Are you experiencing growing pains? Make the move before the warning signs become too much to ignore…

Testing software is not a technical decision that can be made by the QA department alone. A Test Management solution is not just a key part of your software quality initiatives, but one of Managements most important assets. It is vital to ensure your test management solution supports your company’s development methodologies and provides the performance needed to maintain the quality of your releases.

Don’t wait until you cannot bandage the current system any longer or get by with labor intensive manual workarounds. Be aware of warning signs that your system or processes can’t keep up. By the time you are certain that your current solution is inadequate, you’re probably already losing money to reduced productivity, employee churn, poor software quality, and insufficient information to make insightful decisions.

The following scenarios represent typical situations that indicate your company could benefit from a Test Management solution:

1. Multiple versions of the truth. Interdepartmental meetings frequently turn into political debates as participants argue about whose spreadsheet has the correct figures.
2. Inability to perform in-depth analysis. Your project team knows which release has the most defects, but it doesn’t know how long it will take to complete testing of the next release.
3. Inability to locate important information. Someone knows that the last release was documented so that it can be used again for planning the next release. However, no one can find it.
4. Need for simple to use reporting. Your project team spends more than 15 minutes using a spreadsheet to create status reports or create quality metrics. Team members frequently have to email back and forth to figure out who has the most recent spreadsheet.
5. Difficult to use technology. Your company’s QA Manager used Test Management tools at his/her former job and insists be used in your company as well. Although your company has invested in several licenses, users that have tried to use these tools have given up in frustration and rely exclusively on spreadsheets instead.
6. No reuse policy or practice for historical data. The project team is conducting reviews and wishes to compare each release to date this year with its releases to date at this time last year. Someone in the project team maintained the spreadsheet for this year’s results, but the person who maintained the spreadsheet last year has left the company – and no one has any idea what happened to last year’s spreadsheet.
7. Limited operational flexibility due to weak or nonexistent technology. Your company has grown to the point where its testing has expanded to the 10’s of thousands of test assets and is starting to feel the limits of its current solutions performance, organizational structures, reporting and usability.
8. Inability to differentiate and prioritize testcases. While all problems ultimately need to be addressed, you should be able to identify which ones need immediate attention. Oftentimes, you can only identify testcases that are behind schedule or have slipped through the cracks and discovered by a customer.
9. No alignment of Dev and QA. Although management has defined its strategic goals, you are not sure if they are in tune with its daily operations. Several managers have told you that while they know how to optimize the work of their own teams, they would like to better understand how their efforts support the overall goals of the organization.
10. Inability to comply with government reporting requirements. While your company is still relatively young, it hopes to one day go public – or at least demonstrate compliance for any given future business scenario. In your role as QA Director, you want to take steps now to provide proper documentation and data lineage to ensure that your VP of Engineering and VP of IT have confidence in the accuracy of testing data.

Zephyr provides Test Management solutions that integrates with your existing tool sets—enabling more efficient testing, more productive people, and the ability to gain real-time insight into the progress and quality of your testing cycles. If you are experiencing one of more of these scenarios, please contact us to learn how we have helped other enterprises overcome these challenges.