PractiTest at the IGT Cloud Summit
Date: 2009-06-01
Last week we participated in the IGT Cloud Summit that took place in Exodia, Tel Aviv. It was pretty fun and we’ve got some pictures to share. We also met some interesting companies who presented their ideas and product.
Our logo (part of the 20 ‘cloud’ companies that were presenting that day):
Joel also gave a short presentation, explaining about the real need for PractiTest that came from, yes, our users:
PractiTest System Update
Date: 2009-06-01
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- Views’ Tree in the Issues Module, – The popular Views’ tree in the Tests Module, is now also supported in the Issues module, allowing to create and work with hierarchical views in the Issues Module faster and easier. This came as a request from our customers.
- Ability to link between Issues and Test Runs (and vice-versa), giving an additional flexibility when tracking between issues and tests.
- And additional smaller features and fixes to improve your working experience.
Welcome to PractiTest blog
Date: 2009-06-01
At last, we decided – PractiTest needs its own blog.
It wasn’t a no brainer, since we already have the QABlog that Joel posts almost weekly; so what’s the point in having another blog?
The main point is that in the QABlog, Joel mostly posts about QA Methodologies or his personal life & experience as a QA person; but PractiTest is growing fast and there’s much to tell!
So after struggling with the idea, we decided that the best way to go is to have two different blogs. Welcome!
Introducing the new Requirement Module
Date: 2009-07-01
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- New Requirement’s Module, with traceability to Tests & Issues providing a new link to our existing End-to-End Life-cycle Management
- Additional permission levels to give more control to the modifications done to the system Issues Module
- New Requirement’s Module, with traceability to Tests & Issues providing a new link to our existing End-to-End Life-cycle Management
- GUI Improvements
- Additional smaller features and fixes to improve your working experience.
PractiTest on CAST ’09
Date: 2009-07-01
PractiTest was present on CAST ’09, were we gave a presentation about Testing Intelligence and the way in which this new approach can help testing organizations improve their productivity and the perceived value of their Testing Teams.
The CAST conference took place in Colorado Springs, USA, between the 13th and 16th of July and it brought together some of today’s most influential testing figures.
The atmosphere and the approach of CAST provided an ideal platform for some very intensive sessions and off-side discussions around many Testing Topics. We were able to share some of our ideas about PractiTest and its future development and get great feedback from the conference participant’s.
Sigist Presentation
Date: 2009-08-01
Joel, again, taking a central role in the Israeli’s Sigist yearly conference (last week in the Sheraton Tel Aviv Hotel), talking about Testing Methodologies.
SIGiST this year was around the general theme of “Providing Value to the Organization”, and Testing Intelligence together with the new approach of PractiTest to test management were a central subject of many of the conference’s side track conversations.
An additional session where PractiTest was mentioned was the one talking about the AQA project, training people with Aspergers Autistic Syndrome. In that important project our platform is used as the tool where their students are trained in software testing and bug reporting methodologies. But we will talk about this subject more in a future post…
System Update
Date: 2009-08-15
Hi All !
This weekend we performed an update of the PractiTest System. There was no downtime.
- Addition of Folders to the Test Module, allowing users to organize their tests within Folders in addition to the Hierarchical Views Structure. This was requested by many of our users. We still believe that the views (with the custom-filters) is a more scalable, and easier to maintain.
- Improvedײ²ֲ Traceabilityײ²ֲ Functionality, making it easier to link between requirements, tests, and issues. Now you can link tests from requirements, and vice versa. The same with issues and tests, issues and requirements. it’s all fully traceable.
- Improved Performance – we added additional caching mechanisms on our server side, that makes your connection much faster than ever before. We hope you’ll enjoy it !
- And additional smaller features and fixes to improve your working experience.
As always, we’re happy to hear your inputs and feedback; it helps us making PractiTest better.
Testing Seminar in Costa Rica
Date: 2009-08-01
This past August 15th, PractiTest took central stage in San Jose, Costa Rica providing a half day seminar about the latest advancements in Software Testing.
The event was attended by over 50 Managers, Engineers, and Analysts representing around 20 of Costa Rica’s most advanced Software Development & IT departments, and it covered interesting topics such as Testing Intelligence, Testing Methodologies and Tools.
In case you missed the event or if you attended and want to take a second look at the presentation you can download it from here.
PractiTest Update
Date: 2009-09-06
Hi All!
This weekend we performed an update to the PractiTest System. There was no downtime.
This version comes packed with important features you requested in the past such as:
- Customization of views in the Testing and Requirement’s modules. The same functionality you loved in Issues, is now fully available in the Tests and Requirements modules. Learn more about the custom view functionality.
- New option to export requirements data.
- Mechanism to export test steps – improving the previous export where the steps were part of the Test’s row, now the export shows each step in a separate row.
- Ability to follow individual entities and receive notifications on their changes. This feature allows you to get notifications regardless if you are not the author or the assignee of the entity.
- Permalink support for entities – now each entity has it’s own unique permanent link. This is easier for those users working with multiple projects.
- And additional smaller features and fixes.
Let us know if you have any questions or further requests (feedback forum soon to come…)!
Comming soon… Affiliates Program
Date: 2009-10-01
Are you a QA or Testing Consultant, Expert or Site?
We invite you to join forces with PractiTest.
We are about to launch PractiTest’s affiliates and distribution program for QA and Testing Firms, Consultants and Experts worldwide. Earn money by recommending users to work with PractiTest, the best Hosted QA Management Solution available today.
We’ll be providing additional incentives to the initial number of affiliates to join the program.
Send us your contact details to affiliates(at)practitest(dot)com, and we will keep you posted with all the information as it becomes available.
