Quality Assurance Dashboard

Quality Assurance Dashboard: A QA dashboard is a reporting tool, to manage and track given project. It will provide a high level summary of white-box and black-box testing status, major show-stopper bugs,  scorecards, performance metrics, and reports that are distributed to both client and server side stakeholders. The portal provides a single source for critical information with on-demand availability, access, and visibility into vital program activities. It also provides one-line summary about a particular BUILD or Release Candidate status in Green or Red bar - Green (looks good) and Red (Major blocks - needs to be fixed).

The dashboard also provides a breakdown of performance metrics by area of responsibility to distinguish between the metrics within the scope of projects' responsibility and control, and those that are affected by other organizations or agencies. The Dashboard provides online access to a drilldown to the status of the individual performance metrics, including trend analysis, by functional area and service area. 

The dashboard also answers the following main questions:

• Status of testing
• POA for testing for given release candidate or build for given day
• When will it be finished
• Why is it taking so long
• Have you tested (specific item) yet ?

Dashboard becomes effective because 

• Provides management and all stakeholders a detailed test status reports
• Provides visualization of overall testing in terms of charts or graphs or data or stats

Here is an example HTML template of a QA dashboard. A good start for folks looking to develop your own dashboard.

Test Link - Tutorial With Example

Test Link: An open source test management tool. It enables creation and organization of test cases and helps manage into test plan. Allows execution of test cases from test link itself. One can easily track test results dynamically, generate reports, generate test metrics, prioritize test cases and assign unfinished tasks.

Its a web based tool with GUI, which provides an ease to develop test cases, organize test cases into test plans, execute these test cases and generate reports.

Test link exposes API, written in PHP, can help generate quality assurance dashboards. The functions like AddTestCaseToTestPlan, AssignRequirements,CreateTestCase etc. helps create and organize test cases per test plan. Functions like GetTestCasesForTestPlan, GetLastExecutionResult allows one to create quality assurance dashboard.

How to use Test Link: Example of TestLink simple work-flow:


1. Initial step would be to create a new Test Project and assign QA testers or engineers with tasks.


2.Import Software Requirements and for part of these requirements generates empty Test Cases. Reorganize them into Test Suites.


3.Create a content for empty test cases using test specifications that are being organized into Test suites.


4.Create “Regression testing” and assigns to applicable test cases.


5.Create a Test Plan, Build and link all Test Cases in Test Suite to this Test Plan. Assign resources to this test plan.


6.Assume QA got there first Build or Release Candidate from development team, execute and record the testing with the result.


7.Assume QA get new Build or Release Candidate with fixes for blocking issues, verify these fixes for blocking issues, execute regression tests. 


8.Manager (Test or Engineering) and other project related stakeholders want to see results and status of testing. Then in such a case, these stakeholders including managers can create accounts or use default Guest account to view test results for a particular Build. An overall report gets generated for automated test suites, as a Guest manager is able to view test results at a higher level in graphical format.


9.Suppose new changes happens to existing functionality, its very easy to modify existing test plan and add new test cases or enhance/modify existing test cases and attach them to a particular test plan.


10.Test suites continue to execute as usual by generating various reports.


11.For new project again QA creates a new Test , follows above steps to implement TestLink for there project.

Find more about TestLink