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Zephyr: Tooling The Testing Process

March 18, 2008 @ Project Shrink: The Blog from Bas de Baar

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A couple of months ago I got an email from Sean Stewart pitching me Zephyr “a revolutionary test management system with top features”. Well, “revolutionary” is always good for getting my attention… So, I had a small email interview with him about testing processes and his companies test suite. base4.png If you could decide, how would you organize the test process within an agile software project (iterative, on site)? To conform to an Agile process while still ensuring a high quality product/service is a challenge. Given the rapidity with which an agile project moves forward, it leaves very little time for a testing team to do a thorough sweep of all the typical areas of testing – functionality, integration, regression, performance, stress, boundary etc. One way of pulling this off that we’ve found to work well in our past experience, is to split the QA team into two, with one group of folks focused on new functionality testing and moving at the same pace as the rest of the project team, and the other one focused on handling the other areas of test that typically have a longer testing cycle. The second team lags behind the first one in testing but has a longer test cycle in order to complete their tests, while continuously feeding back to the first team. This type of test process organization will not disrupt the Agile process and will still provide greater test coverage. The first team would be more suited to be in close proximity to the rest of the agile project team which the second one could be geographically distributed. And for a waterfall approach? The Waterfall approach is a well understood and implemented process and has been traditionally very widely used. Agile is definitely shaking things up in the past few years which puts pressure on teams using the Waterfall approach to speed things up. In a sense, we’ve designed Zephyr to straddle both worlds. We’ve built a bunch of features that allow testing teams to move a lot faster than they traditionally could – by bringing in:
  • The concept of contextual release spaces with everything associated with a Release or a Sprint found in a one place (tasks, test repositories, test cases, test data, documentation, execution, metrics)
  • An easy collaboration mechanism that ties all users together and provides instant communication
  • The concept of everything being live and updated instantly without having to refresh, re-login, run queries or reports
  • The ability to create and run quick iterations without almost no overhead (we are very agile-ish in our own development and obviously, eat our own dog food) and visually track them
  • The complete removal of reporting overhead as the system auto-reports on all activities and does so in a live, out-of-the-box mode
What impact has Zephyr on/near/offshore on the test process? Zephyr has been built keeping distributed teams in mind. Over the past few years, testing has become geographically distributed with teams spread out over multiple locations. These could be on the same campus, in the same country or global. The biggest issues we’ve seen is in the management side of things. It becomes really difficult to communicate, keep everybody in sync, exchange data and get status unless you have really good processes set up or have the right set of tools, or both. We’ve tried to address these pain points and Zephyr has features that really help in alleviating these kinds of issues:
  • Integrated test management system that has all project, resource, release/sprint, test case repository, execution, assignments, scheduling, documentation, defects and reporting information
  • Live updating of all data as its entered or modified – no refreshes or searching needed
  • Out-of-the-box metrics that are updated in real-time with no intervention needed from anyone (i.e. no collecting data, analyzing, building reports, running queries etc. – everything is live)
  • Collaboration backbone that ties all users of the system together to have 1-on-1 and project level conversations in real-time
  • Real-time visibility into every aspect of the testing process via live Dashboards for entire project team
What are the three quick win tips you can provide us for software testing process? How does your application handle this? 1. Track and report everything that is going on, but do not spend too much time doing that 2. Reuse your test cases 3. Keep everything contextual to a release or sprint – so as to make it easier for testers to switch contexts and find everything they need for that release or sprint Zephyr has all of the above features built-in. What makes your test suite unique? Zephyr differentiates on many different fronts:
  • Rich Desktops and Live Dashboards: Testing desktops provide managers, leads, and testers customized views of the project status, giving managers increased management capabilities, as well as live visibility throughout the project.
  • Instant Global Collaboration: Multi location testing teams can communicate and collaborate easily, reducing communication and knowledge transfer issues that occur between onsite/offshore teams.
  • Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-Based Integration: Open architecture allows for easy integration with other systems.
  • Testing Delivery Platform: Testing Vendors can customize and brand Zephyr and use it to deliver superior testing services and best-practices to their customers.
  • Web 2.0 Features: Zephyr brings Real-Time Data Push, Themes, Tagging, and RIAs into the Enterprise world for test management.
Click here for more information. Related Posts Download here the first part of my book "Surprise! Now You're A Software Project Manager" Zephyr: Tooling The Testing Process

This article is syndicated from Project Shrink: The Blog . The original article is available here. Read more in Project Management News, Project Shrink .

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