Last month I was in Denmark at a leading European carpet manufacturer to train and consult on Qualify, our test management solution and TestDrive, our 100% code-free test automation product.
Their business systems are a mix of Infor M3 heavily customized to provide integrations with multiple legacy systems. This presented no problem as both Qualify and TestDrive are technology-neutral and can run over almost any application, whether client-based or in the cloud.
Their quality team comprises a mixture of IT and business users so it was great to see that both groups were flying with Quality Management after only two days of training. For the rest of the week, we turned our attention to test automation, created some initial scripts, and outlined the organization of the testing project.
This new approach represents a sea change for this company. Previously they had been using a mixture of shared Excel sheets and documents to control the quality process, but this had numerous flaws.
A key issue concerned their communication with the external development company, which created most of the enhancements and changes to functionality. No one was sure what issues had been reported, their status, or whether they were simply duplicating issues that had already been reported.
This was easily fixed by giving the development team restricted access to Qualify to see the logged defects and ability to view the complete results from each test. This was further enhanced by automatically pushing email notifications to the developers the moment that each new defect was logged.
They particularly liked the Animation tool, which creates a movie file showing exactly what the tester performed and saw. This can be created from the test results without any extra work whilst testing and allows the developer to see exactly what was performed to cause the issue.
It also produces editable documentation that can be used for training purposes.
Next steps
The client is now talking with the 3rd party development team to see how they can further enhance their working relationship to identify additional efficiencies. However, we have already removed unnecessary duplication of work and any ambiguity as to the exact nature of each issue.
Going forward, the complete configurability of Qualify means further improvements in working practices can be quickly and easily made without the need for any specialist programming skills.
Justin McDougall is a Training and Implementation Consultant at Original Software.
