While developers can sprint from idea to implementation in a matter of days, QA has struggled to keep up with this rapid pace due to a lack of standard test management software tools. The ability to track software requirements across the full software development lifecycle including testing and verification is often the missing piece in most organisations, and when an organisation adopts the right test management software tool, it drives real acceleration.

Test management software manages the intersection between software requirements, defect tracking, and test plans. When a development team delivers a new feature or fixes a new bug, it is test management software that allows management to track the progress of verifying and validating that software requirements have been tested.

Without the right test management software tool, developers and project managers are forced to track quality in a series of manual spreadsheets. Features implemented are tracked against a series of ad-hoc tests and test plans. Instead of achieving a process that can scale across multiple departments and development groups, this manual testing reconciliation effort requires an endless number of meetings and a series of subjective checkpoint calls where QA discusses how “confident” they are in a given software release. In other words, manual testing involves passing around time-consuming Excel spreadsheets and making subjective calls about how “tested” a given software feature is.

Needless to say, this manual testing approach doesn’t scale. Earlier test case management tools designed before agile are now missing features that limit productivity. Stryka was built specifically to support both agile and waterfall methodologies by combining data from issue management systems with data from continuous delivery pipelines and integration testing tools. Stryka makes release readiness something that can be formally measured rather than a subjective discussion with QA. Formal test case management is a key step in upgrading test management practices for modern development methodologies to eliminate the subjectivity of release readiness and inspire confidence with actual data.

In a large organisation, it is dangerous it is to make release decisions based on how a developer or how a QA engineer “feels” about a given software feature or release. When getting it right matters, use Stryka test management software tool to make your release decisions data-driven and objective.

Edited for web by Cecilia Rehn.