Automation Tests Support Beta is now Publicly available
Date: 2011-02-01
Hi,
This weekend we released a new version of PractiTest with one feature in particular that has been requested by a number of customers – the public release of our Automation XBot Plugin.
Using the XBot, you can run automated tests and scripts created with virtually any tool (Selenium, Watir, QTP, etc) or any homegrown testing framework. You can learn more about the XBot from our Automated Tests documentation, and if you want to take part in this Public Beta just send us an email and we will activate this feature in your projects.
This version comes with a number of small additions in the Report Center, such as the ability to export your reports to PDF format as well as to work with Views on Requirement Reports.
The current release also fixes a number of smaller issues that were reported by some of you in the last couple of weeks.
We’ll be happy to get your feedback on these or any of the rest of PractiTest, you mail us directly or use our User Feedback Forum.
Dashboard & Reporting features, Test Sets’ improvements and much more
Date: 2011-03-01
Hi,
This weekend we released a new version of PractiTest with many features requested during the last couple of months.
Dashboard
– Added the option to create a Private Dashboard tab where each user can define the graphs and information he wants to see.
– Dashboard graphs are now clickable and will allow users to “zoom-in” and see the data behind the specific pie or graph displayed. So, for example, in a pie chart of the bugs for your release you can click and see the specific ones that are in status rejected or open.
– We added the ability to personalize which dashboard tab you want to be displayed by default on each of your projects.
– Added new dashboard items for test instances.
Exporting, Reporting and Printing
– We added the ability to print specific issues, tests, test sets and requirements straight from the form.
– Expanded the support to export specific custom views from all the modules in PractiTest.
Test Execution
– Users can now see the attachments defined in the test library as part of the test instances running within a test set.
– We added a visual indication when adding test instances to your test set whenever a specific test is already part of the given test set.
General
– Improvements to the Multiselect fields.
– Plus a number of additional smaller features and fixes.
As the amount of feature requests grows from month to month we’d like to remind and encourage you to use our User Feedback Forum in order to let us know what additional functionality you’d like to see in PractiTest. Remember that this forum is there not only to add your own requests, but also to vote for the features requested by other users that you’d also want to see in PractiTest. This in turn will help us plan and prioritize our work based on your priorities.
Feel free to let us know what you think by leaving comments and sending us your feedback!
How Delek uses PractiTest to manage their Exploratory Testing
Date: 2011-06-01
Last week in Tel Aviv we had a SIGiST’s (Special Interest Group in Software Testing) quarterly meeting, where QA managers and engineers gather to see presentations from selected QA groups and talk about various topics related to our testing work and its day-to-day challenges.
During this session we had the chance to, among other ineresting presentations, see a very informative and consice presentation on how Delek uses PractiTest to manage their exploratory testing efforts.
As part of the presentation, Gavriel Gutshtein explained how they are able to manage their exploratory testing in coordination with the rest of their scripted testing efforts, documenting all their tests (including their exploratory sessions) in PractiTest, and providing full visibility to the team and their external stakeholders on the tasks and progress of their projects.
In addition to the way in which they use PractiTest he also talked about how, by blending scripted and exploratory testing, they are able to reduce their total testing efforts and at the same time increase the stability of their released products.
Affiliate Program
Date: 2011-06-01
Do you know a company that may benefit from PractiTest? Now you can earn money by recommending users to work with PractiTest.
PractiTest will pay a referral fee of twenty percent (20%) of net revenues for the life-time of your referral, subject to a minimum requirements.
PractiTest Affiliate Program is simple:
- In order to receive a referral fee you need to refer at least one new paying customer every twelve months, generating a minimum US $400 revenues per month.
- As long as this minimum milestone is kept, you will receive the referral fee of 20% for all the accumulative accounts you referred!
As you can see, this is an awesome affiliate program so go ahead and check-out the details. This is your chance to benefit both yourself and your colleagues, by recommending PractiTest.
Launching Test Automation Support
Date: 2011-06-01
Does your team have automated tests?
- Do you run automation as part of your tests?
- How do schedule and execute your automated scripts?
- Do you generate reports out of your automation? Do you do this together with your manual tests?
It’s great to see how test automation is becoming more common in today’s testing organizations. Something that used to be mainly a buzzword in the industry, is becoming a helpful tool to many teams around the world.
Regardless if you use Selenium, QTP, or even home-brewed scripts, automation is more and more a part of everyday QA life. Even though it is still far from being a Silver Bullet, as many tool vendors want us to believe, it allows to streamline our processes and to develop more stable products, helping us release high quality products faster than before.
