Terraform from HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure automation tool that enables users to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
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Tricentis qTest
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Tricentis qTest (formerly QASymphony) provides enterprise-level agile testing tools giving businesses visibility and control needed to ensure application quality in fast-paced development environments. Tricentis and QASymphony merged in summer 2018.
Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.
Tricentis qTest integrates seamlessly with Jira, making it ideal for teams that manage user stories and defects in Jira while keeping test cases and execution in qTest. When paired with automation tools like tosca, Selenium, or WebdriverIO, qTest is excellent for aggregating both manual and automated test results in one place.
As a fresher, when I started using qTest it was very handy and easy to understand.
It helps us trace the test cases that are used to test the quality in a single location
The main thing is its integration with JIRA as soon as we create a ticket we would be getting all the requirements in the qTest so it became easy for me
The language itself is a bit unusual and this makes it hard for new users to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later releases, basic concepts like "map an array of options into a set of configurations" or "apply this logic if a variable is specified" are possible but unnecessarily cumbersome.
The 'Terraform Plan' operation could be substantially more sophisticated. There are many situations where a Terraform file could never work but successfully passes the 'plan' phase only to fail during the 'apply' phase.
Environment migrations could be smoother. Renaming/refactoring files is a challenge because of the need to use 'Terraform mv' commands, etc.
In requirements , we can't add multiple test cases at once, or search multiple cases at once, need to do one by one. Here actually qtest needs to improve.
Linking cloud hosted qtest and on-premise TOSCA is very difficult especially when you are working with client system with security wall. It requires tunnelling software which is not recommended.
I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating
Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.
I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.
Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
All of them offer formidable solutions in the test management realm, but each one caters to different niche and need. qTest distinguishes itself with its deep integration capabilities, especially with Agile and DevOps tools, enabling streamlined CI/CD process. Its modern, user-centric interface contrasts with ALM's more dated appearance and complex setup. While TestRail provides a clean user experience and caters to a broad spectrum of business, qTest's scalability, from SMBs to large enterprises, stands out. PractiTest's cloud-based solution is geared towards mid-sized companies, but qTest's flexibility, advanced analytics, and robust reporting grant teams actionable insights. qTest' approach to a more holistic test management closely aligning with modern software development practices
we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