Presenting PractiTest’s product feedback forum
2009-10-01
During the last couple of months we’ve seen a steady increase in the number companies working with PractiTest. Together with new users come their ideas on how to improve the system, and so we literally got flooded with great features and enhancement requests.
Don’t get me wrong we are obviously thrilled! But if some time ago we managed to collect all this info manually (by talking directly to all our clients) and prioritize it based on the number of users who wanted each feature, today this task has become almost impossible without an automated system.
So, we found a system we really like: here’s the link to PractiTest’s Feedback Forum – http://practitest.uservoice.com.
Please don’t hesitate, just go and log all your requests there!
Before suggesting a new feature make a quick search and if it was already requested just vote for it. You have 10 votes and you can choose to give 1-3 votes to each request / idea.
Here’s how it looks like:
One last thing…
In parallel to the features we develop based on customer feedback, we have a defined product road-map and a clear idea of where we want PractiTest to head in the future. This means that we continue developing functionality based on this road-map even if sometimes these features have not been explicitly requested by customers yet.
Having said that, we always make sure that each new release includes functionality or improvements that were requested by users and we prioritize them using the feedback you provide.
Updated PractiTest help
Date: 2009-10-01
Today we posted a new version of PractiTest’s product help.
This new version includes most of the changes and improvements we did mainly to the Settings module. There is also a Getting Started section with explanations on how to perform some of PractiTest most common operations.
PractiTest Update
Date: 2009-11-08
Hello all!
This weekend we updated PractiTest with some new and useful features, many of which originated from your comments on PractiTest’s Feedback Forum.
This upgrade comes with some exciting stuff such as:
- Jira Integration with a 2-way synchronization between PractiTest and Jira for Seamless Jira test management. (We will post a separate article with more information on this integration as well as the configuration instructions).
- In the Custom Fields settings you have the ability to Reuse the values of existing lists on new lists. For cases where you have one list that you want to use in multiple fields (e.g. Product Versions, Customers, Products, etc).
- Option to edit system fields (like Issue Type, Priority, etc). Modify their values, add default values, and decide whether to show them or hide them as part of your project.
- A new requirement traceability report, showing the end-to-end traceability from requirements, to tests, and to issues. You can access this report from the Requirements module, under the views and reports drop-down list.
- Global search in custom fields. Now each time you search for a word or phrase the system also searches in the custom fields you added to your project.
- Display of Step Number as part of the Test Editing and Execution windows.
- Ability to import requirements into PractiTest from csv files.
- PractiTest now remembers the status of the Requirements tree, so you don’t need to collapse it each time you re-enter the Requirements module.
- And additional small fixes.
As we already said, many of the features listed above came from your inputs, and so we invite you to continue telling us what’s you need so that we can continue developing the stuff that’s important to YOU.
Our Test Management Tool integrates with Jira
Date: 2009-12-01
We know of a number of reasons people like using PractiTest.
For example the idea of running tests and reporting issues automatically when a step fails, without needing to manually add all the steps to reproduce the bug.
The fact that all the testware (Requirements, Tests & Issues) is located in the same system.
The easy of use and simplicity of the User Interface.
And these are only a few…
Still we also see companies who are interested in using PractiTest as their Test Management Tool, but don’t want (or can’t) move their whole R&D team to work with PractiTest as their single Issue tracking system. After receiving a number of requests from companies like these, that are also using Jira, we developed an Integration between Jira and PractiTest.
One of the main difference in our approach is that, unlike many of the other tools integrating with Jira with a 1-side only integration (where bugs submitted in their tool are only copied to Jira and then the link is cut), we implemented a 2-way synchronization that allows our users to still take advantage of our Bug Management as well as our Test Management functionality:
- If you create an Issue on PractiTest you will see it on Jira
- If you create an Issue on Jira you will see it on PractiTest
- When you edit or update an issue, either on Jira or on PractiTest, you will see the changes on the other tool
- So if there’s a bug that originated from a test in PractiTest, you will see all the steps also in Jira, and you will be able to go to the Test in PractiTest directly from the Jira window.
The integrations requires some configuration and mapping (for the fields and their values in both tools) before it starts, but this configuration makes it very flexible and a lot more intelligent than simply copying the default system fields as they are.
The bottom line is that it took us more time than we originally thought it would take to develop this integration, but we think we are on to something good. So I’d like to thank all the users who keep working with us on this project and giving us feedback on the plugin, and to our R&D guys for developing it around the clock.
PractiTest-Jira Integration Help
Tests Management enhancements and more
Date: 2009-12-01
Greetings!!
This weekend (November 6th) we performed an additional update to PractiTest incorporating some useful and important features into the system.
Some of the most important additions are:
- Batch edit in Tests – where users can either select individual tests or whole views and perform batch modifications to the fields in the entities. (We are experimenting with this editing mechanism in the Tests module before deciding whether to implement it in the Issues module too, feel free to tell us what you think).
- Navigation Mechanism in Issues and Tests – allowing users to navigate from entity to entity in their views without needing to go back to the grid. A small improvement that we think will save a lot of “clicks” to our users.
- Enhancements to the test cloning mechanism – allowing users to choose tests one by one before cloning a new Test Suit.
- Improvements to the folder management mechanism in Tests – allowing to edit and move folders more easily. Starting from this update, you can also clone tests from folders too.
- Additions to the Jira integration plug-in – based on the initial feedback we received from our users.
- And many smaller features and fixes throughout the system.
Many of the features above came from the feedback provided by our users in PractiTest’s Feedback Forum. We encourage you all to keep telling us what you want and need, and we will do our best to fill out your wishes…