What is test management?

Test management today commonly involves the use of test management solutions that can organize and streamline workflows critical to successful testing. Such solutions can facilitate better test planning, help build test environments, provide test automation, allow traceability and improve communication and collaboration among team members. Test management should not be confused with project management—the latter may be used to organize the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) while the former focuses specifically on the software testing process of the SDLC.

Effective test management can enable continuous testing, revealing real-time opportunities for improvements in product quality—enabling fixes as a product is still under development—and accelerating the delivery of quality products. This marks a contrast to traditional testing, which takes place at the end of a product development process and offers fewer opportunities for improvements and defect management.

The goal of testing is to identify and resolve issues that would otherwise prevent the product from meeting end user expectations. However, costly quality issues have occurred over the years despite notable advancements in the testing of software applications. In the 1960s, software testing was largely limited to testing individual lines of code, or unit testing. But through the decades, the testing process expanded to include multiple types of testing strategies and test objectives, ranging from integration testing, which ensures that different software components can operate together, to regression testing, which checks whether code or feature updates hurt the software’s overall functionality.

While the development of different testing strategies can empower organizations to discover more issues, the variety of tests and test metrics available creates its own challenge: prioritization. Organizations are faced with prioritizing the types of testing and test cases necessary to identify the most urgent problems and address them expediently. This challenge is compounded by the growing complexity of products being tested: more functions and features per product necessitate even more testing.

A lack of prioritization and optimization in test planning can result in inefficient and ineffective testing cycles, impeding the execution of development methodologies like agile and DevOps while allowing costly defects to slip by. Fortunately, test management and test management tools can help mitigate these challenges, allowing development teams to accelerate the delivery of high-quality software and meet scalability demands.

While test management frameworks might vary from company to company, generally the test management process is divided into two phases: planning and test execution, both overseen by a test manager.

During the planning phase, test managers conduct risk analysis, in which they determine what could go wrong during a testing lifecycle; test estimation, in which they consider what resources and funding the testing will require; test planning, in which they map out test strategy and objectives; and test organization, which entails structuring the testing team and assigning responsibilities to testers and other team members.

During the test execution phase, test managers supervise and monitor the progress of testing activities; conduct issue management to identify problems arising during testing and instruct team members to address them; and create test reports summarizing and analyzing the test process and test data for review by stakeholders.

In the past, companies have used spreadsheet tools like Excel for test management purposes. While such tools are easy to learn, modern test management systems offer features to better organize and streamline test management processes.

One of the key benefits of today’s test management tools is automation, including API testing, functional user interface (UI) testing, performance testing and service virtualization (simulating necessary testing components may not be available in real time otherwise.). Automation can also help testers reuse test data in different test runs for greater efficiency.

Other test management system features may include:

• Support for manual testing processes
• Creating test plans that delineate project quality goals and exit criteria
• Tracking testing resources and ensuring they’re available to execute test plans
• Configuration and test case management to track test cases, test suites and test runs associated with different product variants
• Managing regulatory requirements and preparing for compliance audits
• Accelerating testing using rich text, inline images and assisted data entry and validation for precise test definition and execution
• Integration with external automation tools and third-party testing tools like Jira through standard industry interfaces like Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC)
• Communication among geographically dispersed teams through event feeds, integrated chat and automated traceability
• Providing dashboards and advanced reporting capabilities for sharing test results and other information to address stakeholder needs and assess readiness for delivery.
• Optimizing the use of test management features through tutorials