While it’s our goal to make TestRail the best test management tool out there, it’s not a substitute for a good bug tracker. That’s why we recommend using TestRail together with one of the many bug tracking tools available. To make it easier to work with your bug tracker, TestRail contains a feature to link test cases against bugs managed in a third-party application.

Over the past few days I have been gathering all the necessary details (such as URL formats) to link TestRail to some of the most popular bug trackers. Please see the list below on how to integrate TestRail with your existing tools:

• FogBugz Test Management with TestRail
• Jira Test Management with TestRail
• OnTime Test Management with TestRail
• fixx Test Management with TestRail
• Bugzilla Test Management with TestRail
• Mantis Test Management with TestRail
• Trac Test Management with TestRail
• BugTracker.NET Test Management with TestRail

If your favorite bug tracker is not listed, you can still integrate it into TestRail pretty easily (you will just need to know the view and add URLs of your tool). We are also working on publishing more integration guides, so please let us know which bug tracker you use.

While individual team members here at Gurock Software have been using Twitter for quite some time now (@dgurock, @tgurock), we decided to create a company-wide Twitter account for Gurock Software so that you can stay up-to-date on all SmartInspect and TestRail news, ask questions and get in touch with us on Twitter. So please feel free to follow @gurock on Twitter and let us know what we can do for you!

Now that we released TestRail, it’s time to share some of our plans regarding future versions of our test management software. We normally do not share release dates or which features we will include in future versions of our products. However, we understand that some of our customers need to know the general roadmap of product enhancements, so we are going to share some of our near-term plans for TestRail in this posting.

When we discussed TestRail with beta testers and customers in the past 6 months, it became apparent that the same features where requested again and again and we are going to concentrate on implementing those features first. Please note that all plans laid out in this posting are subject to change and that the following list of planned near-term enhancements is not necessarily complete.

Permissions and Roles

TestRail currently comes without support for user permissions and roles, and we are going to change this quickly. Most teams we have talked to mentioned that user permissions and custom roles are important to use TestRail with larger teams, so we are going to add support for user permissions very soon. Our current plans are to allow administrators to configure custom roles and assign roles to users. Administrators can then optionally override users’ default roles for specific projects, allowing for maximum flexibility.

Blocked Status

TestRail currently supports the test statuses and results Untested, Passed, Failed and Retest. We are going to add support for an additional test status to TestRail in the near future, namely the Blocked status. The Blocked status will make it easier for testers to highlight tests that currently cannot be validated for different reasons.

Custom Fields

TestRail’s fields for test cases and test results already cover all important information usually needed for the software testing process, including version numbers, time estimates, priorities and so on. However, we understand that each team and project might require capturing additional information and entering such information in our free-text fields might not be the best way to do this. To allow teams to enter additional details in a structured manner, we are going to allow administrators to add and configure custom fields within TestRail. Custom fields will be restricted to test cases and test results for now and we are going to support various field types such as lists, checkboxes and text fields.

Improved Documentation

While most of TestRail’s user interface is self-explanatory and the built-in documentation is already sufficient in most cases, we are going to improve the online help and add more topics. Especially the upcoming features of permissions and custom fields are going to require some additional amount of documentation and we are going to invest more time in this area.

Test Case History

It is currently not easy to track the changes of a test case or to understand who modified a case. We plan to improve this by adding a history to test cases. Similar to how we track all changes, comments and results for tests, we are going to record all modifications of a test case and make this information easily available on a new tab. Having multiple versions of test cases also makes it easier to understand a feature that is already part of TestRail but most users don’t know about: when you complete a test run, all associated test cases are automatically copied internally to freeze them. This makes sure that future changes of test cases are not copied over to old test runs. Having multiple versions of test cases will make it easier to understand and communicate this feature.

Unicode Support

Last but not least, we are going to improve our support for more character encodings and languages to TestRail. As part of a technology and platform refresh for TestRail, we are going to support Unicode and UTF-8 encodings in TestRail to make it easier to work with non-Western languages.

