Listen to this articleIntroduction
In the first and second part of our three-blog series in ‘Testing’ category, we have already discussed about the changing face of testing, importance of test automation and how Kovair helps organizations successfully complete the journey of their test cycles.
In this blog, we will explore why this journey cannot be effective until proper traceability and real-time reports are available to testers and QA leaders. We will also learn how Kovair provides an end-to-end coverage of test artifacts through traceability views and visual representation of real-time test metrics.
Test Automation is the Key
An effective Test Automation strategy significantly reduces the QA cycle time without compromising on the test coverage and the ultimate quality of a product. But, can the Test Automation alone ensure better quality and enhanced productivity without proper reporting and traceability across artifacts? It certainly cannot.
Importance of Reporting
Standalone automation definitely solves the problem of time-consuming and repetitive manual testing effort in any organization. But due to the fact of data residing in different tools, after completion of test automation, it is very difficult to capture the test results and link them to each of the individual test cases. This becomes a challenge for QA managers to trace every test script back to the test requirements and their corresponding test cases.
A real-time visual representation of test results gives users a clear visibility into the key test metrics that meet the ultimate objective of test automation. Different quality metrics like test execution status, defect density, and defect injection rate combined together allow users to ensure quality at every stage of development.
Importance of Traceability
Traceability is the common thread that ensures quality verification and feature validation processes for a product are complete. The need for traceability between automated test cases and requirements is no way different from that of manual test cases. In absence of proper traceability, users fail to understand the test coverage against requirements. Traceability not only ensures completeness of test coverage, but also allows users to view the number of defects raised against corresponding requirements. .
A proper end-to-end, bi-directional, and cross-tool data based traceability among various artifacts of a project is necessary to get complete coverage at every step. It also helps in quantitative impact analysis of any change request which enables management to take data-centric decisions on implementation of that change.
Kovair Integrated Test Management – iTM the integrated platform for Testing
Kovair Integrated Test Management – iTM platform provides a central repository for all stakeholders to remain connected and updated with same information. Kovair Omnibus, capable of integrating with 60+ ALM and IT tools, helps organizations to integrate their people, processes and tools. This enables them to achieve better collaboration among stakeholders and gain real-time cross-tool data based reports, dashboards and traceability.
In our previous blog “Importance of Test Automation and How Kovair Supports It”, we discussed how Kovair adds value in test automation and facilitates execution of automation test scripts directly from Kovair application. In the following section, we have explained a use case to showcase how Kovair facilitates the generation of useful test metrics and an end-to-end traceability view based on the data from different tools.
Use Case Example:
Let us assume that in an organization, requirements get created in Kovair iTM and then collaboratively reviewed and approved through Kovair iTM’s Review capabilities. These requirements can also come from any other Requirements Management tools like Jama, IBM DOORS, and HP ALM. Once the requirements are approved, manual test cases get prepared in Kovair iTM. The Test Suite and Automation Test Cases (Methods) get created in Selenium from NetBeans IDE and are added to Kovair through Kovair’s plug-in for Selenium. The Test Suite in Selenium gets added as a Test Suite in Kovair iTM. Each of the methods in Selenium gets added as a Test Case in Kovair iTM and automatically linked to the parent Test Suite. Requirements also get linked to Test Cases from Kovair iTM. Once all tests are executed from Kovair iTM application, the results get linked to the Test Cases for both manual and automated testing. For failed test cases, defects are raised in Kovair iTM or any other defect management tools like JIRA, Bugzilla and then linked to the test cases.
In Kovair iTM, this entire flow of events can be controlled through a centralized task-based workflow irrespective of the tools involved. Kovair’s automated workflow along with the notification feature helps teams to improve both productivity and quality by keeping the testers connected and updated with the real-time progress of the development.
A sample workflow for the above-mentioned scenario is given below in Fig: 1.
Fig 1: Sample Use Case Flow – Requirements Capture to Defect Tracking
On successful completion of this entire workflow, the end-to-end traceability view gets generated in the Kovair application as shown in the Fig: 2 below.
Fig 2: Cross-tool Traceability View from Requirements to Defect
For any change request against a requirement, users can do an impact analysis using the traceability feature and then take an objective decision on change implementation.
With Kovair iTM, not only traceability but also various real-time test-related metrics can be generated based on the data coming from different tools. These reports and dashboards with drill-down capability keep stakeholders informed with the same source of information and ensure quality at every step of the development stage.
Fig: 3: Reports and Dashboards showing Testing Progress and Defect related Records
Conclusion
Through this series of three blogs, we learned how the roles of testers and testing as a whole are changing in today’s world of Agility. Kovair iTM helps organizations to keep up the pace with this change at every step of the test cycle. With its strong support for managing and executing test cases along with traceability and real-time data-based reports and dashboards, Kovair ensures that quality metrics of a software product are maintained right from ideation to deployment stage. To know more about Kovair iTM, visit this page.
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