Recently I was tasked with evaluating/working on a requirements and test
management product for my company that was selected by one of my
coworkers. The product has the clumsy name of Silk Central Test
Management, from Segue <http://www.segue.com> .

We don't do XP or Agile development here but some people think we do
(magic thinking), so we asked the vendor for an XP referral and another
person in the company interviewed the referral.

Here's the entire report from that interview:
"They do agile development but only update their automated tests once a
year."
So I'm left thinking that at best, the referral does a lot of manual
testing and uses the product to manage the results and at worst we have
my company that thinks it does Agile development talking to another
company that thinks the same thing, when neither actually does and the
referral is valueless.

From the work I've done with it, I feel that the product is a bad fit
for us and for Agile development. It's heavily oriented towards Java,
which is about the only language we're not using, and I'd kinda like to
keep it that way. The product is heavily oriented to manual and
automated testing of GUIs and it's a major effort to get it to test the
business logic of our libraries. The product's definition of user roles
is also very constraining. I've had to jump between two accounts and two
systems to be able to get anything done. And their API documentation
and licensing practices seem to be part of a secret conspiracy to make
Open Source look good. (With OSS, if the documentation is out of date
you can always look at the code; not so with this kind of commercial
product.)

So has anyone had a good experience with a commercial test management
system and Agile development?

If not, why not?

Thanks!

Greg C




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