As always, we are interested in your feedback about our near-term TestRail roadmap, so please feel free to email us, discuss this roadmap in our forum or leave a comment. Thanks!

Alex of TestLab² just published their review of our test management software TestRail. As TestLab² is a provider of software testing services, we were especially curious to find out how TestRail performed in an environment with regularly changing clients, requirements and test projects:

The system proved to be almost perfect for us, both for its’ features and everyday usability. We’re involved in outsourced testing and run lots of small projects, and because of that the vendors’ license policy really fits us: the limit is applied to active system users only, so we deactivate client accounts at the end of the project.

Not bad for our initial release, thanks Alex! You can read the full review on TestLab’s website or you can check out the original review in Russian on habrahabr.ru (a popular Russian IT site, I was told).

TestRail review by TestLab² »

We are really excited to announce the release of our new test case management tool TestRail. After working on TestRail for more than 18 months and running an extensive beta program, it’s great to finally release the product and get it out the door.

We also want to thank all testers who participated in TestRail’s beta test. Without your feature suggestions, ideas and bug reports, the 1.0 certainly wouldn’t be what it is today. We’ve got more than 350 beta signups during the beta and are really grateful for all the feedback and emails we’ve received. Thank you! If you participated in the beta test, please check your email inbox for a small TestRail launch present.

When we released the first beta versions of TestRail last August, we didn’t plan for such a long beta phase. We intended to release a few beta versions and release it in November 2009 at the latest. Based on the feedback we received during the beta, however, it became apparent that TestRail would benefit from a few critical enhancement that we wanted to add before the release (such as test plans and configurations, nested sections including drag&drop, print support and importing/exporting).

The feedback during the beta made us confident that a modern and fresh approach to test management is needed and it was great to see that it was so well received by beta testers. There are still a lot of things that didn’t make it into the 1.0 that we want to see in the future of course, but I believe we’ve created a strong foundation for future enhancements and improvements.

We’ve updated TestRail’s website with new screenshots and a product tour as well as pricing details and licensing information. To celebrate the release of TestRail we are offering special introductory prices, so make sure to evaluate TestRail soon if you are interested in the tool. You can download a free and fully-functional trial copy of TestRail from our website.

As usual, the change log and update instructions for this release can be found in our forum. If you have any question about TestRail or this release, just let us know!

In preparation of the upcoming launch of our new product TestRail, we have just updated our online shop and customer portal. All existing customer accounts and SmartInspect licenses have been moved to our new system and you can use your existing login details to access your new account.

In case you have any problems accessing your customer account or if there are any issues with placing an order, please let us know.

Please note: Due to technical reasons we unfortunately won’t be able to accept US dollar transactions for up to two weeks. We are sorry for this inconvenience and are working on resolving this issue as quickly as possible. Please either place your order in Euros (your credit card company will automatically convert this to your local currency) or email us to request an US dollar invoice and pay by check/wire transfer.

We wish all customers, friends and partners happy holidays and a successful new year 2010! We had a great year here at Gurock Software and reached some important milestones such as completing a critical customer project, launching our new website, improving SmartInspect, relaunching DelphiFeeds.com and releasing the first TestRail beta.

Next year will definitely be an interesting (and busy!) one for us and we will start with releasing TestRail in January, moving to a new office (again) and relaunching our customer portal and online shop.

We are looking forward to working with you again next year!

We’ve just released beta 1.0.4 of our upcoming test case management tool TestRail. This new version introduces support for improved printing, importing/exporting test cases, and also adds a feature to copy and move cases between suites and projects. This beta version will probably be the last beta drop before we release TestRail 1.0 in early-mid January.

Print support

As mentioned previously on this blog, we wanted to provide a better way to print test suites, test runs and entire test plans to make it easier to generate reports for customers and management. TestRail 1.0.4 now allows you to easily print those reports.

