♻ Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a framework of standard business practices for building software. ☝🏻Its primary purpose is to determine the software delivery workflow with a detailed explanation of each phase - initiation of the project, planning, coding, testing, and deploying the product. 

The software development life cycle covers the whole process of product development to meet customer requirements. Usually, there are specific stages of the workflow. They are:

✔ Gathering requirements; 

✔ Design;

✔ Development;

✔ Testing;

✔ Deployment;

✔ Maintenance (Tech Support). 

📝 The first stage is about collecting all the necessary information, such as a generated concept of the project and requirements for the product. As a result, the project team receives the detected list of requirements structured in the Software Requirement Specification. The team's main goal is to build a product available to cover all the customer's needs.

📐 The design stage supposes the creation of the software architecture. This is a fundamental basis for the further product.

🛠 Development begins with software design. Developers implement all the software components based on it. 

⚙️ Quality Assurance is supposed to maintain during all the SDLC. Although, testing itself begins only when the code is completed and the project is deployed in the testing environment. Testers execute and report all the defects found. As soon as all bugs are fixed, then the product may be called as verified and approved for deployment.

💎 Deployment to the production environment is a crucial moment of the SDLC of every project. Finally, end users are welcome to use the product.

🩹 If a customer needs something to be fixed in the product or to provide improvement, then Maintenance takes its place. 

So, at this stage, all the issues should be resolved and deployed to live.   

🧡 Thank you for your attention. You are welcome to handle the Testing stage of SDLC with TestCaseLab!

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Test Management Tool should be user-friendly 🤗. It is essential to design the interface so the QA Engineer can interact with the documentation in any desired way.

🗣 Let’s consider in more detail the usability of interacting with Test Cases in TestCaseLab.

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📌First of all, the user is offered to generate a structure of categories and subcategories to keep Test Cases structured and divided by hierarchy. Creating, duplicating, editing, and deleting functions are easy to use from the beginning 🤩. In addition, changing the structure of the categories’ tree (Suite Tree) simplifies the workflow and saves the user time.

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🌟 One of the main benefits of the TestCaseLab interface is an opportunity to view and edit Test Cases on one page. You do not need to go into edit mode to update the details. Double-click on the necessary field allows you to make changes immediately. Once changes are made, click outside the field to deactivate it. As a result, the changes are saved, and the Test Case is always up to date.

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All the changes provided to the Test Case are recorded in the Audit log. This is the history of interactions with the item. It is always easy to find out who made changes, when, and what exactly was done.

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🔍Search through all the Project data allows you to find the required item in one moment. The user just has to enter the first characters to find the matches and get the results list.

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🤩Also, TestCaseLab offers teammates the ability to collaborate on the same project at the same time. Changes are provided simultaneously to all participants. 

So, when your teammate works on the Test Case, you can observe his actions in real-time. As soon as updates are submitted, you will see them as well. 

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🤓 Was it useful? You’re very welcome to join TestCaseLab if you’re not still. We do our best to meet all the needs of the QA community.

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Test execution is the primary process of the Quality Assurance phase in SDLC 🕒. QA engineers pass sets of tests collected in the test plan to ensure that the product functions correctly and that there are no issues while using it ✅.

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🛠 To streamline the process of running tests, TestCaseLab provides users with the opportunity to set statuses for each Test Case on execution. The Not Tested status applies for all the items added to the current Test Run by default. This means that Test Run hasn't been started yet. Once at least one Test Case receives a different status from the list, the Test Run will be automatically placed in the 'In Progress' category 📈.

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Highly detailed statistics allow users to see the changes made in the Test Run on a progress bar. Each color indicates a particular state: 

🟢 Green - the successful completion of the Test Case execution.

🔴 Red - the test failure.

🟡 Yellow - Test Case blockage and should be retested later.

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🔍The progress bar is always up to date and provides detailed information on the number of Test Cases of each status. It shows their percentage. For your convenience, click any color to filter the Test Cases list in the Test Run.

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When a Test Case is assigned a Failed status, TestCaseLab will display a Bug button. Clicking on it opens a modal window. It includes all the necessary fields to report a bug in a task management tool integrated with TestCaseLab.

The link to the generated ticket will be linked to your test results data and will always be available in the relevant Test Run reports.

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❓Are there any questions left?

