Test Run

Excel is a great tool for small companies to manage QA. After all, Excel is the quintessential and nearly ubiquitous portable database. I have seen many QA teams use Excel quite effectively to manage their execution of tests and tracking progress. I have even seen some pretty good Excel jockies whip up some decent reports and graphs to show a project converging on quality. But relying exclusively on Excel comes with its challenges as well:

• Your QA team has to be careful when merging their test plans into the master spreadsheet for fear of clobbering each other’s work.
• Managers always have to ask themselves: “is this the most recent data we have?”
• Excel in all its splendor can make simple tasks way too complicated.
• Graphs can be brittle in Excel and often need tweaking and retweaking when there is a lot of new data to incorporate.
• Excel doesn’t help you track performance and code coverage over time, or to perform historical analysis about a specific test case or test plan.

Test Run addresses all of these problems for you, while allowing your team to continue using Excel to its heart’s content. This enables them to use the features of Test Run that they prefer, while retaining a high degree of productivity because they aren’t forced to learn a new tool.

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Tip

The import and export feature also makes it really easy to get started using Test Run a breeze. If you currently store your test cases in Excel, follow these simple steps in order to take advantage of Test Run today:

• Export an empty spreadsheet. This gives you a data model and template to use when copying your current data into Test Run.
• Map your data into the newly exported Test Run spreadsheet.
• Import the spreadsheet updated with all of the test case information into Test Run.