Many companies have discovered the benefits of integrating their automated and manual test systems. Perhaps you have been putting this kind of investment off, thinking that you will need to purchase expensive, top of the line equipment from a corporate retailer like HP if you want to hook your test management system's tracking capabilities with your automation routines. This is not necessarily the case, as there are plenty of low and mid-range solutions currently available which can help. With comprehensive interfaces for programming, many of these can be easily used in conjunction with an open source project like Selenium.
This approach has been gaining popularity in the business world in no small part due to the fact that it is tremendously cheaper than the higher end appliances and software. It can be very difficult to find enough money in a budget to afford the top of the line equipment. But if you decide to go with something middle of the road for your management tools, you can supplement it with an open source automation in order to get a full set of systems. Among the benefits you can expect will be the ability to schedule things from a central station, and the option to receive integrated reports.
Integrated reporting gives you the ability to see up to the minute status reports covering both your manual and automated progress. It removes the requirement to manually spend time combining statistics from different places using tools like Excel. Whilst this might not seem like a big benefit, as your team grows and the number of tests executed increases, the time you start to save quickly ads up. The combined reporting also helps you to see trends much sooner. For example regression testing is usually covered by your automation. Manual testing usually covers new feature tests. When you can seen combined and comparison automated/manual reports you can start to uncover many interesting conclusions about the quality of the product under test. For example if your automated results start to show significant numbers of failures against a manual results trend which remains steady then you may conclude that your development team is introducing regression issues unnecessarily.
There are two basic ways in which a centralized scheduling and control system can be of great benefit. There may be times when you have left the work place for the day only to realize that you have forgotten to schedule a run for a client. Rather than having to go all the way back there, you can simply log on to the central control, if you have access, and initiate the runs from there. It won't be a problem. In another situation, you may find yourself quite easily managing the two or three clients that you are scheduling and sending runs through, but when that client number hits twenty or fifty things get more difficult. With a fully integrated control system like this you can use the same interface to access multiple clients, and even schedule multiple runs for them all at the same time and in the same place.
So we can see that the tracking and management of both automated and manual tests becomes a much more complex and time consuming thing as the test processes themselves become more advanced and complex. Being able to use a single control interface to access and get reports on an integrated system of automated and manual tests can save money as well as time. A central test management tool will also increase your status visibility and overall control.
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Get more info on the many benefits of test management process and test automation system integration now in our insider's review on everything you need to know about Open Source solutions on http://www.testmanagement.com/
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