Our Support Team is always ready to help ✉️ support@testcaselab.com

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🥰Today we would love to talk about TestCaseLab and its Test Cases functionality. If you are our favorite customer, you should already know, that you can easily create a Test Case inside your Project and fill it with any information you need. Each Test Case is a small masterpiece of a QA, which includes all tiny details and guides you down the path of bug reproducing, like a white rabbit through Wonderland.

💎In order to make the process of creating your Test Case more convenient and complete, we have created one cool feature, which allows you to customize your Test Case depending on Project specifics. I am talking about custom Test Case Fields, which can be created within each Project.

👨‍💻We provide two types of custom fields. They are: text inputs and selects. Options for the select are filled in at the moment of creating the field and can be edited at any time.

In order to create any specific field, your Company Administrator needs to go to the Project Settings and to delve into the Test Case Fields page. This page contains the list of all custom fields existing in the project.

Each field can be configured to be viewable and editable in specific places. For example, we want to make some specific notes during the Test Run in each Test Case, but we definitely do not need these notes in the general Test Cases list. Your Company Administrator simply needs to choose, where to display these fields by marking checkboxes.

As soon as the field is created, it can be easily found in already existing Test Cases in the Project. Project Members are able to interact with them and add the necessary information. All new Test Cases will include these fields by default too.

👌This feature is really very convenient, if you need to pay attention of yourself and your teammates to every important point. You may easily set “version” field, in order to manage Test Cases depending on the version they belong to. Also you can add references, milestones and whatever you want. Please, agree, that it is great to keep information in the field, specially prepared for this.

🤗Please ask your CompanyAdmin to necessarily set Test Case Fields up in the Project Settings.

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💡Today we would like to share with you more detailed information about the reporting system that we provide to clients for comfortable use. Report reviews provide workflow transparency to stakeholders and within the team. This feature allows you to analyze metrics and results.

In order to get a detailed report online, you need to select a Test Run, which is a point of interest 🔍. After that, you need to delve into the inner page and find the “Report” button. Clicking on it will redirect you to a quickly generated report. It is divided into three sections. Each of them is worth your attention, depending on what data you need to obtain.

🧐The first section is called “General Report”. It contains general information about the respective Test Run with a colorful pie chart. This chart provides the statistics of Passed, Blocked, and Failed Test Cases during the Test Run. It is very convenient to see the progress, provided by each user, who interacts with the Test Run. You are welcome to track the activity of every team member and improve processes. At the bottom, you can find the list of Test Cases, which can be accessed directly from the Report.

✌️The second section “Failed Test Cases and Defects” shows us all the stoppers, which may cause the bottlenecks in workflows. If you have an integration of your TestCaseLab Company Account with any of the management tools, you will receive a list of Defects created via TestCaseLab during the Test Run.

🤓The third section allows you to compare Test Runs, completed by your team within the project. It is very useful, if you want to evaluate the performance of the development team. Product update becomes clear and transparent, because all of the stoppers and recurring defects are visible.

Also, you are welcome to download the report in CSV and PDF formats.

🙌If you want to share the report with your stakeholders, simply use the “Share Report” button and you will get an independent report page, unlinked to your account.

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😍Here we are with a new article concerning TestCaseLab functionality. Please, take a look :)

Today I would like to share with you more information about tagging system, implemented in TestCaseLab.

📌They say, that tags exist for grouping items according to specific content they refer to. Tags are also called keywords and are usually used for bookmarking. Tags help users to categorize content depending on various characteristics.

TestCaseLab allows you to create tags for Test Cases within the project. It is very convenient to create a new tag, by just inserting it into the Tag field and pressing Enter. As soon as this tag is generated, you are welcome to assign it to other Test Cases of this project.

💡Tagging has been implemented to provide an opportunity to filter the Test Cases list by a specific tag or group of tags. This simplifies the process of working with a large number of Test Cases inside the application.

If you need to edit the Test Case Tag’s name, please contact your Project Administrator. He can easily change the title of each tag and get the filtered list of tagged Test Cases within the Project Settings.

🗑️Also, tags can be deleted from the Project Settings by your Project Administrator. As soon as the tag is deleted from the list, it is automatically removed from Test Cases.

👍We do our best to make TestCaseLab suitable for your QA workflow. Please ensure that you are aware of all the features of the application.

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😎Today we would like to show you one more interesting feature of TestCaseLab. We know the right way to save the precious time, you used to waste on surfing among browser tabs. 💎Integration with your issue tracking tool will gain your nerves and simplify the process of Test Run passing. Staying on the same page of the failed Test Case, you are welcome to report issues directly to your managing system with the help of integration.

