Why PractiTest?

Sometimes potential customers ask us to help them understand whether PractiTest is the best solution for their needs.  We believe that having Joel working with them to help define their process and customize the platform to their needs is invaluable.

But there are a number of additional cool features that make PractiTest a unique solution.  We want to show you (only) five of them:

1. Anti-Bug Duplication mechanism -  Duplicates, bugs that are reported more than once in the system, are a pain for every organization.  The overhead and the waste of time of looking for the original bug, defining it as a duplicate, and rejecting the new one is something that we all would like to save from our daily lives.
   What if you knew the bug you we are writing right now is a duplicate of an existing bug?
   PractiTest comes with a built-in solution to the duplicate-bugs problem:  the minute anyone starts entering a bug the systems instantly displays the similar bugs candidates, enabling the user to decide whether this bug is a new one or not.
   
2. Bug by mail - With PractiTest you can report Issues directly from your email client. This is great if you have customers or field engineers (sales, support, etc) who don’t have access to PractiTest, or if you want to forward someone’s bug directly from your inbox to the system:
   
3. Unbelievable Customizations - not only can you customize the fields for your Requirements, Tests & Issues, but you can also implement your own user-permission levels and even define the workflow of your issues.
   Read more about PractiTest’s customization
4. Hierarchical custom views – This is one feature that, once you understand how it works and the value you get from it, you cannot stop using it.
   The basic idea is that you can organize your tests-tree based on any fields you choose, for example release version, but ALSO, based on product component and sub-component, and ALSO based on Run Status, etc.
   Unlike folders where the Tests are only shown in one place, with views you can show a single test in multiple different trees based on your needs.  This is similar to how gmail works with Tags, but BETTER!
   Read more about our hierarchal custom views.
5. Integration with SVN – This is a must for many development teams who choose to work in this very organized way.  For each issue you can see all the SVN commits linked to your issues, and also instruct SVN not to allow a commit without an issue being assigned to it.
   You can about our integration with SVN
   

Writing this post made me realize we have a lot more to write about, but maybe I’ll leave that to a latter post.

This week we performed a PractiTest system upgrade to implement a feature we’ve been planning for some time: a more flexible and scalable Test Management model.

This new model allows you to create and manage a Test Library with all the Tests you need to validate your application or system.  It then provides a separate tab, called Test Sets & Runs, where you plan and run your testing tasks (or cycles) based on the tests already written and available in the Test Library.

Test Library and Test Sets & Runs modules

This new model enhances the flexibility and scalability of your testing process:

• Allowing you to create a test once in the Test Library and re-use it multiple times on your Test Sets (or even multiple times in the same Test Set).
• Makes it easier to manage your test repository by having only one copy of each test.
• Provides a quick and easy way to track the status of your test throughout their lifecycle by looking at all their runs from a new Test Sets tab available on each of your tests in the Test Library.

Test Instances in the Test LIbrary

The new model is available by default in all PractiTest project created from this moment on.
Since we don’t want to disrupt the work in existing projects we will provide users with a period of time in order to migrate their projects from the previous to this new testing model.   To migrate your project or to get more information simply contact your PractiTest representative or send an email to our support team.

This week we performed a system upgrade with a feature that was being requested repeatedly by a number of users: the ability to integrate PractiTest with Bugzilla and FogBugz.

JIRA, Bugzilla and FogBugz integration

This upgrade also comes to improve our existing JIRA integration, and it enables Organizations to keep working with their available Bug Tracking systems, while allowing them to link these “external” defects into PractiTest and gain the traceability between the 2 platforms.  You can learn more about this integration and how to configure it from our help pages.

In addition to the new and improved integrations (and to some additional issues fixes) this upgrade includes improvements to PractiTest’s import mechanism, helping users by providing more feedback on errors during the import process.

Yesterday we performed an upgrade that mostly included infrastructure changes and minor bug fixes, but also some of the features requested by our customers:

• System fields can be defined as mandatory, just as regular custom fields
  

  Mandatory System Fields

• We included a couple of additional Reports covering Test Executions (the runs)
• We added column sorting support for the Test grid

  Sort Support to Test Grid

Also for this upgrade there was no downtime

We just finished recording a new web-tour of PractiTest.

The Tour covers the Issues, Tests, Requirements and Reports Modules, as well as some of the platform’s customizations. We hope you’ll find it useful (click on the Play icon):

Feel free to send us your comments.