Extending Lighthouse bug tracking

We use lighthouse for bug tracking at my company. It is simple, flexible and has a great api that allows us to hook it into testlink to track bugs from our test management system. The search functionality, however, seems limited. I have often wished there were a dashboard feature that allowed for more of an overview. It might be different if I worked on only one project, but as a QA lead,  I care about all the projects all the time. So when my company decided to do a hackathon day, I wanted to find a way to extend lighthouse into a dashboard.

We had 8 hours and 4 people to complete our hackathon task. Since a number of us had just completed a basic intro to Rails class, we decided to make a separate page that pulls data from Lighthouse. We were able to get the info out of lighthouse pretty easily with the API and Rails (with web themes) let us get a basic page up quickly. With so much data coming in, we had to figure out how to paginate the results so that the system didn’t run into any lag while trying to display the results. And the profile creation and filtering process took us a while.

By the end of the day, we had a working profile up with dynamic info coming in from our Lighthouse projects. A user can log in and see a list of their current tickets for all projects, with priority and status displayed and link those back to lighthouse to update them, or they can go to a more project specific view and see tasks assigned to them – with details for each project.

We have more work to do- we want to work on the sorting so that tickets appear in different bins by status, by priority, date updated etc. We also want to make a “team view” so that leads can log in and see the release status for all the members of their team. Eventually, we hope to do similar integration with testlink to display test status, test cases assigned and test cases created by you. We also want to integrate with Pivotal Tracker, which is also great from the project perspective, but needs a cross- project dashboard for those of us who are always working cross- team.

Test Link Review

If you search for test tracking and management software, you will run into Test link. Testlink, though far from perfect, does some pretty cool things. I love any excuse to try out a cool new program (Which is the best part about working in a tech environment, isn’t it?) so I decided to give it a shot.  I used to keep track of my tests on proprietary software and open office spreadsheets, but the organization offered by testlink moved my whole testing approach to a new level.

The Good:

Free

Organization

requirements management

requirements based testing

result reporting

central location for assigning, approving and executing tests

Open Source and written in PHP, so it can be adjusted for your specific project

The Bad:

It is a bit clunky to use

Minor bugs and unfinished features

Isn’t set up for a ton of integration- but there is an API

The results:

Testing process has been opened up for anyone on the project to be aware of what QA is working on. Communication between QA and Devs has improved, and the approval process is much easier and more organic than holding a big meeting. Test link has the potential for seamless integration with bug filing and requirements management, helping to carefully order and maintain a tester’s world. It doesn’t come pre-linked to much, but the site does offer some instruction for that. It does offer a good user guide and a pretty active community for support.

You can input your documents (I haven’t found a way to do this automatically, but manually putting them in does ensure that you do careful ambiguity review) and then link each requirement to a test case, or generate test cases right from the requirement. The execute section can accept xml results and notes. Testlink automatically generates test plans, test reports with data from the system, so you can put out a document that shows your test plan, and then gives overviews of your test cases and tracks the requriements. It has been extremely useful for increasing transparency in the QA department and keeping everyone involved with the process. There is a way to create custom fields that I have been using for test plan approvals and linking to bugs filed.

In all, it is a great program- that could use some finishing tweaks and an UI overhaul. I can look past its flaws though for the functionality it provides. I’ll admit it- I love testlink.

Also read this post here: http://blog.agoragames.com/2010/10/07/testlink-bringing-order-to-testing/