Test Case Management System (TCMS) solution for a leading public broadcasting enterprise

The customer, a leading public broadcasting enterprise, delivers high quality products and rich media content across the world. They required a platform to address the needs of a uniform test case management system.

Business challenge: There was no common standard of overall test quality because of the following:

• Each team had their own home grown test case management systems and processes. This comprised execution, reporting and maintenance of test cases and results across six different product areas.
• There was no centralized reporting. Reporting was a static affair with point-in-time reports generated manually.
• Manual and automated test results were stored in different systems.
• There was no linkage between test cases and defects for traceability and RCA analysis.

Our solution

Mindtree enabled the customer to standardize test planning and workflows, so that all the projects would follow a common strategy. This included:

• Evaluating and analyzing 10 tools for a common test case management system and recommended TestRail based on:

1. Ease of use
2. Ability to integrate automation
3. Ease of migrating existing test cases into the tool and integration with defect tracking system
4. Metrics and reporting
5. Cost of the tool

• Developing custom ruby scripts to help import test cases from various sources including Excel and SVN. This helped teams avoid rewriting test scripts in the tool and importing over 40 test case repositories.
• Developing a cucumber plugin to facilitate syncing of automated test cases and reporting the results to the Test Case Management (TCM) tool.
• Building custom reports to help the team introspect and improve their test cycles.
• Conducting workshops for members outside the test team, to familiarize them with the TCMS. In addition, make them derive benefits out of the tool.

Client benefits

Mindtree’s solution for TCMS:

• Enabled the enterprise’s heads to make informed business decisions
• Product Managers use it to track the feature stability.
• Test Managers use it to track efforts and take decisions on future test efforts.
• Business Heads refer to it for Project Health Checks (PHC).
• Ensured live reporting of test progress across projects:

1. Faster reporting for all stakeholders.
2. Better predictability of test effort through up-to-date test suite.
3. Ability to introspect through the archived runs.

• Facilitated cleaner integration of testers working across multiple locations, with a common view of test quality.
• Ensured automation integration:

1. Manual and automated tests are in a common location.
2. Runs can be compared easily to pin-point historically unstable or unreliable tests, which directly impact maintenance efforts.
3. Entire test chain is visible. Tests are linked to user stories and test results are linked to defects.

Customer Testimonials

“Mindtree has helped enhance the quality of our Application Testing by setting up TCMS to collate our many test results – from both automated and manual runs. I think there will be many benefits of using a centralised system as opposed to having many disassociated spreadsheets.”

- Technical Product Manager, TV Platforms

“TestRail has greatly improved our manual regression testing as it gives clarity around the number and percentage of cases completed. We TestRail.”

- Senior Project Manager, Rich Media Publishing