Print support in TestRail Importing/exporting test cases

The latest TestRail beta also introduces support for importing and exporting test cases. If you are just getting started with TestRail, you might already have existing test cases stored in other documents (such as Excel) or test management tools. Chances are that you want to import those test cases into TestRail and this is now possible with TestRail’s new import XML file format (please take a look at TestRail’s built-in online help to learn more about the exact file format).

You can now also export test cases and results to XML, CSV or Excel. You can use this, for example, to build additional custom reports with Excel or other tools.

Copy/move test cases

Various beta testers asked for a feature to copy or move test cases between suites and projects, so we have just added this capability to the latest beta release. You can either copy entire sections or just specific cases from another suite to the one you are currently working on:

Copy/move test cases in TestRail

We also improved and fixed a bunch of other things in this release and you can view the full change log of the new version in our forum. Let us know if you have any questions about this release or if you notice anything not working correctly.

Now that the latest beta of TestRail with support for nested test sections is out, I wanted to take a few minutes to share our plans for version 1.0 and when it’s going to be released. We usually don’t publish release dates or which exact features we will include in new versions of our products (it usually does more harm than good in our experience), but we feel an exception to this rule makes sense for TestRail 1.0 (especially as quite a few users are waiting for the final release to go live).

Before we release TestRail 1.0, we plan to add two more critical features to TestRail (and fix a bunch of smaller issues), namely better print support and the ability to import/export test cases and suites. While printing is theoretically already supported (TestRail comes with a print stylesheet so you can basically print any page with your browser), a better way to print reports of test suites and test runs for customers and management is needed. We still plan to make use of the browsers’ print support for this, but the resulting reports will be more useful and also somewhat customizable as we currently plan it.

Upcoming print support in TestRail

Adding a feature to import and export test cases and suites has been often requested and we understand that this is a critical feature for all users who already have a large collection of test cases (either managed in a classic test case management tool or with tools such as Excel). We plan to add this capability to TestRail and use a simple XML format for importing and exporting test cases, so that converting existing test cases to our file format will be as easy as possible.

We currently plan to release TestRail 1.0 in early-mid January. However, because the TestRail release date also depends on some other internal efforts at Gurock Software, this is still subject to change.

We are happy to announce the release of the latest TestRail Beta 1.0.3 with support for nested sections and section hierarchies, among other improvements and fixes. You can download the latest beta version by visiting your personalized beta link you received when your beta application was approved (just email us in case you lost that email). If you haven’t yet applied for the TestRail beta, you can still participate in the beta test and we are happy about all feedback.

Test suites now support nested subsections

When we originally planned and designed TestRail, we wanted to keep the structure of test plans as simple as possible for various reasons and decided that a flat list of sections and test cases would be ideal. After gathering beta feedback from users over the past months and using TestRail internally ourselves for various projects, we have come to the conclusion that nested sections and section hierarchies are needed to make test suites more scalable. When I say more scalable, I specifically mean that the ability to nest sections makes it possible to organize more test cases in the same suite. It also makes it a lot easier to adjust the suite structure to the needs of individual projects.

One of the reasons we originally implemented flat lists was that tree-based structures are usual hard to use, especially with web applications. So when we decided that we would allow nested sections within test suites, we wanted to make sure that it’s as easy to use as the rest of the application. As you can see in the screenshot below, we accomplished this by adding support for drag&drop, making it really easy to rearrange and copy sections and cases within test suites.

Test cases and sections can be moved and copied via drag&drop

We also improved and fixed a bunch of other things in this release and you can view the full change log of the new version in our forum. Let us know if you have any questions about this release or if you notice anything not working correctly.

Our friends at EurekaLab recently released a new .NET edition of their exception reporting tool EurekaLog. While EurekaLog is a popular and well-known tool with Delphi developers, .NET developers haven’t been able to benefit from its powerful exception and bug reporting capabilities until recently. Now that the new version of EurekaLog for .NET is available (which I understand is a managed port of the Delphi version), I’m sure it will be as well received as the original Delphi tool. Please also note that you can easily integrate EurekaLog with SmartInspect, allowing you to benefit from both tools.