts. I thought of introducing a similar tool for these smaller places, but I couldn’t really find anything suitable for small organizations.
Looking around, it seems like almost all test case management tools are built for medium and large companies only. They have tons of advanced features mainly focused at places with dedicated QA departments and large testing teams. Obviously, they’re priced for those companies, too, making them cost-prohibitive for a small startup. The open-source tools I found don’t look too user-friendly or intuitive, especially for people at startups with no QA experience.
While admittedly most startups could care less about organizing their software testing activities, I feel like there could be a space for a smaller test case management tool that doesn’t cost so much, doesn’t need extensive training to even get started, or have too many fancy bells and whistles that these small places won’t use any time soon.
Is there a reason for this? Am I thinking incorrectly that small companies can benefit from a tool that handles the basics like creating test plans, test cases, generate test runs, and get reports? Just something to keep people organized that goes beyond a shared spreadsheet, so they can see how testing is helping them out. It feels like a missed opportunity.