By Dick Stark

In my last blog I discussed how in the agile world of software development, quality is continuous. By finding defects earlier, this approach shifts quality to the “left.” It helps reduce testing time which means software gets released sooner. Quality Management is a critical component of the software development life cycle, but often gets a short shrift. Why? Partly because of the functionality of available software testing tools. According to a conversation with an IT executive I had recently, there is a negative bias against these tools. He wasn’t aware, however, of QA Symphony (QAS), a relatively new player in the software test management space.

Last week, QAS held its annual user conference, QualityJam in Atlanta. I attended the online partner training session virtually. Here is a short update.

QAS is growing very rapidly and taking advantage of the Digital Transformation movement and its focus on Agile (and Jira). Similar to how ServiceNow took market share away from the legacy ITSM players, QAS is rapidly replacing HPE’s HPQC with the QAS qTest platform. This is good news for QAS which now boasts more than 500 customers in 30+ countries, with lots of large enterprises in the technology, financial, and retail verticals.

It’s important to point out that QAS is not another Jira plug-in. It is an independent platform with various components that integrates with other ALM toolsets such as CA, and other open source solutions. According to QAS, there is no better test management platform tool in the market today.

Test Management tools, not to be confused with Test Automation tools, provide a testing “manager of manager” functionality. These tool sets also offers runbook or orchestration capability that integrates Test Automation open source, custom, or standard offerings from Test Automation companies such as Cucumber, eggplant, or Tircentis. Since testing varies widely based upon the complexity of the software to test, developers may select Cucumber which offers a code based system or Tricentis, which offers a simplified “point and click” offering (better for business users).

qTest is also purpose built for “shift-left” teams to facilitate BDD in their DevOps pipelines. BDD stands for Behavior Driven Design. BDD uses a ubiquitous language to establish a user story for a software system under development. This user story identifies a stakeholder, a business effect and a business value. It also describes several scenarios, each with a precondition, trigger and expected outcome. BDD provides software development and management teams with shared tools and a shared process to collaborate on software development.

Finally, RightStar has already assisted with QAS resales and implementations at several customers. And RightStar consultants have excellent QAS experience. qTest allowed one such customer a rigorous test management experience without reverting back to slow waterfall methods. The QAS eXplorer tool has been a revelation as it allows repeatability and predictably in the exploratory test phases. QAS exceeded expectations allowing this customer to improve its end-to-end testing performance, meaning faster software development times.