The problem is that, in order to make proper use of automation you need to manage it and integrate it into your overall testing process. For example, you need to understand what part of your tests are automatic vs. manual; or sometimes you are asked to generate reports that will show your stakeholders the overall testing status of your product (regardless if the test is automated or not!).
What were we looking to solve?
After getting a number of requests from users to expand PractiTest’s functionality to manage (also) automated tests we started searching for the best possible solution.
Basically we wanted to come up with an approach that would allow users to:
- Manage their tests and runs, whether manual or automated, in one place.
- Increase the visibility of the automation efforts and teams, eliminating any communication or coordination issues.
- To see the results of all my tests in one place, creating comprehensive reports.
- Providing a solution that is simple to deploy and flexible enough to manage as many tools as possible.
Our solution – the xBot automation agent
So, after talking to our users and reviewing many possible approaches we chose to develop what we call the xBot automation agent, a small java utility that runs on every OS (Windows, Mac, Linux) and is able to execute scripts written on any tool or any language.
Users who want to run automated test simply map their automation scripts to tests in the Test Library, they then create a Test Set with their scripts, and schedule the time when they want their tests to start running. When this time arrives the xBot gets from PractiTest the order to execute the scripts locally. Finally after each test is run, the agent uploads the results to PractiTest as part of the test execution log.
Public release of the xBot agent
In the beginning of the year we started a private beta with a limited number of customers who had asked for this functionality. Later on, in February, we released the public beta in order to get more feedback on the solution.
In May and June published a number of posts in our QAblog, linked-in and other forums, asking testers what are their biggest challenges when coordinating automated and manual tests.
Now, after taking the feedback from the Beta and the inputs from the web, we are proud to release this new solution to support automated testing via PractiTest.
We hope you’ll like our solution and invite you to keep providing us your feedback. Here’s more information about the xBot and PractiTest’s support for Automated Tests.
Radwin: ‘a Top-Notch Test Management Tool’
Date: 2011-08-01
We
at PractiTest were very excited to hear what Radwin’s
Kfir Hemed had to say about us. Hemed is head of the Verification Unit at Radwin, a world leading communications
equipment vendor. His team has been using PractiTest for large scale testing cycles.
In Hemed’s own words:
“I liked the product, the simplicity, the ease of use. I decided to run one set of tests for a month and see how it goes. After the first trial we tested a bigger version, and only after that went smoothly – we moved all of our testing to PractiTest.”
“We never had a system crash or slow down. It – easy to deploy – the logic of the system and the UI are clear – and the learning curve is very quick. This is very beneficial for us because we frequently loan testers from other departments, and they start using PractiTest in no time.”
“The results are effective and better managed testing cycles: accurate planning that is executed on schedule, with clear logging of each and every test, issue and bug. With an average cycle exceeding several hundreds tests – that’s a big advantage.”
Radwin: ‘a Top-Notch Test Management Tool’
Date: 2011-08-01
We at PractiTest were very excited to hear what Radwin’s Kfir Hemed had to say about us. Hemed is head of the Verification Unit at Radwin, a world leading communications equipment vendor. His team has been using PractiTest for large scale testing cycles.
In Hemed’s own words:
“I liked the product, the simplicity, the ease of use. I decided to run one set of tests for a month and see how it goes. After the first trial we tested a bigger version, and only after that went smoothly – we moved all of our testing to PractiTest.”
“We never had a system crash or slow down. It – easy to deploy – the logic of the system and the UI are clear – and the learning curve is very quick. This is very beneficial for us because we frequently loan testers from other departments, and they start using PractiTest in no time.”
“The results are effective and better managed testing cycles: accurate planning that is executed on schedule, with clear logging of each and every test, issue and bug. With an average cycle exceeding several hundreds tests – that’s a big advantage.”
PractiTest product support is getting an upgrade!
Date: 2011-09-01
We've been making changes over the last several weeks to better support our customers at PractiTest. As our client-base grow, so do the support requests, and our need for more automation and integration to our workflows.
That’s why we have migrated to new PractiTest help platform (via Assistly). This will make support more efficient. What you can expect is the same level of support, with the following visible changes:
- All support will be answered right in your inbox.
- A new knowledge-base, with the same articles you're used to.
- Later on, an easier ticket submission right from the app instead of opening your email or creating a ticket in the help site.
We are confident this new system will make our excellent support even better.
Improved grid, attachments to steps, fast filters and more
Date: 2011-10-01
We’ve been working really hard on the “October-2011” version of PractiTest, that we released this Wednesday (today 🙂 ).
To be honest, we originally aimed to release this update about 6 weeks ago, but the scope of the features kept growing, and it took us more than expected to reach “code freeze”. Eventually, we decided to cut the scope a little and made this release as an opening shot for the next ones to come.
