We're a startup. And our money is very limited at this time. So investing in free alternatives in all aspects of our company is a good idea. At least, in our inception phase.
QAleap Team Systems:
I have been researching various free or open source tools that will help us organize our team work, (Spreadsheets, documents, project plans, email, calendars ...etc).
Google Apps is our choice. A great set of integrated tools that will help teams to stay in sync through all projects phases.
I have configured our team system as follows:
- QAleap Team Page: http://team.qaleap.com: any team member can go to this URL in the and see the latest news, emails, calendar and shared documents between the team.
- QAleap Mail System:http://mailsystem.qaleap.com: A bullet proof Gmail-based mail system. A pop3 enabled email that will enable members to view their messages online or using any desktop email client such as thunderbird or outlook.
- QAleap calendar:http://calendar.qaleap.com A Google based calendar for each team member. He/She can view other calendars by a single mouse click.
- QAleap Documents: http://documents.qaleap.com A repository for all documents (spreadsheets, presentations and word documents) where any team member can create, edit and share in a very flexible fashion.
- QAleap Chat: Team members can chat using Gtalk client.
It's important to know that all of the above activities can be configured to work solely under qaleap.com domain only. This is necessary for the security of the system.
We are now experimenting with the free version of Google Apps and it's enough for our current purpose. A future plan could be buying the business version which is very affordable.
Automation Tools:The open source and free software community provides world class test automation tools that will save us a great amount of money. We are willing to adopt free and open source test automation tools that are reliable, stable, customizable and convenient for our automation purposes. Here's a glance about some of them:
- Selenium Remote Control: A test tool that allows you to write automated web application UI tests in any programming language (java, C++, Python, php ...etc) against any HTTP website using any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser. This tool is adopted for testing activities in Google.
- Selenium Grid: It allows you to run multiple tests in parallel and on multiple machines, cutting down the time required for running web acceptance tests. This tool is adopted for testing activities in Google.
- Selenium IDE: It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.
- Apache Jmeter: A 100% pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions.
- Eclipse : A fully integrated Java IDE to help us code our test automation scripts. It can be fully integrated with all of the above tools.
- Bugzilla: A free bug tracking suite from mozilla. Very reliable.
