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.

Testing an Application without documents

I have taken the Stefan's dashboard just to show how the exploratory testing can be done, as recently i met a person(tester) as our conversion went as follows

Tester : Do you know anything about Win Runner, QTP
TesterWorld(ME) : They are automational tools used for checkinging the functionality
Tester : That answer any one can say who are in testing field. Tell me are you manual / automation tester.

Our conversation went top to the hill, as he argued that Automation will re place manual testing, I got annoyed with his reasonless argument and I just asked a simple question. Can you test any appliccation that has no functionality/specification document).Tester : No, i cant test. how can we test with out any of the documents.

This was the answer he gave me, i really pitty for most of the people who are not skilled testers and still acts as if they are senior QA, etc. So this post is for those people who are really intrested and passionate about testing.

I have taken the Stefans Dash board as it really looks great and made me exciting while i was testing for this post, (http://abouttesting.blogspot.com/2008/06/testing-dashboard.html) . This made me really exciting while seeing the sample screen shot in the above mentioned post and i downloaded the file with out reading the whole post

First thought regarding the Dashboard :
when I unzipped it, i found a html file, excel sheet, two images, and one sample screen shot. I opened the HTML file AND FOUND no values are getting populated in dashboard, I was shocked why is this not getting opened, i thought some of the files must have been deleted intensionally.

Second thought regarding the dashboard :
After some time later, again i went into the folder and opened the html File in notepad, unfortunately i am poor at programming languages but i gussed the path that was given in html file, that excel sheet has to be placed in C drive and then immediately i did that and again i opened the html file. Hurray it got opened. Offcourse the path can also be changed to as desired location and can be given in the notepad, inorder to make the dashboard to be worked.

Third thought regarding the dashboard :
So i tried in doing couple of changes, just by status to pass to fail, changing version and adding comments everythings seems to be cool and working fine, then i used some of diffrent scenarios.
Sceanrio 1
Steps to reproduce:
1. Open the "autteststatus.html" file, and click on the change status button
2. In the comments give as 'test' and try to save a java script error is populated.

Scenario 2
Steps to reproduce:
1. Open the "autteststatus.html" file, and click on the change status button
2. Now give the word in double quotes in comments column and save, you can observe that comments column is saved, now again click on the change button you can observe that, there is no data present for the changes you done previously

Scenario 3
Steps to reproduce:
1. Open the "autteststatus.html" file, and click on the change status button
2. Enter the comments column with html tags like test and save you can find that it is saved and displayed as bold. Now again click on the change button, now ive the name in html tags like and save, changes were saved successfully but text i changed is not visible, now click on change button then you can find that text is present as given but it is not visible after we savee save.

Scenario 4:
Steps to reproduce:
1. Open the "autteststatus.xls" file, and click on the change status button
2. Give the comments as 'test' note the costumer and version no. now open the html file and observe that starting quote is misssing in the column.
These were some of the scenarios Please be passioante about the work you do, that will make you rich and wealthy.