By Baranidharan Thiruvengadam

� End-to-End Life Cycle Management

� Program Monitoring

� Debugging

� Automated GUI Testing (if applicable)

� Performance Analysis (if applicable)

� Comprehensive Test & Defect Management

� Commercial Tools (CT)

� Non-commercial Tools (NCT)

� HP Quality Centre

� HP Quick Test Pro

� IBM Rational Functional Tester & Rational Quality Manager

� Smart Bear “Test complete”

� Tricentis “TOSCA”

� Defect Tracking Tools◦ JIRA

◦ Bugzilla

� Automation tools◦ Selenium

◦ Watir

◦ Cucumber

� Features & Functions

� Application & Platform support

� Types of Testing

� Training needs

� Complexity of the Application

� Percentage of Testing effort involved

� Level of Integration with other tools

� Output requirements

� Licensing cost (Pricing Policy)

� Maintenance Costs

� Return on Investments

� Finally..

◦ Project Planning & Tracking and Enterprise Release Management

◦ Context in terms of Interface

◦ Support of Test & Defect management

◦ Operational support for handling different functions like Debug, Exception handling, Tracking logs & results, Dashboard etc

◦ Compatibility in terms of environment like Windows, Mac, Linux etc.,

◦ Support for technologies like HTML5, Active X controls, etc

◦ Application support for different applications like JAVA, .NET, Siebel, Oracle etc

◦ Extensibility to support browsers like IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc.,

◦ Functional Testing

◦ Regression Testing

◦ GUI Testing

◦ White box Testing

◦ Business flow Testing

◦ SOA Testing

◦ Database Testing

◦ Knowledge & Skill set of Testers

◦ Composition of Testing Team

◦ Cost of Training

◦ Level of Training required (Basic or Advanced)

◦ Application which uses complex formulas & calculation can be difficult to Automate

◦ Level of functional support that your desired application can support say for eg., API calls

◦ Some companies consider 20% of overall Effort in Testing & others believe (30-40%)

◦ More the percentage of Testing, better the chance for Tools

◦ Integration with Defect management tool

◦ Integration capabilities with other vendor products

◦ Integration level with Database and other applications as the case may be

◦ Support with 3rd party tools

◦ Level of output requirements (Enterprise, Release, Project etc.,)

◦ Stake holders requirements

◦ Reporting formats requirements

◦ Compatibility for different types of Reporting

◦ Number of users for the Application

◦ Type of License requirement

◦ Additional costs required for Plug-ins & 3rd

Party controls support

◦ Period of usage

◦ Costs required for support

◦ Level of support required

◦ Costs involved for Installation & Trouble shooting

◦ Documentation support

◦ Test cases identified for Automation

◦ Number of releases per year

◦ Number of cycles per releases

◦ Cost of Manual effort

◦ Cost & duration of creating Automation scripts (in case of Automation tool)

Automation ROI