I'm tester of a small product development company under going mergers and expansion (probably another 2/3 dev teams will be merged). We use manual as well as automated (currently only regression) testing. This is a period of transformation from waterfall to agile and DevOps. There is no test strategy or planning just add-hoc testing and me and product manager would give Go/No-Go decision based on our experience.
For a long time, I've been advocating a proper test management tool but it was postponed or ignored, mainly due to cost. Main argument was why test management tool as we already use JIRA and recently started using Confluence. As a tester, I like to have ability to drive automation from a test case. My view is JIRA and Confluence are not designed for testers.
My question to you experts in testing is: Test management tool is necessity or luxury? What are pros and cons having the test management tool? What logical arguments towards having TM tool? If getting TM tool what should I look for (other than cost)? I would like to see unit/integration/regression/manual test scenarios in one place and be able to say: "OK, 75% of high and medium risk tests are done"