Drink your own Champagne – How do we beta test QTM4J for our customers?
There is a saying at QMetry, “Drink your own champagne.” You might be wondering if we have given up on testing and test management and started ‘tasting champagne,’ but jokes apart, what we mean is we test our own tool – QTM4J.
The concept of companies testing their own tools is not new. It had been earlier popularized by companies like Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, who encouraged their internal team members to use their own products whenever possible. For example, Microsoft created an internal server called dogfood, where they used to send their products for their employees to test in beta form. Testing your own tools is a great way to put yourself in the shoes of the user and improve it for your users.
Why testing your own product is a good idea?
- Only when you test your own products will you see things from a user’s perspective. And that helps us to develop empathy towards our users. It helps us understand the real challenges we might miss out on for so long. Drinking our own champagne lets us walk a mile or a few steps in the user’s shoes. It also helps to build product knowledge and experience within the company.
- Regular testing of our own products also sparks ideas for new products and features apart from finding ways to improve the existing ones.
- When you encourage your internal staff members to use your product, it means you’ve got a ready user base within the company. So, it becomes relatively easy to get feedback and insights from users.
- Finally, it is a great idea to keep the team pepped up and build enthusiasm about the great products you are building!
How do we Beta test QTM4J for our customers?
The QA team at QMetry uses QTM4J, our test management app in Jira, in our internal testing process.
New Requirement in Jira
Customer feedbacks are the most essential requirements. Our customers love us, and we take their feedback into account for improvements and new features. These requirements are logged as Jira story in QMetry’s Jira project. All the key stakeholders of our engineering team – developers, QA team, product owner; then analyzes the story to understand the scope of the requirement. Once the scope is finalized, the development team picks up the reined story and plans the release.
Test Case Creation
Next, the QA team prepares test cases according to the story in the QTM4J add-on in Jira. They create test cases, test scenarios, and test steps based on the finalized scope.
The beauty of QTM4J add-on is – Once a test case is created, it is linked directly to the story. This helps one to understand what test case is written by the QA team against a particular Jira user story. Once the test case is created, QMetry’s internal team reviews the test cases to understand any errors or any scenario that is missing.
Mark the status of test case in QTM4J
QTM4J lets the team set the status of the test case to be done/reviewed/rejected so that the QA lead knows the exact status of a test case at any point in time. For instance, once the status is set to review, the QA lead reviews the test case and provides feedback or any missing points to the particular user and changes the status to reject. The QA team then fixes all the feedbacks, and the QA lead does one more round of review.
Test Cycle in QTM4J
Once the test case is written and completed, we proceed to the test cycle. QA team groups similar set of tests in a test cycle. For example, all the functional tests are grouped together in a test cycle “Functional Testing”. This group of functional tests ensure all the functionalities are working the way it is supposed to work.
Test Execution
Once the logical grouping of test cases is done to form test cycles, it is time for execution.
To begin the execution, the test environment is selected. In QTM4J, you can create a repository of environments such as Chrome, Firefox, Android, etc. As the execution progresses, the result of the execution is noted down at each step. If a step is failing, the team writes down the bug along with marking the test case as failed. Next, an issue is created and assigned to a developer to address it.
QTM4J allows to auto copy the steps to reproduce so the developer can see which step is failing. This is called the bug traceability.
The test execution screen gives an overview of how many tests are executed and how many defects are logged and fixed so that anyone can know the details at a glance.
Reports
This process now has made it helpful for the product support team to view the status update of their respective customer logged issues from the report. It gives better visibility to our management and support team into their respective customer requests. All these details can be accessed easily by generating different reports, especially the defect report. Overall, it is helpful for any end customer using QTM4J in their daily routine. And it is visible to everyone as it is on Jira and QTM4J product itself.
Wrapping Up:
Drinking our own champagne helps us to test our product usefulness and usability for the market. The best thing about it is, the first round of feedback comes from the users and not any product manager who are a part of the company. Hence, the feedback is unbiased and allows us to rectify any errors much early on. For us, it saves time, cut down cost, and helps us avoid any issues early on that could delay the product release. Finally, promoting the product awareness across the organization creates enthusiasm among the employees that make them love what they do!
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