Technological innovations have made the business world so dependent on technology that to meet the challenges of the competitive environment the enterprises get equipped with world-class infrastructure and a number of applications. However, developing applications in the changing technological landscape is not an easy task. Enterprises involved in the development of software make use of widely distributed teams to meet the ever-changing requirements of the customers. These applications that are developed go through a serious of phases and includes requirement analysis, designing, coding and testing besides other.

The developers in today’s globalized environment though part of a project team, work in isolation or groups. They are assigned development duties on the basis of technology know-how, functions or geographical locations. However understanding the requirements during every stage in the software development lifecycle is a vital activity which enterprise manages with the help of the requirement traceability matrix. The software development life cycle is not complete without its testing phase. Test management is an activity which passes through the lifecycle of the software application. Every changes, minute to large need to undergo scanning through a test management tool.

Testing of software applications is carried out by taking the software through its functions to check its capability of satisfying the requirements and to detecting errors. Further, this is not just one-time activity but an activity that needs to be performed with every upgrade, version changes or addition of modules. The test management is performed through six stages which includes organizing and maintenance of inventory, planning, authoring, implementing, reporting and metrics. Depending on the intricacy of the application, testing of the software development lifecycle demands reviewing into various aspects which becomes not only time-consuming, but labor extensive and expensive too. 

Experts involved in developing IT service management software have developed test management tools that will help enterprises with a number of benefits such as: 

* Traceability of test cases with requirements, defects and other units in a well incorporated manner

* Creation of Graphical Metrics Reports

* Easy management of manual and automated tests, and multiple version of test runs

* Anytime anywhere access of the test cases

* Helps in automatic scheduling and running of test cases and also automates defect capturing from failed tests.

* Establishment of cross-tool traceability , visibility and automation at the micro-level

* Maintaining the best practice process

* Integrates test cases, results and iterations if any.

The test management tools are structured in a way to help the developers track the tests execution through every stage by reviewing the status of the project and maintaining a close view on the readiness level of the software to meet the customer requirements. In case of any defects being detected or limitations realized the enterprises and the software developers can hold back deployment till the issues are fixed.


Other Links

Requirements management tools

Agile methodology