👌It is also convenient and useful for your working processes, that the link of the generated ticket will be saved in the Test Case, so you don’t need to search for it next time.

🔍At the moment, we have a long list of systems, which we provide integration with: Jira, JiraCloud, Trello, Github, Redmine, Asana, Pivotal, YouTrack, and Mantis.

🤗It is very easy to initiate an integration in your Company Account. In order to do that, you need to be an Administrator of the Project, which you want to interact with. In the opposite case, you need to ask your Administrator to provide this integration for your team.

In the Project Settings you need to delve to the Integrations page. And here we are. From the dropdown list you can select the desired tool. After that, you need to enter the URL of your tool. Please pay attention, that the subdomain is required in order to find out, which account of the managing system we need to interact with. After that, you are asked to insert a Personal Acess Token. This Access Token can be found in your issue tracking tool. If you get any issues with any of steps mentioned above, please contact us for assistance.

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🤩We would like to share some interesting information about TestCaseLab, which might be missed by the majority of customers.

It is very important to make a product convenient to use and bring joy to customers. That’s why we have thought about beneficial functionality 🤗.

On the base on our own experience, we have found out, that It is ALWAYS annoying for users to remember multiple usernames and passwords in order to access the various websites and applications they use for both personal and business purposes. Single sign-on (SSO) removes the need to keep in mind hundreds of usernames and passwords by allowing users to access multiple resources using a single set of credentials. To make a long story short, SSO is performed when a user logs in to one application and then automatically signs in to other applications, regardless of the platform, technology, or domain the user is using. He has to log in only once. That's why this feature is called "Single Sign-on".

🛠️There is a long list of advantages of using SSO in your working environment:

✔️SSO is considered a feature that brings security to your life. There are enough reasons for this opinion.

At first, a user is up to use way stronger passwords. A strong password must be difficult to repeat and random enough so that hackers can’t attack your confidential data successfully. There will be no problems with password recovery too, if you have forgotten your strong password. It is so, because SSO reduces the time taken by internal commands. You do not need to spend time recovering or resetting passwords for dozens of applications, and log in to them after it. This can improve business productivity.

In addition, it is a great opportunity to avoid situations with repeating passwords in different services. Using the same password everywhere increases security risk. It is explained by the reason, that all services used by the user are only as secure as the service with the weakest password protection. If this service's password database is attacked, hackers can use the password to get to other services of the user as well.

✔️SSO helps to reduce the effort to enforce the Password policy of every company. Administrators can force a credential reentry after a certain period of time to ensure that the same user is still active on the signed-in device. With Single sign-on, the user can do this immediately for all internal applications.

✔️It is important to mention, that SSO allows you to activate MFA at one point instead of having to activate it for dozens of services, which can be difficult to implement.

That is why, we would like to offer SSO set-up to you. It will positively influence the working process of your team, by avoiding the daily routine with extra password inserting and logging-in processes. Please contact us via email support@testcaselab.com to get more details 📧.

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🙌Today, we'll roll back to Test Types and look deeply into categories of ☝🏻 the Formal Test Case types.

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The list of them you will find in the previous post: Types of Test Cases in software testing. Part 1.🧐 Check it out if you've missed it.

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Formal Test Cases:

✅Functionality - the most obvious because its primary purpose is to determine whether the target functionality of the product works appropriately or fails to perform its function. QA Engineers write functional test cases looking at the product requirements and execute them as soon as the function is released.

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✅UI. These tests focus on the application's visual elements to confirm they perform as intended for the product. Display elements such as menus, sub-menus, buttons, tables, and columns are checked to ensure they are precise and concordant.

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✅Integration. It's designed to evaluate how combined features work when added to an application. While it is important to test individual pieces of software, it is equally essential to ensure that disparate systems can communicate effectively with each other. QA Engineers must understand application flows well to write effective integration tests.

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✅'Pressure tests' and 'Load tests' these terms sometimes interchangeable. Performance checks execute to see if the device meets the productivity requirements.

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✅Usability. These tests are prepared by UX researchers for end users, not testers, to assess how easy or difficult the product is to use.

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✅Database. These tests verify application data is stored following requirements and regulations. The scope can vary from testing a small database object to a complex action involving multiple application parts.

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✅User Acceptance. These tests are valuable when business requirements change during development. QA Engineers can document entry/exit criteria that fill gaps in other tests.

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✅Exploratory test cases are valuable when QA Engineers test the application to discover bugs missed by structured testing.

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