Test Management Tool - New Release of Enterprise Tester

Well it's been a busy couple of weeks for the team putting together the next release of Enterprise Tester.

Enterprise Tester (http://www.enterprisetester.com/) is a Test Management Tool that allows for traceablility between your UML analysis model through test cases and scripts to any issues in your issue management tool.

While other Test Management Tools attempt to do everything from requirements management to issue management we at Catch (http://www.catchlimited.com/) have taken a more focused approach believing that a Test Management Tool should be just that, not a defect tracker nor should it be a requirements analysis tool. Most if not all organisations have a defect tracking tool and / or an enterprise issue management tool so our view is why buy another and duplicate capability that you already have or if your organisation doesn't have one then why should your test management tool determine the issue management tool your organisation uses?

That's right you should be able to use the best of bread tool of your choice that fits with your enterprise's architecture and allows you to minimise your technology footprint not make it more complex.

The other thing we have tried to do is make the testers life easier, yes that's right, if you are buying a Test Management Tool then you should get some benefits from it besides that fact that you are transfering paper forms and information into an electronic format. We run a consulting company and so a big driver for us was to improve the speed and quality of the work we complete. From our internal studies we have found that Enterprise Tester will save you approximately 4% minimum of your total project cost. That's right run a 100K project and save 4k and at the same time pay for the Enterprise Tester license cost - simple :) .

Why is Enterprise Tester different to other Test Management Tools?

Because of our consulting background in the past we have ( far too many times) been given specifications to develop test cases and scripts from. This is the industry standard but we also find that our test analysts have to question, query and update these specifications and try to keep everything in sync with the analyst and developers. With our own team we use Sparx Systems, Enterprise Architect (http://www.sparxsystems.com/) and in fact we like it so much that we last year for fortunate enough to also be allowed to operate Sparx Systems New Zealand (http://www.sparxsystems.co.nz/).

Enterprise Architect is a UML modeling tool that allows an organsiations Enterprise Architecture to be modelled, including the ability to model projects and automatically generate specification documents. Enterprise Tester integrates with Enterprise Architect to automatically generate test scripts for you, no more duplicating the work of the analyst and no more having to keep things in sync, the tool does it for you.

In this release we improved the reporting capability so that you can associated a number of precanned reports to your projects and customise them by selecting the relevant criteria. From a base set of 5 report templates you can generate approx. 30 different customised reports. We have also allowed users to export any report into a number of different formats including CSV, RTF, PDF, XML, etc. so you can use them in your current document templates or save them in your project directory or document management system.

Along with the improvements in the reporting area we built on the tools reporting to allow users to reference the reports they have created on their dashboard. In this way each project dashboard and users personal dashboard can be customised by 'pointing' a report portlet to a separate report and displaying the associated chart giving the user real time reporting on the projects they are interested in and at a glance the status of the testing being undertaken.

Users can now see what happening with the testing side of a project in an instant. No more trawling through data reports to understand the current status.

Other features we have tried to improve is that we have given the user the choice as to executing a script in a step by step manner, may be for Use Acceptance Testing, or via a multi step grid that allows the test analyst to see all steps and update them quickly while being able to see any attachments and incidents associated with any of the steps.

In addition we attempt to make the test analysts life easier by automatically populating the project, script, step, expected & actual result and related information directly into the incident record to save time and effort in revording this information and speed up the testing process.

Enterprise Tester takes reuse into the testing arena by not only allowing automatic generation of test cases and scripts from your UML models but allowing you to reuse script templates and reports within and across projects.

We aim to add additional features on a monthly basis based on the requirements of our user community. Not only will a number of new interfaces to other popular incident management tools and automated tool be added but we have had requests to release a single user license. We will look to release this in the coming month.

To demo the tool go to http://www.enterprisetester.com/ to download a trial version or have a go on the online demo at http://demo.enterprisetester.com/enterprisetester
username: demo , Password: password

Let us know what you think
Happy testing
Bryce