Test management involves the systematic organization of test artifacts to support their accessibility and reuse. Parveen, Tilley, and Gonzalez provide a description of the problems and lessons learned when introducing test management in a distributed, industrial, software development environment. Testers managed test cases as Excel files stored locally. Access to test cases by offshore testers and management was a problem, and some test cases were lost due to, for example, employee turnover. The solution adopted was to centralize test artifacts using TestDirector, a Web-based test management tool.

Impact assessments, while revealing a drop in the loss rate of test cases, also revealed many unanticipated problems. For example, TestDirector only allowed four columns to describe test cases. Since every tester had his own unique Excel file format that exceeded four columns, porting test cases to TestDirector was time consuming. The performance of TestDirector when executing automated test scripts was found to be unacceptable. Some customers specified test case formats that could not be accommodated using TestDirector.

Three major lessons were learned. First, testing terminology and the test case format should be standardized. Second, training and support are vital to the successful adoption of a test management tool. Third, prior to purchase, tool functionality and limitations should be thoroughly assessed.

The authors do not state the number of person-months consumed with porting test cases and do not provide actual estimates for the loss rate of test cases before and after the implementation of TestDirector. Nonetheless, for the real-world insights alone, this easy-to-read paper is highly recommended to the software engineering community.