Do you develop software?
I suspect if you are looking at blogs in this space then that’s probably true, or at least it might be an area of interest for you.
Do you carry out End User Testing?
Well again, if you develop software then in most cases you are likely to be doing so with users in mind.
So End User Testing can be a pretty difficult thing to really get to grips with. In Applications Division we have adopted a technology called TestRail to help us, and frankly, it’s really doing an impressive job
http://www.gurock.com/testrail/
TestRail allows us to do things that have previously been terrifically hard and complex to coordinate. It allows us to understand how User Testing is going and to rapidly get defects straight back into development as they surface in our testing processes. Tracking progress is done through a very intuitive gui and when defects are found they are created by the tester and JIRA is created immediately. No messing about, straight back to development. This is really impacting our productivity positively
Often with big systems there can be quite literally hundreds of workflows and user test cases that need to be validated by teams of End User Testers. Keeping track of progress, or actually more importantly lack of progress, is a project manager’s nightmare. Traditionally, teams have used things like spreadsheets, email and word of mouth to know how far testers are getting on with their test scenarios and plans. Often, people unfortunately become distracted or have their plans interrupted or perhaps they might be unexpectedly absent from work. Knowing someone has not managed to complete a set of tests is crucial in making sure that things are not disappearing down rabbit holes and so that projects can complete in time.
Getting issues straight back to development allows us to start working on the problem or defect straight away, we don’t need to wait until the test run has completed, getting the tester to create the JIRA when the defect is found really speeds things up
Surfacing this has often been a really difficult thing to do but TestRail really helps to address this. It is easy to interpret and allows the project to adapt to the current situation in a way that would not really have been possible previously
We have introduced TestRail as part of our Digital Transformation programme.
You can find out more here;
http://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/dti002
Currently we are using TestRail in Human Resources and Finance. We are extending its use to link into both agile and waterfall projects and expect to adopt this across the entire range of projects we undertake in Apps
If you fancy finding out more about how we are getting on with this please do get in touch
Iain