Generating and Analyzing Project Data Using Test Studio

I mentioned in my last post on project data and analytics that testers and other project professionals certainly use data generated through various tools in helping us determine application quality, our progress to schedule, and to track defects, for example.  But the organization of the data and our inability to ask the right questions prevents us from deeply understanding our software.

Why is it so important that we understand our data beyond a few graphs and charts?  The reason is that many projects fail altogether and are cancelled.  Many more don’t achieve all of their important objectives.  One of the reasons why projects fail is that team members don’t have the information they need in order to make informed decisions on how to objectively assess the project and determine what they have to do next.

I would like to say that Test Studio has all the answers to generating and analyzing data, but of course it doesn’t, at least not yet.  However, we recognize how important data and analysis is in understanding the state and direction of your project. 

In Test Studio, the data collected during exploratory and automated testing resides front and center for testers to analyze in new ways.  You can capture information that makes it possible to understand how your tests perform, where the problems are, and produce some level of diagnosis of those problems.  Anyone using Test Studio for exploratory testing can easily give information to developers that can enable them to reproduce, understand, and resolve a wide variety of problems.

Beyond exploratory testing, Test Studio gives you several ways to make the most of your testing data.  Here are a few examples:

• Important information fast.  We’ve made some educated deductions about the data and reports you need immediately, and give you that information at the end of each test run.  That includes whether the test passed, where it failed if it did, and what was the impact on the rest of the test.  We let you dive deeply into the failure, so that you can capture essential information that can easily be filed with a defect and analyzed by developers.
• Data export.  Most testing professionals need more reporting than can possibly be included in canned reports within a product.  Test Studio lets testers export data to Excel, CSV, or HTML formats, enabling project professionals to get data into a format and application that makes it easy to build custom views and graphs.
• SQL storage. Test Studio also lets you save data from automated test results, performance tests, and load tests into a SQL database, letting you combine it with data from other tools to get a comprehensive view of the project and its quality.

Test Studio, especially in conjunction with Telerik TeamPulse, provides access to an enormous amount of information.  It can help team members answer questions such as:

• If I deployed today, what is the state of my quality?
• Are there areas of my development process that are having fundamental problems, either because they are technically complex or because they aren’t well defined.
• How can I identify areas for improvement and feed that back into my development lifecycle processes?

We on the Test Studio team have more to do to make data work better for your projects.  But we know the direction we have to take.  Take a look at Test Studio to get an understanding on how it can meet your information needs in your next project.

Peter Varhol

About the author

Peter Varhol

Peter Varhol is an Evangelist for Telerik’s TestStudio. He’s been a software developer and software product manager, technology journalist, and university professor among the many roles in his past, and believes that his best talent is explaining concepts and practices to others. He’s on Twitter at @pvarhol.