Test Plan Design: Productivity Counts!

For years I've been working with TestLink. It's actually a pretty good tool, but using it just sucks.

It's so darn slow, expecially for creating test plans. Designing test suites is an creative task, productivity is important for that and TestLink is really poor here.

Since I didn't had another tool available in the past (no budget and TestLink was the only good open-source I knew) I sticked with some workaround. I created the test plan structure in Microsoft Word  and when I was done I started I entered all that stuff into TestLink.

When I started the development of Quality Spy - my own test management tool - I wanted productivity and simplicity to be the key design drivers.

Compare the sluggish web interface of TestLink with this:

• A native typing feeling, almost as in Microsoft Word (ENTER, type, ENTER, type), with in-place-editing
• Full drag & drop support

It looks like that:

When a test suite is selected:

• ENTER creates a new test suite next to the current
• CTRL+ENTER creates a new child
• CTRL+LEFT moves the test suite "in" one level (makes it a child of the previous)
• CTRL+RIGHT move the test suite "out" one level (makes it a child of the parent's parent)
• CTRL+UP moves the test test suite up
• CTRL+DOWN moves the test suite down
• F2 toggles in-place-editing

When a test case is selected

• ENTER creates a new test case next to the current
• CTRL+UP moves the test case up
• CTRL+DOWN moves the test case down
• F2 toggles in-place-editing

The latest version can be found on sourceforge.

Risk-Based Testing Cartoon

Cartoon Tester explains what Risk-based testing is all about:

I must mention: Quality Spy also includes some simple tooling for Risk-based testing.

Quality Spy now Supports Risk-Based Testing and a Graphial Outline

Quality Spy now includes a risk-based testing feature as described by testing guru James Bach.
It should be used before designing the actual test plan and allows to identify (bug) risks. One benefit of using it would be to focus scarce testing resources on high risk and high impact risks first. I highly recommend this article by James Bach for the full background.

Also I'm proud of the new outlining feature. It allows you to add some graphic file to your test project. It should be used to describe the test plan and process in a graphical way.

Both features are optional and must be enabled per project:

A risk analysis could look like that:

For example I know that testing with non-admin user account can find certain bugs, but I think that for the application under test this is unlikely to occur, so I wouldn't invest time in that.

And this is how the outline looks like with a practical example:

It's really just an image you can link here. It maybe overlaps a little bit with the test strategy, but you could also document which component should be tested by which tester (group) or you could highlight key components and so on.

So it's really versatile.

The latest version can be downloaded from sourceforge.