"SaaS-based Test Management"

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"Conceptualized by the testers, QMetry is a SaaS based comprehensive test management platform that provides a tester friendly interface, and provides powerful capabilities that help QA teams to integrate, collaborate and co-ordinate the entire testing process to increase testing effectiveness and efficiencies."
Source : QMetry

Resources Related to SaaS-based Test Management:

• Software as a Service (SaaS) (Wikipedia)

SaaS-based Test Management

Executive Summary

In the world of dynamic software, which changes every day to adapt to customer demands, the quality is always of prime concern. To manage customer expectations and mitigate associated risks we are constantly asking ourselves the same question, "Will the application work as expected when it goes live?" In order to answer that question we must look at 4 basic areas of concern. First, have all the critical functional requirements been validated? Second, have all the critical use cases been tested? Third, were we able to keep pace with the volume and frequency of changes? Finally, do we know what the quality/risk tradeoffs are for the release? An uncertainty to any of these questions can lead to delay in release, resulting in loss of revenue and ultimately, failure.

When analyzing the four basic areas of concern, most of the uncertainty falls in the quality process of testing. Moreover, is the quality process efficient and effective? According to recent research we might be surprised if we dig a little deeper. According to IDC (need citation) 75% of teams don't know what to test. Even if they do know what to test, are they doing enough testing? Gartner says NO, as 50% of projects get rolled back (citation). This can be very troubling as test management is only becoming more complex as we move forward.

Today's software development and QA teams are distributed, trying to follow the sun model for faster deployment. QA teams are getting overwhelmed with the complexity of the tasks and the large amount of information that needs to be managed and communicated throughout the software testing lifecycle. Test engineers are spending more time understanding the change and managing different tools, rather than testing. This leads to concerns regarding valuable time and where resources are being spent. Overall, it makes it really difficult to gauge what is going on during the testing lifecycle. The inability to have transparency throughout the process makes it difficult for not only QA team, but managers and eventually CEO's and Vice Presidents of organizations as well.

This paper summarizes the challenges faced by today's software development as well as testing organization and proposes a solution for next generation of test management solution to deliver high quality software to your end consumers with confidence.

Why Test Management Tools are required?

The rapid progression in technology just highlights the fact further that test management is no longer optional. Test Management tools are necessary as they enable objectivity and efficiency. A proper test management tool can help address several areas of concern:

• What to test and how does it help to address business objectives?
• Where we are in the testing cycle and what is the coverage?
• To address the change in business lifecycle, what should QA team be doing next?
• What are the risks and how are they being mitigated?
• Are we doing enough to meet customer expectations?

Qmetry is a next generation test management tool that can help address these concerns and many more based on your business objectives. Qmetry is designed by test engineers, specifically for test engineers as who else would understand their needs better? The fundamental reason behind the existence of QMetry is to allow testing teams to focus on testing with the process that works for them without having to worry about installing a product, learning new processes and spending valuable time to generate various reports. Qmetry supports installed version as well as hosted instance. The hosted instance enables easy access from multiple locations, meanwhile eliminating installation & support dilemmas as well as backup of test assets. For larger projects an installed version is available. The product utilizes a dashboard which has real-time updates and quality metrics, keeping everyone on the team up to date with the project. In addition, Qmetry offers version control, which records all modifications, additions, or deletions that can be viewed to get historic perspective of testing effort.

What is QMetry?

Open source testing technologies have come of age. Today, you can download rich open source test technologies that hit the ground running. Be it java unit testing, defect management, web service testing or GUI testing, you are likely to find mature open source technologies that serve the cause efficiently. What is missing is a platform that integrates execution and results of these open source and commercial tools. The tools execute in silos and management is often left wondering how to draw information from the results and make decisions.

QMetry's vision is to be the next generation convergence platform for test technologies either commercial tools or open source tools. QMetry will provide a platform that integrates, summarizes operational data from test tools and represent it on a dashboard such that it forms a decision support system.

To continue its promise of becoming the next generation open source convergence platform, QMetry itself is built on open source technologies - Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL. (Should we highlight this as we support Windows, other app servers and db servers also??)

