Test Run

In gratitude and in acknowledgement of the role open source plays in Test Run.s development, we are happy to announce that Test Run is available for use with open source projects completely free of charge. Furthermore, in pursuit of a belief that all businesses should think of how their products and services can best help their communities, a model proven not only successful but also profitable for Salesforce.com, Test Run is also available free of charge to non-profits and educational institutions.

More details can be found on Test Run's pricing information page.

We continue to refine Test Run well into the weekend and late night. Test Run Beta 5 is ready for download. You may notice a slightly different download process as I have finally made available the Test Run Beta license. Also, I have created a dedicated page for setup and installation instructions. All this to hopefully make things a little eaiser and a lot clearer.

Of course, Beta 5 contains a number of enhancements and bug fixes. Most notably a new "Active Bug Report." For developers and integrators, the ground work has also begun for an extensive callback framework that can be plugged into to create Test Run extensions and plugins.

It has been a busy Thanksgiving Day weekend for Test Run. There has been a flurry of activity and a few bugs reported, and a few discovered while fixing others. We have packaged up the lastest build of Test Run and made it available for download. And of course we have updated Test Run Online with the latest as well.

Also, now that there are plenty of more users we thought it best to started maintaining a detailed change log which will accompany every download and every new release. Keep reading to learn more.

Continue reading "Beta 4 Released" »

We have received a lot of questions of late about the Test Run Beta and Trial period, specifically: how long will the trial last and what kind of quality and service can I expect during the trial?

How long will the Test Run Beta Last?

We hope the beta period is as short as possible, however we can make no guarantee as to its length. The beta period is in place to ensure the highest quality software possible once Test Run "ships." We also want to leverage the beta period to ensure that Test Run in is the marketplace long enough to collect and integrate valuable feedback from potential customers.

What kind of quality and service can I expect during the beta?

During the Test Run beta period, we will take all reasonable efforts to ensure the safety, security and integrity of your data. Keep in mind that it is in our best interest to ensure the highest quality possible for our customers.

Are there benefits for participating in the beta?

Absolutely. All users that participate in the Test Run beta will qualify for special discounts and pricing when Test Run is officially released. To qualify, register for an account for the online version of Test Run, or sign up for the Test Run newsletter. You will be notified when the time comes on how to take advantage of any special discounts.

We encourage everyone to take advantage of the Test Run beta, and please don't hestitate to contact us with your comments and feedback!

The increased interest in Test Run has resulted in a lot of questions to which there should be easy answers. Over the holidays we have devoted time to revising a lot of material on our website to better answer your questions about the company, the product and the eventual pricing. We hope you find this information useful in your research to determine whether Test Run is right for you or your company.

I woke up this morning and went to go check my email and to see if there were any new Test Run signups or downloads. And boy, was I surprised at what I saw. But then I checked who might be linking to Test Run... Man, nothing pleases me more than knowing that the word is spreading.

• "QA Testers Rejoice" from Post Money Value (I only wish that the mention did not appear in such close proximity to this beautiful image...)
• O'Reilly Radar

The answer unfortunately is "yes." It is a requirement. But what are "tags?" What are they used for? And how do they help me in Test Run?

To be perfectly honest, "tags" are nothing more than keywords, although if you listen to a lot of innovators today they may make you believe that they are a new invention. What is new about these keywords called "tags" is not the concept itself, but how people are using them. Tags are being used today by communities to organize content. Whereas a single person may build an "ontology" using categories and keywords, a community builds a "folksonomy."

One thing that is different about how applications are using tags is that they are made visible to the public. Typically keywords were considered private metadata associated with an asset, and only a small minority of people could view or edit a set of keywords. Keywords were used to help facilitate searches for assets within a catalog and contained words and phrases that may not be contained in other metadata fields associated with the asset.

Tags on the other hand are made visible to everyone and (in some systems) editable by everyone as well. This may seem like a scary idea at first and one horribly prone to user error and malicious "tag spammers." But experience across the Internet with tags has shown quite the opposite, that a community is quite capable of policing, managing and editing quite a large number of tags and assets.

Also, not only are tags visible, they are often hyperlinked. Often when you click on a tag you will subsequently be displayed a page containing assets that share that tag. For each of those assets you will see another set of tags, which are also hyperlinked. In the end, tags not only provide a categorization scheme for content owners, but a navigation scheme for visitors as well.

