Test Run

Customers frequently ask if Test Run could one day in the future support hierarchical test cases. It is a feature that is definitely on the roadmap, but its implementation would be pretty hairy, so I have honestly been putting it off. But it occurred to me that the feature may already exist in a latent form.

If you have used Test Run than you are familiar with a "Product" property associated with test cases. It is a property I added, but I never developed any *features* around because it was clear that some form of test case segmentation was needed, but it was unclear how it might be used. So this feature exists, but does not provide any benefit to users.

It occurs to me however, that this feature could easily be used to segment test cases into *test suites*. Then a slight UI change could easily be introduced to group and display test cases by test suite as opposed to in a strict reverse chronological order.

I would love to hear from users what they think of this idea and whether they currently use the Product field for anything. Let me know!

Test Run now has a Twitter account. If you want to stay up with the latest development news, follow us there!

I have been receiving a lot of feedback in the New Year from new customers, perhaps because people out there are looking for ways to cut costs and keep things simple. Their feedback as usual has been invaluable, and most recently led me to revisit the design of the Manage Test Plans screen. The impetus for the change was to create a framework that allowed for me to surface more management functionality on the screen and to offer a more compressed layout that allows admins to take more information in more quickly and efficiently. I am not finished yet, so feedback is still welcome. Here is a before and after of the Manage Test Plans screen:

Before

After

What do you think?

I have been looking and admiring a lot of other web applications recently and have paid special attention to form design. Test Run's forms have gone through multiple iterations, but none of them are as simple as I would like them to be. I feel they require too much scrolling and they don't put the right emphasis on the right things. So I am in the process of redesigning Test Run's forms and would love to hear from customers what they think.

Before

After

Here is what I have done:

• I have place summary and description up front because those are arguably the most important fields on the page.
• I have devoted less space to the text format radio buttons and kept them closer to the textarea box that they control.
• I have widened the summary and description fields so you can see more of what you are typing.

With the slow and steady increase of customer usage of Test Run Online, the product has begun to feel a little sluggish and a number of you, my customers, had expressed their concern. On the up side, I guess that is bound to happen when you have over a hundred thousand test cases, and five thousand test plans - surely a sign of success by some measure. But the success of Test Run should never come at the expense of paying customers, so I have turned my attention towards performance and database optimization.

Having just completed a thorough analysis of Test Run's database architecture I will, over the course of the next several days, be rolling out a number of recommended improvements to the system. Several have already been deployed and the results are enjoyable - and difference is remarkable.

Of course, I am also working on other improvements to make Test Run more usable, and flexible. A number of users have been having difficulty with text formatting, and in working with them I realized that text formatting doesn't always make sense as a global setting. So, I just finished making text formatting, like the use of markdown and a rich text editor, a test case level setting. Now each and every test case can set its own preference for how it should be formatted.

Other improvements are also coming, so stay tuned.

Welcome the new version of Test Run: 1.1. Behind the scenes the product has undergone a great deal of change in the last twelve months and I am finally pleased enough with what has accumulated to release the first public beta.

More Information about this release:

• Detailed change log

Finding Help and Reporting Bugs

• Report a bug
• Find help from the community in our forums

Frequently Asked Questions

I am not sure what I found is a bug, should I still report it?

We want to hear any thoughts you may have about the application. Perhaps what you have found is not a bug, but if it doesn't work the way you want it to then something could be improved. So please, be sure to inform us if:

• an error occurs
• if the application appears slow
• you receive a javascript error
• you have a feature request

Do you have special support for Jira and other bug tracking systems?

Support for Bugzilla is almost complete. However before it is released, we wanted to finalize the developer interfaces between Test Run and the bug system driver with more thorough and public testing.

Next on the list to support is Jira because of the overwhelming number of requests we have received for it.

How long will the beta last?

Our hope is to wrap up the beta as soon as possible.

Can I subscribe to Test Run during the beta?

Absolutely!

Test Run 1.1 has been in development for a very, very long time. I admit. But the pay off will be worth it as there is a lot in this release to look forward to, and virtually all of it is the result of direct feedback from you - my users.

So, some time next week or two I hope to launch a beta of the next version of Test Run. I would like to first extend the opportunity to users of the downloadable version of Test Run to try it out and after an initial round of feedback and testing, roll it out to everyone using the online version.

If you would like to get a preview of this upcoming version of Test Run, drop me a line, and I will happily provide you with a copy.

For a complete list of enhancements that have been made in Test Run 1.1 to date, keep reading.

Continue reading "Preparing for the Test Run 1.1 Beta" »

I wanted to give a quick development update as we near a release of Test Run 1.1 Beta. I have nearly completed Bugzilla integration with FogBugz, but there are still a lot of kinks to work out in regards to allowing users of our hosted product to access their private instance of Bugzilla.

I have also been working on a number of UI tweaks to make Test Run easier to navigate and use. Without going into too much detail yet, here are a few screenshots to whet your appetite:

Summer is over, the traditional slow time of the year in the software industry, and I have been getting a lot of renewed interest in Test Run. Customers have been submitting bug reports and a lot of feature requests, and many of them have in all honesty gone relatively unanswered in the last several months.

Well, that is about to change. I feel there is a critical mass of feature requests to begin working on Test Run 1.1. So last night work officially began. I have started to assess a lot of different things about the product in an effort to improve customer support and the experience around finding help. I upgraded the Test Run Blog and Knowledge Base to use Movable Type 4.0, and I have migrated Test Run's forums off of my personal web server onto the production Test Run machines. This has the added benefit of dedicating Test Run's forums exclusively to Test Run. Users will no longer find content related to my other software projects. This is a good thing.

As for what features I am planning for this release:

* At the top of the list is the need to integrate with popular bug tracking systems. This feature will allow users to submit bug reports directly into Bugzilla and FogBugz from within Test Run.
* An import feature for Test Link which will allow people to easily migrate to Test Run from that case tracking tool.
* Test Plan printing - many users asked for the ability to print a test plan to make it easy to review plans offline.
* Rich Text Editing - several users have asked for me to integrate a WYSIWYG editor into Test Run, and I will see what I can do to accommodate.
* Naturally there will be lots of bug fixes as well.

I encourage users to submit feature requests to me (as a comment to this post if you wish) and let me know what you would like to see out of the next version of Test Run.

Development on Test Run continues at a fast and furious pace as we rush to keep up with all the wonderful feedback we get from customers. Most of the feedback is about a feature or two that people would really like to see. Sometimes the feedback is in regards to a bug that a user finds. And then occasionally a user will tell me something like this:

"I have worked at a lot of companies and have been responsible for reviewing and recommending countless test management tools. Test Run is far and away the best and simplest tool I have ever encountered."

God, I can't tell you how wonderful it is to get feedback like that. When it sometimes becomes really hard to create awesome software while continuing to work full time at another job you also love, feedback like that picks you up and keeps you going.

And what better way to reward a growing and increasingly involved and engaged user base then with a new release of Test Run?

Tonight I am happy to announce the latest version of Test Run which contains features implemented exclusively from customer feedback. Most notably, Test Run 1.09 has the the following new features.

Continue reading "New features: Tag Management and Time Estimates" »