Working with TestLink

i was excited working on it, i really felt good but, there are also disadvantages/factors that has to be considered and in fact i learnt few things/lessons in implementing (not yet implemented decision left for management) When I started taking this task, we knew that it is hard to implement this, but for the long run this is good, Problem is for a project that have 40000+ test cases which will be really hard to dump into testlink. So if testlink is implemented in a new projects i think this can be fit.

As for my observations these were the Hurdles/disadvantages as for our project is concerned regarding implementing the Testlink tool.

1. In order to migrate our test cases completely to Test Link, which takes a lot of time, though the import functionality is given, these can be done only via XML(including custom fields). 2. This restricts only to Pass, fail or blocked status are only available as for as test cases execution/while generating Results.

Advantages :
1. Easy in tracking test cases(search with keyword, test case id, version etc)
2. We can add our custom fields to test cases.
3. Allocating the work either test case creation/execution/preparing any kind of documents is easy
4. when a test cases is updated the previous version also can be tracked
5. We can generate results build wise
6. Test plans are created for builds and work allocations can be done.
7. Report, is one of the awesome functionality present in the Test link, it generates reports in desired format like HTML/ CSV /Excel and more over the art of reports is based on the results from the test case executions that were allocated build wise/individual resources/test plan with pass/failed percentage and this can also be generated in graphs.
8. And the above all is done on the privileges based which is an art of the testlink and i liked this feature much

This post is made not to use testlink or neither to implement the tool. I wrote this post since we could learn before implemnting the tools a few lessons and i learnt the following lessons
1. Regardless the features of the tool, we need to look how far is this feasible to the project
2. Environment and process also has to be considered as well
3. Time is main factor in implementing such tools in such huge project etc.....

Off course all the above mentioned lessons were heard that while implementing any kind of tool we need to consider the above points, but today i experienced those lessons and enjoyed in doing such work.

Thanks,
TesterWorld

Update: Atleaset we started to implement for one of the project. yet, there are many challenges to come.