Formerly from Micro Focus and earliler from Borland, unified test management with OpenText™ Silk Central drives reuse and efficiency. It gives users the visibility to control application readiness.
N/A
PractiTest
Score8 out of 10
N/A
PractiTest is presented as a cloud-based test management tool that provides its customers with an end-to-end system to meet testing and QA needs. It is described by the vendor as flexible but methodological, enabling organizations to ensure visibility and communication at all levels. The solution aims to help users and project development teams streamline and manage their testing processes, while providing management with a clear and simple view of their project status at all times.
$39
user
Pricing
OpenText Silk Central
PractiTest
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Professional
$39.00
user
Enterprise
$49.00
user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
OpenText Silk Central
PractiTest
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Features
OpenText Silk Central
PractiTest
Test Management
Comparison of Test Management features of OpenText Silk Central and PractiTest
We didn't just select Borland Silk Central randomly. In the selection process, we actually evaluated in total 26 available test management tools in the market. We sent surveys to all potential users in the department to collect their wish list of our next management tool, converted them to a criteria list, and used that list to evaluate all 26 tools. We reduced the possible candidate tools to five and organized a small committee to pick the final three. Top management then checked their price tags and selected Borland Silk Central. Based on this evaluation process, I would say Borland Silk Central is suitable to an organization which has no more than 60 testers; needs both manual tests and automated tests; needs on-line support; needs a low learning curve and has a limited budget. My personal view is that this tool reaches the balance points among ease-of-use, budget and support.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
PractiTest works GREAT as a test case repository. It is very easy to gather metrics, filter, and sort based on custom fields. We were able to work with the API to pull our automation results in as well. The support team is always very quick with their responses and monitors the "in-app chat." They are very open to answering questions, providing best practice materials, and looking for additional feedback. If you already have a central location for all of your test cases and testing needs, then I guess you probably wouldn't need to add another. However, PractiTest has high capability and potential, so if it's set up properly you can easily save time managing your tests.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Borland Silk Central is good for the users to associate test requirements, test cases, execution plans and test reports together. Each asset (test case, requirement, etc...) provides links for the users to jump to other assets in a click, and the users can jump back and forth between two assets.
Borland Silk Central is also good in test automation. Although Micro Focus does provide a client tool for test automation, the users don't really need it to automate the tests. In our case, we are using Python to automate the tests and use a batch file to launch tests, and in Borland Silk Central we just call that batch file from server side. The test result is automatically fed back to Silk server.
Micro Focus also publishes the schema of the database behind Borland Silk Central, so it is very easy to extend its function beyond its original design. Moreover, because its schema is published, we can easily retrieve and process its data for business intelligence purpose.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
On the other hand, the plugins of Borland Silk Central with third-party tools are programmed poorly. In our case, the plugins for JIRA have a lot of limitations and were almost unusable in our test environment. (They did improve the plugins a little bit later, however.)
The tech support people are located in UK, so frequently it is difficult to get a hold of these guys due to different time zones. Also, most of them obviously don't have enough experience and sometimes drove us nuts in emergency situations.
The last thing I feel is that Micro Focus possibly doesn't provide enough manpower to maintain Borland Silk Central. There are tons of feature requests for Borland Silk Central pending there. Although they have frequent hot fixes every few months, they don't digest these requests quick enough.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The chat button is available to anyone who logs into PractiTest. In my experience, the support has always been very quick, very friendly, and very thorough. They make sure that your question is answered in a way that you understand it. They also provide documentation of best practices so you are never left hanging on what to do next.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
IBM Collaborate Suite - it is way too complicated and the learning curve is too high.
HP Quality Center - it is OK but a little bit expensive.
TestLink, Squash TM and other open source tools: The capabilities of open source tools just can't compare to commercial tools. Although we can modify the source code to improve the tool, we are just test engineers, not developers.
Zephyr: Our testers simply didn't like its UI - too weird.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I've used many different Test Case Repository tools, and while each of them has its perks, I like the capabilities of PractiTest best. When creating a test in qTest for example, you can only input information into the fields provided, and you have everything set up in a folder tree structure. With PractiTest, we are able to create custom fields and filter our tests based on those fields to provide more accurate information in a readily available format while quickly searching for the filter instead of through a folder tree. TestRail did not appear to meet our needs as a company. It just didn't have the potential that we found with PractiTest. Zephyr for example worked seamlessly with Jira, which is really nice since that is what we use for the most part. However since we cater to many different clients, we needed an external Test Case repository so we could use something that wasn't tied to 1 Jira instance.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Borland Silk Central provides a centralized test platform for multiple test departments in the company, so now all of the departments know what each of them is doing. In turn, all departments can coordinate with each other to reduce the duplicated test items and increase the overall test efficiency.
Also, Borland Silk Central enables the users to publish the test procedure (steps) of each test case so all the users can know how each test case is performed. It is not like what we had before, the test procedures resided in difference place from Excel to Google drive or some other weird locations.
Also, because all departments are using Borland Silk Central, all testers of the departments have better communication regarding testing methods. In the past, the department used different test management tools and it was hard for the testers to understand each other's testing methods.
Finally, because all departments share BorlandSilk Central, they also share the same set of reports published to Atlassian Confluence, so now they use the same set of reports to evaluate the test progress.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
