As I previously hinted in “Building a test case management solution”, I’m personally of the opinion that the holy grail in test case management is in finding the way to manage tests via an issue tracker database.
In the time since that post I didn’t find much information about this, and didn’t see tools taking this approach.
Therefore, it was great to stumble upon Agile06 – François Beauregard – GreenPepper Software – a podcast discussion where I learned about greenpepper, a test automation and management system developed by Pyxis Technologies which closely integrates with JIRA to create an issue tracker solution for managing test cases, and adopts a Fitnesse-like approach (on drugs) to table-driven testing, over the Confluence wiki. I liked the choice of tools to integrate with as well as the pragmatic simple ideas.
Last week Frank and Christian demonstrated the system to me and a colleague. I was impressed, and would recommend anyone with interest in the test management or issue tracking domain to track those guys. I know I will.
One issue I’ve been thinking over regarding both Fitnesse and GreenPepper is how to take those tools that are focused on one-shot automated testing, and adapt them to track manual testing documentation, results, etc. Finding a good way to solve this problem might assist with adoption of those tools/frameworks in environments which are not the classic agile web development environment I suspect are the majority of adopters at this point.