For many years till now it’s our natural belongingness towards the old and traditional ways of living life. We prefer our ancestor’s ways of living a healthy life as a gift from them and show reluctance towards adapting to new, modern, and advanced means of today. But when it comes to operating a business, you’ve to keep aside your old, traditional, boring, and unproductive means of operations. This world is rapidly changing. The thing you see today or saw yesterday gets easily replaced by another more enchanting item tomorrow, just like you say within a blink of an eye. Similarly, a mindset to run and operate a business with the same manual procedures as those who have incorporated before you must be replaced with modern techniques and procedures. Today, the science and technology sector has escalated. Every single day new inventions and technologies are emerging with their full swing. In such a rapidly changing and evolving world, having use of those manual business operating procedures is the worst choice you can make for your business growth.
Today is an era of software products, networks, and applications. No matter which domain your business is in, you must surely have your mobile app, software, or a network to perform business operations or else might be indulged in developing your software products. An individual who opens up a business of software development intending to reap as much success as he/she can be successful because the software development industry just demands unique user experience, customer satisfaction. And both of the demands would only be fulfilled when the software is well enough tested before it goes live.
But when organizations indulge themselves in software testing they usually come up with mistakes of mismanagement of test cases, the inefficiency of detecting bugs and issues in the software, etc. Issues in managing test cases arise mainly due to the use of excel sheets or spreadsheets. However, To get the right results, you need the right tools.
As a tester, you may think that a tool as simple as an excel sheet will simplify your test case management process.
Reasons why excel is not a wise approach
Desktop full of sheets - For the sake of planning your testing process, bundles of sheets are required. Sheets are in so much quantity that you may have experienced your laptops or devices full of sheets, without leaving any space for any other file. There’s a need to have a separate excel table to track requirements, test cases, test runs, errors, and a table for tracking. Regardless of the size of the project, each project requires 5 different Excel worksheets. If you choose to separate the worksheets by testers, modules, or releases, it will be difficult for your team to manage the number of excel worksheets. Due to a large number of documents, the possibility of errors is higher.
Challenges of updating test cases - When a huge amount of Excel worksheets are being in use, if the requirements of each version change, then tracking the test cases that demand updating will be a nightmare. Therefore, since all test cases are not up to date, you may face the challenge of inconsistent data. In addition to inconsistent data, tracking any changes is equally difficult. Your team has to spend extra hours to modify and track changes, regardless of testing.
Unreliable data in sheets - Without incorporating any structured way to make changes in the documents, chances of incorrect information in excel sheets are high. Therefore, the unreliability of data will harm the test results. For instance, there is a test step added to the test case due to the change in the requirement but the test manager forgot to update it in the excel sheet. The tester might get the test result as passed without running the additional test step.
Absence of assistance for agile business practices - Excel is unfit for handling the changes while agile methods or practices provide adaptability to change. Excel sheets are precise and easy to use just for the individual who has taken a step to create it. It is challenging for another person other than that of its creator to have the use of excel sheets. The newcomer might have to start from scratch.
Hindrance of scalability - One of the major flaws of working with excel sheets is that as the organization gets expanded, the data stored in spreadsheets get more distributed. Even as you add more team members to your testing team, there will be a requirement of more excel sheets. There’s a need to update the data in the excel sheet with an increase in your team size. Manually maintaining data and sensitive information in Excel sheets are of great challenge thus prone to human errors which makes test case management way more challenging and inaccurate.
Unable to obtain proper and exact insights - Having the use of multiple Excel worksheets i.e every tester has its sheet according to the project he/she is working on, visualizing test data can be difficult. Extracting data from a variety of excel sheets and then merging the data is another great challenge. Also, aggregating data pose to be an icing on the top of threats for testers as it consumes a lot of time and is much more prone to errors. In most cases, you don’t want to make critical testing decisions based on inaccurate data.
Despite these shortcomings, even if you choose to use excel spreadsheets, you must make extra efforts to:
- Create a template and format it to record requirements, test cases, and errors in an Excel worksheet.
- Determine the value of the field, such as "test result" ("good", "failed" and "not run", etc.) and "priority" (high, low, medium)
- Set naming conventions between all test artifacts
- Determine the folder structure and set up a network drive
- Agree with the development team to create error report and tracking templates
- Create a template for reporting test case management
Final Thoughts
Now you might have sufficient knowledge to understand why using excel sheets pose a great threat to your overall software testing efforts. All of the above activities not only take up your testing time but are also prone to errors. Hence, the best and recommended way to handle test cases is to use a proper test management tool.
