Test Management Tools

Test Management tools helps in managing anything and everything that we do as testers.  Our day-to-day activities like

• Creating and maintaining releases, project cycle, component information
• Creating and maintaining the test artifacts specific to each release /cycle that we have- requirements, test cases, etc.
• Establishing Traceability matrix and coverage between the test assets
• Test Execution support test suite creation, test execution status capture, etc.
• Metric collection/report-graph generation for analysis
• Bug tracking  and helps Defect managing

The above are broadly some of the tasks that involved in the test management process. This process is critical, detail-oriented and instrumental is making sure that the entire testing effort is successful.Test management tools are categorized into few types according to their type of test management.

• Test Management tools
• Requirement tools
• Incident management tools
• Configuration Management tools

1.Test Management Tools : These tools managing requirements , planning tests , preparing tests, provide interfaces for executing tests tracking and reporting defects. Quantitative analysis related to tests and tests objects can be easily obtained. Example: Quality Centre ALM, SilkCentral, Rational performance manager.

HP ALM/Quality center:HP QC has been one of the most used test management software for many years. It has all the features necessary and in many ways, it is the standard against which the other tools are measured. Even though it is one of the high-end tools, economically, it still remains to be very popular.

2.Requirement management Tools: Store requirement statements , checks for consistency and undefined requirements, allows prioritizing and traceability of requirements. Some of the Examples are Rational requisite Pro

IBM Rational Quality Manager: A test Management product that has all the typical features – Test planning, test design, test execution, tracking and reporting. It integrates with many of the rational products for automation, source control and bug tracking activities. It is a commercial product. 

3.Incident Management tools: These tools store the incident reports i.e defects, failures, problems, faults etc Incident management tool is also known as a defect-tracking tool, a defect-management tool, a bug-tracking tool or a bug-management tool. However, ‘incident management tool’ is perhaps a better name for it because not all of the things tracked are actually Defects or bugs; incidents may also be perceived problems, fortunately that may not necessarily be defects.  Examples of these Incident management tools are Bugzilla , RCQ etc.,

Bugzilla: Bugzilla has been a leading bug tracking tools widely used by many organizations for quite some time now. It is very simple to use, web based interface. It has all the features of essence, convenience and assurance. It is completely open sourced and is free to use.

4.Configuration Management tools : These tools are used to store information about versions and builds of the software and testware, in order to check traceability between software and testware and different versions or variants, to keep track of which versions belong with which configurations(e.g. operating systems, libraries, browsers), to build and release management, baselining (e.g. all the configuration items that make up a specific release). access control (checking in and out). Examples of Configuration management tools are Rational Clear Case.