QMetry Features

• TEST REQUIREMENTS MANAGEMENT - Managing Requirements and respective changes is at the core of successful testing effort. QMetry provides extensive capability to manage requirements and link them to testcases as well as defects for traceability analysis.
• TEST PLAN MANAGEMENT - Test Plan is an initial step for QA team to communicate its testing strategy with other teams. "Test Plan Wizard" assists you in creating a detailed as well as customizable test plan while helping you to evaluate the quality of the application at every stage of the testing process.
• TEST CASE ORGANIZATION MANAGEMENT - Agility to changes in requirements as well as schedule and still delivering desired Quality goals is very important in today's software world. QMetry provides a task and resource management interface that gives detail of current workload and automatically allocates tasks to available resources.
• TEST EXECUTION MANAGEMENT - Test Execution is a standard used to gauge the quality of software. QMetry provides a dynamic interface to execute testcases based on quality objectives, changes, and requirements to maximize the impact of QA resources efforts. QMetry keeps pass/fail/not executed information at test case step level as well as provides summary for overall testing progress indication. The failure of test execution can be linked to defects enabling traceability.
• TEST DATA MANAGEMENT — Predictable test data is essential to create a repeatable test set. QMetry offers capability to manage Test Data and associate them at step level. It gives you the ability to isolate the test data from step and manages the change in test data across testcases.
• DEFECT MANAGEMENT - Regularly, the effectiveness of testing teams is measured by defects discovered during the testing process. QMetry provides a flexible defect management module that can be customized to meet QA teams' needs. QMetry also provides Web services based API to integrate external Defect and/or Issue Management systems in the testing process. QMetry makes Defect tracking simple & efficient while reporting on Quality Metrics.
• CHANGE MANAGEMENT — Keeping track of changes in requirements, testcases and defects is very vital to the success of a QA organization. QMetry keeps track of change history with date/time stamp, users and machine details for most of the testing assets. All modifications, additions, or deletions are recorded and can be viewed by selecting the respective version.
• RELEASE & BUILD MANAGEMENT — Software is usually deployed in incremental feature sets, which are released in successive builds. QMetry Release and Build Management capability provides a comprehensive means to identify scope of testing efforts and align the testing efforts effectively.

The Tools of QMetry

• QMetry Dashboard —The Dashboard has Real-Time updates that can be accessed from a centralized repository, allowing your QA Team to actively see information regardless of geographical location. In addition, the interactive graphs allow users to decipher through the large amounts of data instantaneously. Quality Metrics provide the necessary details to enable "Go-No Go" decision making. QMetry product management team has collected various attributes that help measure the progress of testing effort objectively. QMetry comes with industry standard Quality Metrics out of the box.
• Qmetry Centralized Repository and Web services - QMetry stores all the test assets in version controlled centralized repository. Information is available to different users based on the access privileges. Centralized repository can be backed-up regularly for easier maintenance, relieving users from desktop based system maintenance issues.
• QMetry Version Control - Keeping track of changes in requirements, testcases and defects is vital to the success of a QA organization. QMetry keeps track of change history with date/time stamp, users and machine details for most of the testing assets. All modifications, additions, or deletions are recorded and can be viewed by selecting the respective version. Version Control on centralized repository allows you to track updates & changes from anywhere.
• QMetry Customization- Success for test management deployment is dependent on its ability to adapt to various processes. QMetry provides a non-programming interface to create Custom fields; User defined list management and workflow customization.
• QMetry Import — QMetry provides a readymade import tool for importing requirements, test plan, test cases and defects straight from excel, making the process seamless.
• QMetry Query and Report Writer- QMetry provides extensive reports out of the box that can enable objective decision making about product quality. QMetry provides JASPER as well as Custom Query based reporting capability to create a wide array of reports and save them in .pdf, HTML, .rtf or .csv format.

Conclusion

Organizations today must answer to the call of technology and adapt their QA processes in order to continuously succeed. Test management is no longer optional. The proper test management tool allows for objectivity and efficiency, at the same time enabling an organization to monitor quality at every step of the testing cycle. QMetry provides the organizations with all the information they need to know such as; the precise step in the testing cycle they are at, the next steps and the risks being mitigated while controlling the costs as well as saving the time.

Corporate Headquarters
QMetry 3003 Bunker Hill Lane, #104
Santa Clara, CA 95054 www.QMetry.com

Table of Contents

• Executive Summary
• Why Test Management Tools are required
• What is QMetry?
• QMetry Features
• The Tools of QMetry
• Conclusion