The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.
$5,000
per year
Tricentis qTest
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
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.
It has helped save us so much time, as it was designed to automate mundane and repetitive tasks that we were using other tools to perform and that required so much manual intervention. It does not work very well within Windows environments, understandably, but I would love to see more integration. I want it to be sexy and attractive to more than just geeky sysadmins.
The qTest is well-suited for organizations transitioning to Agile or DevOps frameworks. It Streamlines test management with real-time collaboration and integrates with popular CI/CD tools. It excels in complex, large-scale projects needing centralized test cases management, traceability, and detailed reporting. However, organizations on a tight budget might find it cost prohibitive compared to simpler, low-cost alternatives.
Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.
Highly customizable: we were able to organize our test cases in unique ways that made our work easier.
Connectivity with Jira: being able to pull requirements information in from Jira was a big point for us.
Standalone tool: Being a standalone tool on a dedicated server, we were able to have access to our tests regardless of whether our Jira server was down.
YAML is hard for many to adopt. Moving to a system that is not as white space sensitive would likely increase uptake.
AAP and EDA should be more closely aligned. There are differences that can trip users of the integration up. An example would be the way that variables are used.
Event-driven Ansible output is not as informative as AAP.
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.
Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.
Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
I haven't thought of any right now other than just doing our own home-brewed shell scripts. Command line scripts. And how does this compare? It's light years ahead, especially with the ability to share credentials without giving the person the actual credentials. You can delegate that within, I guess what used to be called Ansible Tower, which is now the Ansible Automation platform. It lets you share, I can give you the keys without you being able to see the keys. It's great
Extensive integration options with various third-party tools, enabling seamless integration into existing workflows. Allows for flexibility and customization of workflows, fields, and permissions to adapt to unique testing requirements. Supports robust requirements traceability, ensuring comprehensive test coverage. Lastly management decisions too
Better organization and centralization of test cases has led to more cohesive team collaboration
Speed to delivery, deployments to production, are mostly maintained
Performance issues have led to testing delays requiring the team to switch to other methods which contributed to QA bottleneck issues and sometimes even missed sprint commitments
