Test Management Software

Enterprise 2.0 is here – Upgrade your Test Department

Gone are the days when QA and software testing departments used multiple disparate, outdated applications to plan, manage, and execute their day‐to‐day work. With the Web moving towards 3.0, Enterprise tools are getting 2.0ish with companies introducing RSS, blogging, collective intelligence, themes, tag clouds and real-time data push within the enterprise.

Test management software, designed and created by actual QA engineers, offer the next-generation slick and affordable QA Test management and collaboration capabilities that enable test teams to achieve enhanced levels of productivity in order to ship high quality software on time. New test systems are adopting this Enterprise 2.0 paradigm and have a snappier interface, drag-and-drop windows to improve productivity, real time metrics and reports, test repository tag clouds, enhanced real-time collaboration and instant communication.

In today's global workplace, where test teams are spread across different time zones, encountering language barriers, and disparate systems, communication challenges prevail. QA/Testing/V&V departments need better tools for sharing information, reporting data and maintaining timeliness. The newer software systems have instant collaboration features, live dashboards, interactive desktops and integrated systems, so there's no need to spend hours searching for information or tracking, collating, beautifying, and sending reports because all data is now complete and real-time. Live and automated dashboards keep the whole company updated on every aspect of testing and product quality.

The latest test management systems manage every aspect of a test department - its people and resources, projects and releases, test assets, test case and data repositories, execution cycles, defect tracking and reporting - by providing a centralized servers and customized client desktops using newer technologies such as RIAs and Reverse AJAX/Comet. .

Typical Enterprise software is expensive with complex licensing models, requiring companies to make large upfront capital expenditure and agree to complex binding software agreements. Of late, newer companies have come up with tools that increase team productivity, efficiency with improved feature sets and performance; all with a very low cost of ownership. Tools such as Mingle, Confluence, BaseCamp are in this category. They have even come up with an affordable pay-as-you-go model, with straightforward and flexible licensing. Similarly, Test Management solutions like Zephyr are leading that way in the Test Management space with revolutionary ways of managing every aspect of a test department. These tools not just save on cost, but also help save precious time & money by enhancing productivity and efficiency and getting quality products to the market faster.

QA/Test/V&V teams should seriously consider these kinds of tools and upgrade their Test Department to leverage all of these technology advancements and innovation that has come with it.

Samir Shah

CEO, Zephyr

www.getzephyr.com