Since TestRail now is owned by the same company as Xray, will you be adding some features from Xray that TestRail is missing, and vice-versa?
Having TestRail and Xray under the same roof means that the same product managers and engineers who brought you two of the best platforms for test management and QA now work together.
We can collaborate, develop and most importantly, invest in both tools to support the testing community.
Effective testing and QA processes don't happen by accident. Organizations need to (1) streamline the process of designing and capturing test results, (2) foster collaboration across teams, and (3) make QA native to the rest of the software development process. TestRail and Xray share a common background in delivering these results to our customers. Now, we can share insights and enhance the experience for TestRail and Xray customers even faster.
What are the Pros and Cons of TestRail when transitioning an org from old-school, metrics and stepped tests to a more exploratory + gherkin approach ?
TestRail gives you a lot of flexibility around how you design and implement your testing process. You can use test case templates for steps-based or precondition / expected result-based testing for the cases there that still make sense, or use exploratory testing or even dedicated behavior-driven development (“BDD”) test case templates (a new feature coming out early Fall 2022!) to write and run tests for test cases where it makes sense to take a more exploratory + gherkin approach.
That said, TestRail still requires you to plan your testing before you actually run it, so if you’re planning to do ad-hoc exploratory testing and don’t feel like you need to have a more fully-fledged plan in place for a given test cycle, TestRail might not be a great fit for that.
The BDD features that will be coming down in our Fall 2022 release are also going to help a lot with designing and running Gherkin-style test cases in TestRail, but the initial release of these features may not integrate fully with other common tools that your team might be using with Gherkin-style syntax, like Cucumber. So if in-depth integrations are something you’re looking for in your move to adopt Gherkin, TestRail may not have everything you’re looking for…yet.
Can you share insights into how you process feedback and decide on priorities for development? What is the best way to provide feedback?
Absolutely. Our Support Team serves as the first point of contact for feedback, and they work directly with users to validate and document their feedback and make sure they understand all of the relevant information related to your request. If a similar request already exists in our backlog, the Support team will locate that ticket and add your vote to increase the total vote count on the idea. Or if this is the first time we’ve received a request like yours, Support will document your feedback for our Product team to review and triage. As the Product team plans our roadmap, they take a variety of factors into account like total vote count, alignment with our strategic direction, alignment with our mission, etc. to decide which requests to develop further and which to keep in the backlog for the time being.
We welcome any and all feedback! Just choose which types of feedback you’d like to submit and send us a request using our help center: https://support.gurock.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
How do you help testers transition to TestRail from using the likes of spreadsheets and Trello to manage regressions tests and smoke tests?
Many teams that use TestRail graduated from spreadsheets or issue tracking tools, so this is a very common scenario and a great question!
First and foremost, TestRail is known for being easy to learn and use. In the words of Torsten Zelger, Test Manager for the Swiss government’s disability insurance management platform, “TestRail is simple to use, the learning curve is very minimal, and you can just start from scratch without any prior experience.”
That said, we also provide a weekly demo with live Q&A that you can join to learn more about how TestRail helps you speed up testing, or check out this “Getting Started” video series to get an overview on your own time.
And if you’ve written your test cases in a sheet or another tool that can export to CSV, you may even be able to import some of your existing test case artifacts to TestRail so that you don’t have to add them by hand. You can learn more about importing test cases in this support article.
Finally, we’re always looking for ways to improve and help folks learn how to use TestRail more quickly in the future, including the possibility of launching a TestRail academy some time in late 2022 or early 2023. Stay tuned!
How can TestRail help with defect management?
TestRail helps with defect management in a few ways! Most teams that use TestRail already have a system in place that they like for defect management (whether Jira issues/bugs, GitHub issues, Azure DevOps work items, or another defect management system). So instead, TestRail makes it really easy to link the defects you’re tracking in your team’s preferred project management tool to objects in TestRail like tests, test runs, plans, and milestones for full traceability and visibility into coverage.
Additionally, if you happen to use one of the ~20 issue-tracking tools that TestRail has a defect integration with, you can automatically populate and push new defects from TestRail to that tool without having to copy and paste anything. That helps speed up the process of reporting, saves you time and effort, and provides greater visibility and context for development and product regarding areas of risk in your application.
Will you combine Xray and TestRail into a unified test management system?
The key is flexibility. Together, we support nearly 5 million users at more than 13,000 companies worldwide, providing teams with unmatched QA tools regardless of their scale or technology stack.
Does your team prefer the Jira-native ecosystem? Xray is for you. Want a dedicated test management platform instead? TestRail fits your needs. Both products will continue to provide easy-to-use, exceptional QA tools with award-winning support.
