Using a survey application as as a test-tool?
Submitted by Antony Marcano on Tue, 21/09/2004 - 20:56.
test management | test tools
[textile]Sometimes we use various tools as test tools, even if they aren't specifically testing tools... Alan Richardson discusses the tools that he uses in his article "Alternative Testing Tools in Theory":http://www.compendiumdev.co.uk/toolsinaction/Alternative%20Testing%20Tools%20In%20Theory.pdf - but "this particular post on testingReflections":http://www.testingreflections.com/node?from=8 gave me an idea...
There are various test-tools that allow you to guide a manual tester through their test execution, however, they are often part of a suite that can be prohibitively expensive for many teams/organisations.
Perhaps it would be possible to use a survey tool such as "NSurvey":http://www.nsurvey.org/ in the same way? There would be some work configuring a set of standard answers (e.g. PASS or FAIL), but the time-saving capturing results might outweigh some other methods... The forms builder is pretty simple and allows just about every field type you would need... the data you would want to gather (which could go beyond PASS and FAIL) would have to be considered as you built the test-plan... I mean, survey...
You could just use it as a survey tool...
Users, on larger projects, performing their own manual acceptance testing or exploring the latest iteration could complete a survey at the end as a way of capturing their feedback.
If your budget can't afford a specialised test-tool to help you track manual testing, this may be an alternative for your manual testing needs.
If anyone has already done this, let me know how it has gone...
These are just ideas - it may seem like a good idea in theory... if I get to use it in practice, I shall let you know if it works as well as the visualisation in my mind.
There are various test-tools that allow you to guide a manual tester through their test execution, however, they are often part of a suite that can be prohibitively expensive for many teams/organisations.
Perhaps it would be possible to use a survey tool such as "NSurvey":http://www.nsurvey.org/ in the same way? There would be some work configuring a set of standard answers (e.g. PASS or FAIL), but the time-saving capturing results might outweigh some other methods... The forms builder is pretty simple and allows just about every field type you would need... the data you would want to gather (which could go beyond PASS and FAIL) would have to be considered as you built the test-plan... I mean, survey...
You could just use it as a survey tool...
Users, on larger projects, performing their own manual acceptance testing or exploring the latest iteration could complete a survey at the end as a way of capturing their feedback.
If your budget can't afford a specialised test-tool to help you track manual testing, this may be an alternative for your manual testing needs.
If anyone has already done this, let me know how it has gone...
These are just ideas - it may seem like a good idea in theory... if I get to use it in practice, I shall let you know if it works as well as the visualisation in my mind.