Filtering testing checklists or managing them in a better way than a Word/Excel document

Question

For manual testing we are using checklists.

• The problem: over time, checklists are growing larger with many very specific cases that can be skipped in most of situations. But it takes too much time to just read these not needed cases.

So I'm searching for a tool that can:

• before building a checklist we determine some characteristics of product under test
• build final checklist only from actual cases
• so when creating a new testcase, we should determine properties of product that makes this case actual for checking current product

For more clear understanding of my question, here is a similar problem:

Hi All, we are developing an application which is a web site. our customers has its own requests and for each customer we have the same web site with different configuration,one have specific fields that the other don't,one have different windows that other don't have,one is working SSO and the other don't,one is using IE6 and the other IE7,8. my mission is to test this web site and the problem is that if i'll write a test document for specific customer it will not fit the others.it's so close but yet so different. does anyone have an idea of how to solve this problem? thanks

Answer 1

It seems to me you need some sort of test case management tool. If you can make a strong business case that money spent on a management tool will save the company more money in your wages than the tool costs, you might be able to ask your boss for a non-free tool. Some tools (in no particular order) are: Visual Studio Test Manager Testlink TestStuff FogBugz Redmine Jira

VS Test manager is the most expensive of the lot and is a good choice if your developers are already working in Visual Studio. You can collect test cases into test plans and distribute them to your testers, and has good reporting.

TestLink and TestStuff are almost identical. TestStuff puts your data into a cloud, TestLink uses a machine in your local network. If you have security concerns about your data, TestLink is the better choice between the two.

FogBugz is a pay-per-user model, so it's free or nearly free for small teams, and grows with you. It's good at bug-tracking and reporting as well as managing test cases.

Redmine is an open-source tool that you install on a machine in your network. It requires a DB server as well. It's fairly easy to set up, administrate, and can be used for logging bugs & managing test cases. The reporting is a bit weak but the structure is simple enough you can create your own queries within the tool to pull what you need.

I've heard good things about Jira, but have not used it personally.

This is a small list. You can find a larger list by searching for "Test Case Management Tools".

Answer 2

In addition to Jerry Penner's answer: Jira can be combined with a lot of Test Management Tools, such as Xray, synapseRT, Zephyr, TestRail, Kanoah and Qmetry. The features and prices differ between the alternatives, so there should be one to your liking. Of course, these tools are best used when you are already using Jira. If you use another Issue Tracking Tool, you could search for Test Management Tools that can be incorporated into yours.

I would say that using a Test Management Tool right into your Issue Tracking Tool gives many useful advantages. You can link tests to issues, features or epics so that you have a broad overview of which tests need to be executed before next release in order to cover each changed and added feature.