Monday, August 17, 2009

Free Test Management tools

Recently moved into another project and got the chance to evaluate test management tools. The requirement was simple.
1. It must be free. (it was an internal project and so we can't spend money) better if it's open source in this case we can change or add the things.
2. Easy to use.
3. Should provide the facility to connect to mantis or Bugzilla BTS.

So I started searching on the forum and Google for the free Test Management Tools and end up with plenty of that. It's nice to have plenty of options to choose from, but not when you are running out of time. I have got only a week to do this, with too much work in the another project. So I simple gone through the features they provides, and based on that I picked some six tools to evaluate.

After deciding which tools to evaluate, I started downloading, installing and configuring them to see what they offers. After evaluating most of the tools and ran out of time I finally decided to evaluate only two tools further.

Following is my experience with tools.

From the 6 test management tools I picked, two are client-server application and other four are web based application, Which are developed in PHP and uses MySQL as database.

Client-Server
1. XStudio: It's quite a good client-server Test Management tool with XStudio as server and XAgent as client.
It provides you to write down Test Plan, Requirements, Test Suites and Test cases. It also provides the requirement coverage matrix. The installation and configuration is easy is easy.
But the problem was that it was crashing too frequently on my machine, so didn't able to evaluate in detail.

2. Salome: It's yet another client-server Test Management Tool made in JAVA and uses MYSQL as database. provides all the facilities of normal test management tool.
The only problem I face is that it's performance was sluggish on my machine, and it did hang couple of times, might be coz mine is not a server.

I drop down the whole idea of using client-server Test Management tool. Primarily because both the software I installed seemed to be unreliable. The other problem with client-server is every time you adds a user you need to install the client application on his machine. This is quite a nice thing from security point of view but we didn't want any of the installation headache.
So finally I decided to move with web based projects only.

Web Based:
Following are some of really nice web based test management tools which have been developed in the PHP and uses MYSQL as database.

2. QaTraq: This pops out as free tool in my search, but when I visited the site I became suspicious about the free and open source thing.
So I search further on site and find out that it's not free. the project was initially started as open source project, but as they didn't get any help from the community they changed it to paid one.
They still have an open source version available on sourceforge.net but the problem is that, it's about an year old. there isn't any active community to solve your bugs or to add features, So it's bit risky to use it.

The online demo of the paid version is available on request. you can check that out. But i drop the idea of using this one as we didn't want to spend a penny on the software.

4. RTH: It's known as Requirements and Testing Hub. It provides the features to create Test Plan, requirements, test cases. to store test result per release. It also has it's own BTS (bug tracking system). Provides the requirement coverage matrix too.
What I really like about the tool is it provides the facility to import and export test cases from excel file.
What I don't like about it is, It doesn't provide the facility to connect to mantis or Bugzilla BTS and it's bit complex to use.
It has a good facility for user role management but doesn't have facility to assign work to some user.

one of the nicest thing about the RTH is that it has online demo available. So to evaluate the tool you don't need to waste you time in downloading, installing and configuring it.
The online demo is available on following site
site:http://rth.liedl.at/login.php
User Name:admin
Password:password

1. Testlink: From all the tools I evaluate this is one is simplest to Install, Configure and Use.
Provides all the features, creating and storing test plan, requirements, Test sets, Test cases, Test results, Requirement coverage matix and much more.
What I really like about the tool is, It provides you to connect to mantis or Bugzilla.
It also allows you to import and export test cases, requirements and other things from Excel,XML,CSV. Which is quite a nice thing, I mean if you have already write down the requirements, and test cases in excel file, rather then doing a copy and paste simple import will solve your problems.

Testlink also provides the online demo. So you can check that out to evaluate.
Site: http://testlink.org/demo/login.php?note=expired

3. qaManager: Actually didn't get the time to evaluate this one. But it seems promising too.

After evaluating all the tools we finally decided to use TestLink, as it is simple to use and provides import export from excel file and also connects to mantis or Bugzilla.

The only problem we have is (or we might have), the stable version is 1.7.3 while we have choose to use 1.8.3 as 1.7.3 doesn't allow to directly import things from excel file.

3 comments:

magP said...

Squash Is missing as an Open source and free software testing tool
http://www.squashtest.org/

Joe Strain said...

I have had good experiences with Testlink

What is in name said...

Thanks gaurang. this helps me a lot.

Post a Comment