Here are some of the major items we included in this version:
- Better (ajax) grid in the Issues and Test-Instances. This grid comes with many requested features, such as:
- Batch edit & batch filter – also to Test-Instances
- Better and complete batch edit for Issues
- Batch delete where permitted
- Column chooser for the Instance Grid -> this means you can choose what columns you want to see in the instance grid, including custom fields
- and more
- Attachment support for steps – enabling to attachments (or links) to steps, and see them while you run the test.
- Better history log for step changes
- Adding comment to the ‘send by email’ feature of the issues
- a large number of additional improvements and bug fixes
We already started working on the next version, and always there are many things coming that have been asked for in our User Feedback forum. Still, we ask you to keep telling us what you’d like to see in PractiTest so that we can make the system even better for all of us.
Until next time (hopefully in a shorter time this time around)!
Stuff that worked and lessons learned from a Service Outing
Date: 2011-12-01
A couple of weeks ago we had a short service outing for PractiTest.
The service was down for about 22 minutes. This was the first time in over 18 months that our service was unavailable for more than a couple of minutes (and even this happened only twice) or as part of a scheduled maintenance.
Even though short outings like this one are common in our Industry (after all there is no system, not even Gmail, that doesn’t have glitches once in a while) we have gone through a serious retrospective analysis of what happened in order to avoid similar issues in the future, and maybe more importantly to respond even faster in the event something like this happens once again.
What went right
Part of our analysis showed that there were many things that worked correctly.
For example:
– We got both SMS messages as well as notification phone calls from our automatic monitoring systems telling us something was wrong with our servers.
– All back-up systems were working correctly (even though we did not really need them because no data was corrupted at any time).
– Our team was aware of the issue even before the first of our users contacted us.
Things to improve
We also detected a couple of things that need to be improved:
1. Because of system security procedures there were only 2 PractiTest employees who could respond and act when issues like this happened. Unfortunately this number seems to be not enough because at the exact time the issue happened one of them was commuting and the other one was also out of the office with a dead smart-phone battery.
To avoid issues like this we provided another employee with access to these servers. We are also creating an internal notification process to make sure that at least one of them is available 24/7 – with more than one way to communicate 🙂
2. Up to last week our internal monitoring system didn’t cover secondary services and one of such services turned to be the culprit. Now we’ll monitor all services, primary and secondary. This means that the monitoring process will give a head’s up before the services reach a dangerous level, so that we have more time to act.
3. One of the things we had already planned to do but may take a couple of sprints to have in place, is the ability to use the Autoscale system provided by Amazon. This will allow our system to automatically scale up in cases when the CPU of any of our services goes over a set threshold.
We already started working on this, but now we increased the development’s priority of it.
4. Last but not least, we want to provide even better visibility and transparency to what is happening in our service. We know that we have the best support and provide almost immediate answers via any of our current communication channels (e.g. Support Site, Skype, email, etc)
But we need to improve the way we broadcast information by being quicker with our twitter updates or by publishing blog posts such as this one faster and closer to the date of the incident.
(*) Just a short note to say that some of our technological plans may change as we have been accepted to be part of the Redhat Innovate program.
As always, we are here to answer any questions you may have about this or any other aspect of our service.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us via support@www.practitest.com.
Happy Holidays!
The PractiTest team.
Alerting before loosing unsaved data, multilists on the dashboard, improved account visibility and more
Date: 2011-12-01
Just before the end of the 2011, and maybe as a starting point for 2012, we just released (this last Wednesday) and update to PractiTest with additional features requested by many of you during the last couple of months.
The feature list is extensive, but here is a summary of the highlights:
- User alert before leaving a page with unsaved data. A simple yet useful reminder for those cases when you “accidentally” left a page with issues or tests and you forgot save your work before hand.
- Multilist support on the dashboard. This feature will allow you to create graphs and tables also for fields of type multilist, providing enhanced visibility into your project.
- Added instance count field to the Test Set Grid. Similar to the Step Count in the Test Library, providing added visibility into your Test Sets
- Improved visibility into the users in your account. Showing Account Administrators a list of their users by the projects they are assigned to, and of the projects with all the users in them. This feature also allows you to delete users from all projects simultaneously.
- Email notification for users when added to a new project. Making sure your users are aware of new assignments or additional projects they can now access via PractiTest.
- And many additional smaller features and fixes
As always, we invite you to go to our User’s Feedback forum and update us with the features and options you would like to see included in PractiTest. This information is really important to us to make our system better and more aligned with your needs.
From all the PractiTest team and family, we hope you had a pretty cool and fun 2011, and we wish 2012 is you an event better year; a year of happiness, success & fruitful testing!