Developing a good test management process for you company is not a task to be taken casually. The more thought you put into the type of test management process and implementation up front the more benefits you'll receive as your team follow the process.
Defining the process usually means working out who will be using the process, what those people want to get out of the process and crucially what they need to put in to get what they need out. Each user will have different requirements and different needs. As the people who are defining the process are usually more senior people in the team it's easy for them to focus solely on the reporting and data output requirements they need. Nothing wrong with this you might think except that it's easy to define lots of requirements for the data you need to get out (in terms of nice looking graphical reports perhaps) forgetting that to achieve this your less senior team members need to start entering enormous amounts of very specific data to enable you to deliver these reporting demands. Using the word enormous might seem like an exaggeration but I've worked for teams where you have to enter so much data in different spreadsheets and applications as you run a test case that the data entry takes 5 or 6 times more time than actually running the checks. When you get to this stage your teams focus has shifted significantly to data entry rather than completing the test executions needed that you have to ask the question is payback from the data output worth the loss in efficiency that the overhead causes.
It's not an easy balance to get right but it's an important one to get right. Too little data being reported means you risk losing control of your project. Too much data being inputted and you risk wasting a significant amount of your testers time, diverting their attention from finding the defects.
As the data input time increases, it becomes much easier to lose control over the quality of data input as team members become more resistant to managing unreasonable workloads. Sometimes members will start getting sloppy and the wrong data may be entered. In some cases, members may cease entering data altogether. The latter scenario is actually preferable because it will be easy to see that data is missing. If incorrect data is getting into the system, there will be far more serious consequences. As long as the errors go unnoticed, team managers will be basing their decisions on date that is bad. Later bad decisions will compound the ones that were made before them. This is a recipe for disaster because all control is lost.
Most of these problems can be avoided by taking the time necessary to review all aspects of the test management process before any attempt is made to implement a new system. Carefully consider the role played by each member of the team and design the process to increase efficiency for everyone involved with the project, regardless of position. Make sure the requests for data entry are reasonable. The best process will be balanced between relevant report capabilities and adequate levels of data capture. When the balance is right, each team member will perform at the most efficient level as they work toward a common goal. Armed with good information, the team managers will be better equipped to make the best decisions as the process moves along.
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Top tips on how to develop a good test management process for your company now in our comprehensive overview of everything you need to know about the best test management software on http://www.testmanagement.com
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