The document discusses the benefits of using Rally, an agile test management tool, in software development and testing projects. It notes that agile development is becoming the norm. Rally helps manage requirements, estimation, test case creation, execution, defect tracking, and reporting throughout the agile project lifecycle. It integrates with other tools and provides benefits like real-time status, coordination across teams, and analytics. An example case study describes how Rally was used effectively over multiple sprints in one of Marlabs' client projects to plan, track progress, link defects to user stories, and generate reports.

1. Marlab’s
Volume IV
Welcome to the 4th issue of Test Digest.
INSIDE THIS
ISSUE:
Go Agile
Go Rally
2
Marlabs Testing
Updates
6
Quality News &
Views
7
Know Your
Teammate
8
Cartoon Space
8
In this edition, our focus is on Agile testing. As per
Forrester, “Agile development is rapidly becoming the
norm” . Agile has taken many forms and moved well beyond the Agile manifesto. There are also so many different methodologies classified under Agile- Scrum, Feature/Test driven development, eXtreme programming.
Specific to testing-As per the World Quality Report 201314, Agile development is widely adopted, but still gives
rise to problems for testing- the key challenges reported
by executives include – Lack of a good testing approach
to fit in with the Agile development, low levels of test
automation, lack of Tools to create reusable test sets ,
difficulty in identifying the right areas on which Testing
should focus. This edition includes an article on the benefits and use of Rally, in one of our Agile projects.
Enjoy the edition and keep your feedback coming in!
December 2013

2. Sri Harsha B
Agile methodology is a very popular process that has been followed in most of
the development and testing projects. Rally is one of the popular Test Management tools in the agile world, which covers end to end process of a Project which
includes :

Requirements creation

Task Estimation

Test case creation

Test Execution

Defect Tracking

Reporting & Time Sheets
Advantages of Rally over Traditional Test Management Tools :

Real time picture of project status.

Co-ordinate multi-team releases, every feature and sub system stays synchronized with QA focus.

Shared product backlogs, hierarchical projects, roll up reporting
and advanced analysis.

Integrated
application
lifecycle
data provided to everyone.

Idea Management, Agile portfolio
management, time and Cost tracking, full quality management

Extended Rally’s functionality with
customer features, displays and
reports.
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3. continuation of ‘Go Agile.. Go Rally..’
Rally Integrations :
Rally can be integrated with:

Test Management tools: IBM Rational Software, HP, VSTS

Source code management: Github, Perforce

Defect Management: JIRA, Bugzilla, VSTS, RCQ

CRM: Sales force, Oracle Sales Cloud

IDE: Eclipse, VSTS

Build Release Management: Jenkins, Electric cloud
Rally Editions Comparison:
Case Study of Rally for Marlabs Internal Projects :
It’s been used in one of Marlab’s prestigious client’s project effectively from
last 4 sprints
Each sprint is designed for 4 weeks of duration and starts with Sprint planning meeting, where in QA and Dev teams need to provide their estimates for
the user stories.
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4. continuation of ‘Go Agile.. Go Rally..’
Tool has been used across different phases of sprint cycle as shown in the diagram.
It’s been used to capture, track and report defects
On a high level Rally hierarchy starts with
Project ->Iterations -> User Stories ->Tasks, defects
Complete end to end Agile process can be tracked using this tool
Different activities which are performed in Rally are as below :
o
Create customized Dashboard of individual priority
o
Sprint progress tracking which shows the planned velocity and current status.
o
Creating and updating the tasks for a user story
o
Create defects and link it to user story
o
Setting up the notification rule to indicate the changes to respective story
owners
o
Generation of reports for each sprint. For e.g. Burn down chart as shown in
below image., etc.
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5. continuation of ‘Go Agile.. Go Rally..’
Some Sample Screens of Rally Platform :
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6. Trainings
HP Unified Functional Test & Application Lifecycle Management
A 2 day training was conducted on “HP-UFT & ALM” by Vikas Joshi. The
training covered new features of UFT 11.5, how it differs from QTP 11, integration with ALM, BPT concepts
Plans are of
little
importance,
but planning
is essential –
Winston
Churchill
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7. ME : Vivek Hosmani, born in Bangalore and spent my next 5 years in Delhi (which i
vaguely remember) then back to Bangalore where i did most of my Education and then to
Pune for my postgrad and currently in the peaceful city Mysore.
On Role : Test Engineer
DOB : June 7th
Interests : It‟s a BIG list, but the prime ones are Football (with which my day start with)
and Music (Rock/Electronic comes first in my favorites, but it‟s the songs from recent Kannada movie „Lucia’ tops my current playlist). Also love to spend my leisure stumbling upon
sites which feature latest on mobiles/technology
Favorite Gadgets : My Lappy and Mobile
Aspirations : Not to limit myself to one thing or aspect. I love to learn new things, expanding
my horizon of knowledge in every aspect and to give back something good to the world.
Looking forward to it.
Inspiration : Living in different cities and meeting different people has been an amazing
learning curve in various aspects of daily life .So i try to take my inspiration from all the good
things in each one i meet and each place has to offer.
About Marlabs: Has been an amazing start to my career here with great humble and supportive people who stand by the phrase - "Marlabs Family".
Rajesh Sundararajan
Sriharsha Kumar B R
Murali Dubutavalu
Varaprasadarao Yarra
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