OpenText Silk Central vs. Tuskr

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.

Incentivized

Its interface, features and dashboard which help a lot to streamline the workflow. And its really very ease to use. My team and I just use this software and adapt in a week. I surely recommend to any organisation, in regards of pricing, features and interface. And their customer support.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Its easy to import test cases in Tuskr by using the csv import feature
• Test runs are easy to create and can include test cases from multiple suits.
• Reports of test runs make it easier to track all the cases that were covered at a particular instance before giving a release signoff.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• When you click into a specific test, the status automatically clears. it would be nice for this to be preserved when clicking in instead of clearing
• It would be nice to be able to add comments specific to certain steps in each test, instead of just one big comment box
• Since we use Tuskr for QA, we structure it as a table with instructions and expected results. because these are side by side, sometimes it is hard to go in a step-by-step order when there are multiple QA steps to take to complete the test.

Incentivized

Tuskr suits our organization needs

Incentivized

The test case management and automating repetitive tasks, Tuskr saves significant time for my QA teams. The whole process was very easy for my team to adapt and get comfortable with other software. We were continuously able to improve our business and this had a significant positive impact on customer satisfaction and retention.

Incentivized

We had evaluated, for example:

• 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.

Incentivized

I have not worked with related testing suite before but Tuskr has been the favorite platform for running test suites. It has generated positive leads from the company data by offering the necessary testing support. It is easy to integrate with other applications to suit business demands. The system generate results from various testing suites that can shared with our clients.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Everyone in the team can go and read how to perform a specific test and note down the result of it which can be viewed by anyone
• We can filter based on results understanding what test cases are failing from previous runs
• Helps save a lot of time, effort and minimises future issues

Incentivized