Significant benefits can be gained by integrating your test management process. For many the idea of linking both the tracking capabilities of the test management system with your automation system is a goal which can only be achieved with significant financial investment in top end tools from the likes of HP. However, many mid range and lower end solutions now come with comprehensive application programming interfaces. These solutions allow you to integrate with Open Source solutions like Selenium.
This approach has been gaining popularity in the business world in no small part due to the fact that it is tremendously cheaper than the higher end appliances and software. It can be very difficult to find enough money in a budget to afford the top of the line equipment. But if you decide to go with something middle of the road for your management tools, you can supplement it with an open source automation in order to get a full set of systems. Among the benefits you can expect will be the ability to schedule things from a central station, and the option to receive integrated reports.
One of the best ways to get current, real time data on your running tests (both manual and automated) is through the use of integrated reporting. You won’t have to sift through and collate data in Excel anymore. And though this may not seem like a huge savings at the moment, consider what will happen when your business grows. It may be easy enough to interpret the data from five or ten sources, but what if you have hundreds? You will also be able to spot patterns and trends quite easily. The ability to quickly and accurately compare data from manual new feature testing and automated regression testing simultaneously may allow you to conclude certain things about the overall processes. If the automatic testing shows considerable failure levels while the manual tests report no change, it is possible that there are regression issues being unnecessarily introduced by the development team.
Being able to initiate and schedule automation from the managing application is another major advantage to an integrated set up. This can be shown in two particular circumstances. Consider first the scenario in which the automation application is not available to you, but the regular management systems are. This might occur if you are at home when you realize that you should have started an automation run. With central scheduling ability, this is not a problem at all. A second scenario involves the actual work load. It can be easy enough to initiate three, four, or even five runs if you only have that many clients, but as the number of clients increases it will become more and more time consuming to access and start each necessary run. Instead, you will have the option to use a single interface to schedule and initiate multiple runs for more than a few clients.
So we can see that the tracking and management of both automated and manual tests becomes a much more complex and time consuming thing as the test processes themselves become more advanced and complex. Being able to use a single control interface to access and get reports on an integrated system of automated and manual tests can save money as well as time. A central test management tool will also increase your status visibility and overall control.