Rules Are Certainly Not For Fools When It Comes to Enterprise Test & Defect Management Platforms (ETM)
As my children grew up, I always liked to read books and watch the movies and TV shows they enjoyed so I could have conversations with them and share in some of their entertainment time. My youngest son, now a college freshman, and I used to love watching a cartoon called “The Regular Show.” It was a bit zany, had hysterically funny plots, and always made us laugh out loud. There was one episode where the two main characters refused to follow the “House Rules” of where they were boarding and eventually came up with the mantra “Rules are for Fools.” If you are curious about this cartoon series, feel free to read more at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_Show
Over the years, I have heard many war stories from customers about ETM platforms. Platforms with such poor usability that testers only pretended to run their assigned tests and arbitrarily marked them as “passed” because they did not have the patience to follow an archaic and time-consuming process. There were teams that inaccurately re-classified defects or change requests to lower their workload and improve measured KPIs. I heard of ETM managers struggling to maintain common data standards and naming conventions within Business Requirements, Tests, and Defects.
Wouldn’t it be great if your ETM could manage all these issues for you automatically and alert key stakeholders in real-time when they needed to review or act on something? Wouldn’t it be great if these rules were so easy to build that IT resources were not required to develop or maintain anything? These types of automated rules are not for fools. They are purpose-built to deliver data quality, consistency, and efficiencies across mission-critical ETM activities.
Imagine the following scenarios:
- A business requirement is logged, but its categorizations do not follow established norms.
- A defect is logged as complex and business-critical, assigned to a developer, and given an unrealistic due date.
- A new test step, added by a Test Manager, does not include key data points needed by the tester.
- An authorized user accidentally deletes an in-process business requirement.
These scenarios are just a few examples of real-world business scenarios that can best be supported by event-driven functionality to confirm data quality and\or alert necessary stakeholders. In some cases, this automation could programmatically modify data to conform to the established standards that were not being followed. Indeed, any API-based application can track these events and act upon them. But in most cases, the cost of building, enhancing, and maintaining code-based rules can be prohibitive.
The Panaya Change Intelligence platform provides an Automated Rules Engine that allows administrators to build effective, quick, event-driven rules that can alleviate many ETM pain points. Rules can be fired when records are created, edited, or deleted and can be matched with complex criteria. Rules can add, edit, and delete data based on these criteria and send rich-text email alerts to key stakeholders, including embedded data points.
When the data in your ETM is cleaner, false alarms are being mitigated, and nothing is falling through the cracks, your projects are completed faster, and innovation is deployed rapidly, without any nasty surprises. Nobody would ever think that the underlying rules responsible for maintaining this state of efficiency and quality were for fools.