How does Test Run use tags?"

In the first iteration of Test Run I relied on a highly structured schema for a test case. I needed a way to track:

• test case type (e.g. functional, regression, unit, usability, etc)
• product area or categories (e.g. "UI Front End," "Search," "File Uploads," etc)
• keywords
• software version and build numbers

I even had users submitting feature requests for me to add even more fields to a test case. It was simply not scaling, the UI was getting strained, and there was too much field bloat.

So I decided to reduce all of those fields to a single one: tags. In Test Run tags allow the user to label a test case in an unlimited number of ways. If you associate a rich set of tags with all the test cases you create, then when it comes time to generate a test plan you simply say, "give me a test plan with test cases that have been tagged 'registration' and 'functional' and 'email verification'." And presto, a test plan is generated and is pre-populated with relevant test cases.

In Test Run tags are used to keep things simple and flexible at the same time. Tags provide structure, but allow users to define their own structure as opposed to being reliant on an arbitrary structure I impose.

The bottom line is that there is nothing to fear. Use tags the way you would use associate keywords in any other content management system or application and you will soon be addicted.

Test Run does not force you to completely change the way you conduct your quality assurance process, it simply allows you to execute it more efficiently. One way it achieves that is by allowing your team to leverage the tools that they are already familiar with, like Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet application.

Continue reading "Enhance Your Test Plan Spreadsheets" »

It was not too long ago that Beta 2 was released. However, that release didn't have a lot of user facing features once you got past the setup process and it just didn't seem right to go a whole week without giving our users some candy. So we started focusing on arguably one of the most critical areas of the application: the import and export area.

In a multi-user environment, there is a real danger of users introducing conflicts or clobbering each other's data when importing test cases into Test Run. To address this we added the ability to preview the changes introduced by importing a spreadsheet of test cases into the application. Granted, it is a simple feature on the surface, but it is laying some important and substantial groundwork for more advanced importing and exporting controls, like advanced collision detection, record merging, and more.

Test Run Beta 3 is now available for download as well as online.

We received a good round of initial feedback and tackled some bugs that hindered some in the downloadable version of Test Run to get started more quickly. In addition we received some execllent feature request. It was our hunch that I would need to implement the features requests we received at some point, but it makes a big difference when a customer asks for them specifically.

Thanks to all of you that provided us feedback on Test Run Beta 1. Your help, input and insight is very valuable to us. Test Run Beta 2 is now available for download.

Continue reading "Beta 2 Released" »

Looking to learn more about Test Run. I have recently updated Test Run's product tour to help visitors get a better understanding of the value of Test Run. And what are the key messages of the tour?

• First and foremost, Test Run helps you and your team create, manage, and execute test plans. Learn more.
• Test Run is not a tool designed exclusively for test engineers, it is a tool designed for project, program and product managers alike. Learn more.
• Test Run was created by a project manager that understands the complete development lifecycle, and who has spent years working with QA teams to streamline their process and tools. Learn more.
• Test Run is one of the only test planning software packages on the market that isn't afraid to tell you its price up front. There are never any surprises in your invoices when you use Test Run. Learn more.
• Take control of your software, don't let it control you. Learn more.

I am happy to report that Test Run is finally available for download. Much effort went into making the setup and installation process as easy as possible. The first time you access a newly installed instance of Test Run you will be directed to a simple three step installation wizard. This wizard will ensure all your prerequisites are met, help setup the Test Run database for you, and allow you to create your superuser administrator account.

As always, if you have difficulty, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Well, its official: I have customers. I am getting a steady stream of traffic to the website, and I have even begun to engage with customers taking part in the beta. I have also started to receive feedback, but before I can really begin in earnest to implement the feature requests I am receiving, I must first turn my attention to Test Run's infrastructure. Up until this point I have been enhancing Test Run in a live production environment, but that in no longer advisable considering that I risk disrupting users on the system. Plus, I have yet to create an installable version of Test Run, which is a pretty fundamental milestone I need to reach.

So please bear with me. I will be done soon, and will then turn my attention towards some much needed enhancements and make an installable version of Test Run available for download soon.