The growing popularity of automated testing – running the tests without human intervention ensures faster releases without compromising quality. If the software is not working right or does not adhere to certain standards, it can damage the company’s reputation as a reliable software provider and negatively impact on the way clients deal with the products or services. That’s why establishing a well-managed quality assurance process is the key to delivering high-quality products or services with high standards.
Introducing a test management system for automated tests allows you to build more effective workflows. This helps you increase efficiency within the development lifecycle and solve complex testing issues. Once it is implemented properly, your business can start to benefit, boosting productivity and efficiency. Moreover, it opens up ample opportunity to increase output and improve the testing process in various ways. Keep on reading to reveal more details below!
QA process: What’s it exactly?
When it comes to software development, the quality assurance (QA) process is considered to be an extremely important element that runs along all stages of the software development lifecycle and checks whether a piece of software meets specified requirements or not.
It helps engineers to identify areas in the software solution that should be improved and optimized as well as enables them to test the final product. By collecting feedback from real users, they can make additional improvements based on their insights. If scheduled from the very start, QA teams can launch a software product that meets high business requirements and high standards with ease.
Challenges of quality assurance process
Without a test management system in place, it is highly problematic for QA teams to perform fast and accurate testing activities to deliver a great piece of software. Moreover, they face many challenges when performing their day-to-day tasks. Let’s take a closer look at some of those issues that they encounter:
- Miscommunication in the team: Lack of clarity over tasks makes collaboration and communication difficult among development and QA teams. Moreover, the inability to keep them fully informed on important changes and provide them with correct information increases unproductivity and has a damaging impact on the future piece of software.
- Lack of automation: It’s no secret that the testing process takes a long time if done manually. Having that in mind, failing to accommodate automation in this process contributes to spending a lot of time on running tests as well as fixing glitches after the release.
- Scattered data: Not keeping data identical between two or more systems contributes to making business-critical mistakes. Team members are forced to input data manually in different systems that make this process tedious and time-consuming. This results in making poor decisions, generating inaccurate reports, etc.
- Lack of testing strategy: Without a testing strategy, the team doesn’t have a clear picture of the project. Moreover, it’s impossible to create a thought process that helps to structure the QA activities, keep every team member informed, and discover some unexpected issues, including logical gaps, requirements that aren’t being met, etc.
- Poor requirements and scattered data: Dealing with poorly-written documentation leads to misunderstandings when interpreting requirements and uncertainty regarding the QA process. Moreover, it results in more work to be done and more bugs to be fixed. That’s why testing requirements should be specific and well-polished to avoid mistakes and save time.
As you see, without test management software designed to help in managing testing activities, businesses can run themselves ragged trying to keep up. This has firmly established a test management system as a must-have for automated tests to improve QA activities.
Why do you need Test Management System for automated tests?
Many companies don’t have a test management system at hand. Moreover, they don’t realize that it can support the QA process and help you deliver a great piece of software that meets high standards. Here we are going to outline why you need to opt for automated testing:
- This helps structure project documentation and make it visible for all parties involved, including stakeholders, development teams, BAs, PMs, QA teams, etc.
- This helps work together on producing and implementing a testing strategy as well as carrying out manual or automated tests.
- This helps view test results and provides test analytics for all technical and non-technical team members.
- This helps assign test tasks and manage these tests with a simple click.
- This helps you evaluate progress and productivity during the software testing process.
- This helps keep manual tests along with automated ones in one system. If you need to meet a precise requirement to reach the optimum test coverage, you can convert manual tests into automated ones with ease.
- This helps non-technical team members support automated testing by carrying out automated tests and viewing their results.
Want to improve QA process?
With Testomat.io, you can better plan and manage your testing activities and foster collaboration among the teams to speed up the entire development process and drive better results.
👉 Top 5 Improvements that Test Management System provides for QA process
In fact, a test management system is a critical asset for your QA process that multiplies the resources of your software engineers. Let’s move on to improvements that the test management system provides for the QA process.
#1: Agile-driven workflow
Managing remote teams is getting more effective by incorporating a test management system. It provides workflow coordination and quick access to data required for the job. Using correct and real-time data allows team members to eliminate data duplication and prevents them from costly mistakes. In addition to that, you can connect stakeholders, BAs, PMs, Dev and QA teams that fosters similar-to-live communication and collaboration. Moreover, it enables to make sure that your team members and non-tech stakeholders are in the know about regular progress updates given to everyone in the team.
#2: Better team management
With a test management system in place, the whole team can participate in the testing process. When working on a testing project, you can organize project dashboards, design manual or automated tests, and manage users and roles. In addition to that, you can better coordinate and monitor the activities of your team members, view deadlines, track tasks and their completion. This results in better managing the workflows of various tasks and assignments and increases team productivity.
#3: Optimized QA process
Only by opting for a test management system can companies establish an optimized quality assurance process. It introduces a comprehensive quality plan by providing manual testing along with automation testing capabilities and includes built-in auto-suggestion and auto-completion features to create test cases quickly and easily. In addition to that, you can add tests in bulk, use drag & drop mode or test attachments during test case creation. This will increase the test automation rate, reduce the number of missed bugs, and shorten the testing time.
#4: Data consolidation
Having a test management tool in place allows engineers to deal with the information delivered from different data sources, including a variety of testing frameworks, knowledge base software, popular CI\CD tools, ticket management tools, etc. It helps them create and run test cases quickly and easily as well as better plan and execute the tests. Moreover, they can set up milestones and requirements. All these can be done from one place removing any redundancies and cleaning up any errors. This significantly streamlines the development and QA processes as well as makes them more manageable.
#5: Sophisticated reporting & analytics
With a test management solution in place, you can better monitor the testing activities as well as establish common testing KPIs and metrics. It helps you make sure the project is running as it should, on time, and on budget and allows you to make any changes in configuration to track exactly what you need. In addition to that, you can visualize the real-time progress of the tests and share it with stakeholders and the management team. In addition to that, you can be notified about finished runs via email, Slack, MS Teams, or Jira.
Bottom Line: Want to arm your team with test management software?
Technological advances are changing not only the world but the software testing process as well. Without a well-structured QA process, the stream of new clients dries up, putting the whole testing process in jeopardy. With test management tools at hand, such as testomat.io, you can greatly simplify the testing process and become more productive and efficient. What’s more, you can create a flexible test process that can fit any project and speed up the entire development process.
