How does your tool improve my life as someone in QA?
Why don’t we just let someone in QA tell you themselves! “TestRail is exactly what our team was looking for. We needed a place to organize our numerous test cases, complex test configurations, and multiple test runs. TestRail takes the hassle out of all of it. The interface is clean, simple, and easy to use; anyone can start using it right away. TestRail has the perfect blend of design and functionality.” - Gary C, Lead Test Engineer at Citrix Systems, Inc
What misconceptions are there around your tool?
The biggest misconception about TestRail is that it only really helps teams that have a heavy emphasis on manual or exploratory testing. In fact, the teams that get the most value out of TestRail document the tests they are automating alongside the tests they still run manually. Then, when they queue test runs for a given sprint or test cycle, they filter automated tests into some runs and manual tests into other runs, and send the results from their test automation to TestRail via the TestRail API. Ultimately, by tracking automated and manual tests in the same place, you can drastically improve visibility by creating a single source of truth for all testing progress. It also allows you to demonstrate coverage and traceability across your entire testing cycle.
What tool feature are you most proud of?
TestRail’s test case repository is one of the features we’re most proud of in TestRail. In TestRail, test cases give you a dedicated space to plan your testing and write out exactly what needs to be tested. You can customize the fields in your test cases to allow you to store whatever information your team needs to make sure you’re testing the right thing. You can also design your own test case templates with all of the types of fields you need to manage the specific kinds of testing you do at your organization. Test cases retain all of the history of previous test results and a history of changes to the test case to help you identify risky areas of your application and provide auditability. Those test cases live in a dedicated, flexible repository in a single test suite or multiple test suites. You can sort and filter your test case repository like a spreadsheet, make bulk edits, and organize test cases in hierarchical folders and sub-folders to give you complete flexibility over the way your test case repository is structured.
What is your roadmap and how do you decide what to prioritize?
We’re excited to continue delivering new features to our 10,000+ customers and 150,000+ users. We’ve got a few awesome features like webhooks, test case versioning and review, and improved search right around the corner, with test data parameterization and improved reporting following early next year. Generally, when deciding what to build we try to balance customer input with shifts we’re seeing in the market, evolutions in the toolstack teams use, and developments in the ways teams approach testing.
How do you involve your customers in your tool development process?
Customer feedback is integral to the product development process at TestRail. We solicit input from TestRail users through various channels, like direct customer research interviews, ongoing NPS surveys, our yearly user survey, in-product analytics, conversations in our community forum, questions during webinars, feature requests submitted to contact@gurock.com, and more. We combine all of that user feedback with analyses of market trends and ongoing changes in the challenges that software development teams face in delivering high-quality applications to ensure we’re delivering key features and improvements to support the ever-evolving needs of the QA and software development community.
What is the most under-appreciated feature of your tool?
This would probably be the ability to launch a test and receive results within Slack.
Users are also enjoying how the On-Demand platform allows them to share the responsibility of QA with other teams, and prove the value of quality to the business as a whole. Test results can be accessed and presented to suit more audiences in their companies. For example, more senior stakeholders may not be as familiar with Jira, but have the option to now view results in another channel, eg via the intuitive On-Demand GAT platform, or Slack.
How do you support your customers when releasing tool updates?
With each new release, we always release a blog describing the new features and updates, including screenshots and examples. We also add new articles to our documentation and typically host a live webinar with our Product Managers to demo the new functionality in the release and answer any questions our users may have. After the initial release activities, we often record and publish short how-to videos or publish more in-depth tutorials on our blog.
What type of support is given when purchasing your tool?
First of all, the TestRail Support team is available and excited to support anyone with any questions about TestRail, regardless of your subscription status! Just email contact@gurock.com and we’ll be happy to help with whatever questions you might have. We also offer a 14-day free trial so that you can test out the tool for yourself. We’ve built a few different educational guides to help new users learn the ropes quickly, or you can add an example project to check out what a more complex project might look like at scale. Finally, we’re super excited to share that we just recently launched a weekly, live product demo that happens every Wednesday at 4:00pm GMT / 11am US Eastern Time. We spend about 15-20 minutes in a live demo and the rest of the time we have TestRail Product Experts on the call to help answer any questions that attendees have.
How would you like to keep the conversation going with the Ministry of Testing community in the long term?
