The majority of organizations must contend with the daily challenge of managing a complicated suite of automated and manual tests. They know that both forms of software testing offer their own advantages and disadvantages, and that by integrating the two – through tools such as Tricentis Tosca and Micro Focus ALM (formerly HPE ALM) – they can improve the overall speed and quality of their enterprise software products.
Manual testing, for instance, plays a crucial role with regards to inspecting and improving the user experience of the software. Expert testers can draw on their skills, expertise and experience to manage tests that are unplanned/ad-hoc, urgent, complex or light on documentation. As an end-user themselves, testers know what to look for in terms of usability and functionality. In that respect the human brain is just as important as any piece of code in software delivery.
Automated testing, meanwhile, makes up for the shortcomings of manual testing. In a world of frequent code changes and time-consuming repetitive tasks, automation can pick up the slack – especially when it comes to managing large mission-critical product portfolios and serving huge user bases. Work of that magnitude is too much for the human brain and touch. Automation eliminates a lot of this time-consuming, non-value adding work, freeing up QA teams to focus on more specialized quality assurance activities such as:
- Requirements Ambiguity Check
- Developer-Tester Static Code Inspections
- QA Metric Design
- Automated API Test Design
Many of our customers use both manual testing tools (such as Micro Focus ALM) and automated testing tools (such as Tricentis Tosca). By integrating both of these tools, the quality and breadth of their test coverage is amplified dramatically.
Key test-related information such as requirements and defects can be automatically flowed between the two tools, eradicating manual communication tasks (such as email, status meetings and duplicate entry) to accelerate the process and reduce the ever-looming threat of human error. Requirements can be linked to test cases while defects can be handled within the ALM tool, improving testing speed and coverage.
In the below video, you can see how integrating the two tools can improve product quality, collaboration and visibility:
Key Tasktop features and benefits
- Share requirements with test automation engineers early on, so they have plenty of time to design automated tests and ensure adequate test coverage.
- Centralize data about defects logged in multiple in one tool (acting as master) for the sake of easy reporting.
- Product owners, business analysts and testing teams can collaborate directly from their tool, never having to copy and paste information between tools.
- Teams can exchange comments directly on the artifact inside their own tool, maximizing productivity and creating a completely traceable thread of communication.
Value Stream Integration and Quality Management
In many organizations, it’s up to the testing and QA teams to declare whether an application is ready to ship and deliver value to customer. In order to make that critical decision, they need real-time information from across the toolchain to access the health of a product. Value Stream Integration helps flow that critical information across tools to improve Quality Management. Check out the white paper below to learn more:
Step by step – integrate your whole Software Delivery Value Stream
Integrating testing tools is only one step in improving the quality and delivery speed of software products. Organizations are also integrating development tools to testing tools to help them spot and remediate defects even faster, as well as integrating development and test tools with all other key stages of the software delivery value stream. You can read more on integrating Agile Planning tools (such as Jira) with Test Management tools (such as Tricentis Tosca) in the below blog:
https://blog.tasktop.com/blog/integrate-jira-and-tosca/
Connecting an entire value stream can at first seem like an overwhelming task. But most leading organizations are connecting their value streams in an incremental way. They start by implementing one or two ‘integration patterns’ – such as Micro Focus and Tosca with Jira – that allow them to connect parts of their value stream. Over time they add more and more, with the ultimate goal of a fully integrated value stream.
You can learn more about Value Stream Integration and how to manage your value stream in the below e-book:
Want a more personal touch? Request a highly-customized demo of how Tasktop can help you connect your end-to-end value stream to help you to measure, improve and optimize your enterprise software delivery.
