What are the uses of test management tools?

Answer 1

Legacy test management tools were developed a few decades ago using technologies that were developed long before their modern counterparts. They are written using languages such as VB Script that are almost 10, or sometimes 15 years old.

With the rise in digital transformation, business that are still clinging to legacy tools are either forced to modify or replace their software to keep pace with the modern business scenario. However, some companies still holding on to their legacy systems may find it difficult to let go for the following reasons-

Investment – although its more expensive to maintain a legacy system, moving to a new software requires upfront investment in terms of both money and manpower.

Fear of change – change is hard. Moving the organization’s data to a brand-new software will provoke some resistance from those who have become comfortable with using the older one.

Difficulty in migration – Since legacy systems are mostly outdated, there is a shortage of skilled personnel who can migrate data from legacy systems to modern tools. The difficulties in searching for such professionals might be a cause for the delay in migration.

Answer 2

The best way to describe the uses of test management tools is to relate the tools to the different phases of the software development process. So for example unit testing that the developer carries out is not usually tracked or covered by a test management tool. Unit testing by developers tends to be ad hoc at best. However, at the other end of the scale with user acceptance testing it is pretty much unheard of not to track the acceptance results using a test management tool. A test management tool used in the user acceptance phase delivers a clear picture of progress and status. And when the status of results is used by the client to accept or reject a product the easy accessibility of results held in a test management tool is invaluable. Again at the system level when you have many testers within a team carrying out hundreds if not thousands of tests on a daily basis means the use of a test management tool for tracking is essential. With out a test management tool the execution of large numbers of tests can soon descend in to chaos.