The prohibitive cost of branded Test Management suites coupled with the high cost of maintenance and training is putting a lot of strain on already stretched budgets. Using a base framework and some open source components can address several of these issues both from an enterprise and individual productivity point of view. Moreover, given the rapid changes in the software engineering space, there is a lot of scope for innovation to take the focus of Testing as a practice beyond ‘software assurance' to ‘delivery assurance'.
A group of individuals have made an attempt to create an innovative framework, Tzen, which aims at overcoming technology and cost barriers. Tzen uses Mantis, a popular free web-based bug tracking system for defects management. The current tool has been developed such that it not only surpasses the need for installation and maintenance but also manages test requirements, test cases, defects, traceability and reports. The tool as it stands today comes with a bundle of features like multi-level project management, user management, requirement management, test plan creation, maintenance, designing and execution. The Testing team of Zensar Technologies' as Sponsor of the Project has decided to offer the framework in its current form as an Open Source resource which can be improved and extended through the efforts of the NASSCOM Community Project.
Leading management thinker and guru of ‘edge perspectives', John Hagel writes, "Technology and practice are intimately linked - very little performance improvement comes directly out of the technology itself! It is only when seasoned practitioners engage with technology professionals, especially in close-knit communities, and evolve their practices to better use of the technology that the real performance breakthroughs occur."
The significant achievements of Open Innovation Projects like Eclipse (initial contributions from IBM) and Intalio BPMN Suite (contributions by Intallio) among many others, have shown the power of community enabled innovation especially in terms of individual contributors who can bring to bear their innovative talent and skills to co-create next generation products and solutions.
The NASSCOM EMERGE community has shown significant results in record time connecting small and medium enterprises. With the idea of rekindling innovation at the grassroots (viz. Individuals) NASSCOM is bringing together individuals who have been certified under NASSCOM's NSR (National Skills Registry) Program to form the NASSCOM Innovation Community. The Community will be enabled by a Co-creation Platform, CommunityWare, which will help the individuals to Connect, Collaborate and Co-create. A Sponsored Innovation Project has been identified as a Pilot to create and extend ‘an innovative Test Management framework'.
Vision for the Project: Tzen is equipped with many features but aspires to gain a set of enhancements like a dashboard, API engine, reporting features and more. Finally, this product would aim at enabling its users with innovative functionalities and tools to support realization of their future test management objectives.
Who should participate: We are looking for individuals who are passionate about open source technologies, testing domain, and product architecture. This is an open invitation to all members and is an attempt to igniting individual minds towards innovation!
If you are interested, please register by writing in to communityware@aikonlabs.com by Sep 15, 2008, and we will revert to you on how to get started.
Thank you.
Avinash
Comments
No one has commented yet.