Here are 4 Ways to Make TestRail Better
Features that would help the QA process and decrease bottlenecks.
TestRail has become an industry standard for QA testing, and for good reason.
It’s very easy to learn, and does the job right out of the box. It easily connects with outside product management tools like Jira, and it’s convenient to import and export test cases (which is great for manual testing). You can have multiple projects going on with minimum confusion. It’s a good, cost-effective tool, especially for agile product development.
However, there a few things we’d love to see incorporated into future versions, and if you’re shopping around for a web-based testing platform you should consider before purchasing.
TestRail can only talk to one tool at a time.
If we create a ticket in Jira, then take that ticket number and put it in multiple test cases as a reference number, all of the test cases that have been written for a task in Jira will be listed in Jira.
Now, let’s say we want to do the same exact thing but with a different tool, we can’t. We can’t add multiple layers of product management tools, TestRail only allows you to pick one at a time.
If your QA process is lean and mean, and you have a relatively small team dedicated to a few products, it’s not a huge problem. But it becomes a real issue if a company starts scaling, and different teams and partners come into the picture.
It wouldn’t at all be unusual for one project team to use a tool like Jira, then for another team on a different project to use something like Asana or Pivotal Tracker.
It needs a documentation area.
Currently, TestRail just stores test cases and generates reports based on those cases, but it would be nice to have a documentation area. That could open the door for it to be much more than just a test case management tool. It could be like an overall QA tool that includes many useful bits of info, as well as onboarding documentation.
It could use a coding format.
I like the format of API testing, because whenever you write API testing with adjacent data, it just makes all that code vomit look a bit nicer. It’s a small thing, but a coding format would be nice aesthetically and not make it feel like you’re dealing with a brick wall of data.
Better UX for different screens.
TestRail’s site isn’t super responsive for smaller screens and could use some work. Using it on a laptop in split-screen can be challenging because you can’t see the full page/test cases. A minor inconvenience, but it keeps coming up.
The pandemic definitely put a spotlight on this, as more people worked remotely and away from more traditional desktop setups. To take it a step further, a dedicated app would be a great addition to the TestRail ecosystem.
