Hosted TestRail trial now available

By Dennis Gurock | Published: March 10, 2010

We just published a new feature to our website: a hosted trial version of TestRail. Instead of downloading the TestRail trial and installing it on your own server, you can now also request a hosted trial and we will automatically create a TestRail instance for you on our servers.

While TestRail is quite easy to install, it’s not always easy for customers to get the necessary resources for an installation in their organizations, so we want to help with this.

If you planned to take a look at TestRail but didn’t have the time or the resources to install it yet, make sure to request a hosted trial from our website.

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Announcing TestRail 1.1

By Dennis Gurock | Published: March 10, 2010

We are happy to announce the release of TestRail 1.1, a new version of our web-based test management software. The new version comes with a complete permission and role system, introduces the new Blocked test status and comes with various other improvements, changes and bug fixes.

Roles and Permissions

TestRails new permission and role system allows you to restrict user permissions, hide projects from users and use fine-grained access control to customize TestRail according to your needs. TestRail’s new version comes with pre-configured standard roles such as Guest, Tester or Lead that you can assign to users. You can also customize the pre-configured roles or add completely new roles to TestRail.


Configuring the permissions of a role

Roles and user access can additionally be overridden on a per-project basis. This is especially useful if you want to assign individual permissions to users per project. But you can also use this functionality to hide projects from users, make entire projects read-only or to invite customers to access their projects in TestRail. The combination of TestRail’s user roles, project access settings and user-specific project access makes TestRail’s roles and permissions extremely flexible.


Changing a project’s access settings

Blocked Status

TestRail 1.1 introduces a new test status, namely Blocked. The Blocked status makes it easier for testers to highlight tests that currently cannot be validated. For example, if a test cannot be completed because the test data is not yet ready or because the tested feature is not included in the tested software build, the Blocked status can be used to highlight this. Once a blocked test is ready to be tested, it is recommended to change the status back to Retest (or directly enter a test result).

Customize overview pages

To make it easier to work with a lot of data (such as milestones, test runs or suites), the new version allows you to select one of three different views for TestRail’s overview pages. The new views display the data in a more compact way:

Getting the new version

Existing customers can download the new version from our customer portal. New users can download TestRail or request a hosted trial of TestRail from our website. To view the complete list of changes for TestRail 1.1, please see our announcement forum. Please refer to TestRail’s Admin Manual on how to upgrade an existing installation.

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Integrating TestRail with bug trackers

By Dennis Gurock | Published: February 22, 2010

While it’s our goal to make TestRail the best test management tool out there, it’s not a substitute for a good bug tracker. That’s why we recommend using TestRail together with one of the many bug tracking tools available. To make it easier to work with your bug tracker, TestRail contains a feature to link test cases against bugs managed in a third-party application.

Over the past few days I have been gathering all the necessary details (such as URL formats) to link TestRail to some of the most popular bug trackers. Please see the list below on how to integrate TestRail with your existing tools:

If your favorite bug tracker is not listed, you can still integrate it into TestRail pretty easily (you will just need to know the view and add URLs of your tool). We are also working on publishing more integration guides, so please let us know which bug tracker you use.

Update: We have added two additional bug tracker and project management tools to our website, namely Gemini (from CounterSoft) and SourceGear Fortress:

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Gurock Software on Twitter

By Dennis Gurock | Published: February 22, 2010

While individual team members here at Gurock Software have been using Twitter for quite some time now (@dgurock, @tgurock), we decided to create a company-wide Twitter account for Gurock Software so that you can stay up-to-date on all SmartInspect and TestRail news, ask questions and get in touch with us on Twitter. So please feel free to follow @gurock on Twitter and let us know what we can do for you!

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TestRail Roadmap 2010 Q1-Q2

By Dennis Gurock | Published: February 9, 2010
test management software

Now that we released TestRail, it’s time to share some of our plans regarding future versions of our test management software. We normally do not share release dates or which features we will include in future versions of our products. However, we understand that some of our customers need to know the general roadmap of product enhancements, so we are going to share some of our near-term plans for TestRail in this posting.

When we discussed TestRail with beta testers and customers in the past 6 months, it became apparent that the same features where requested again and again and we are going to concentrate on implementing those features first. Please note that all plans laid out in this posting are subject to change and that the following list of planned near-term enhancements is not necessarily complete.

Permissions and Roles

TestRail currently comes without support for user permissions and roles, and we are going to change this quickly. Most teams we have talked to mentioned that user permissions and custom roles are important to use TestRail with larger teams, so we are going to add support for user permissions very soon. Our current plans are to allow administrators to configure custom roles and assign roles to users. Administrators can then optionally override users’ default roles for specific projects, allowing for maximum flexibility.

Blocked Status

TestRail currently supports the test statuses and results Untested, Passed, Failed and Retest. We are going to add support for an additional test status to TestRail in the near future, namely the Blocked status. The Blocked status will make it easier for testers to highlight tests that currently cannot be validated for different reasons.

Custom Fields

TestRail’s fields for test cases and test results already cover all important information usually needed for the software testing process, including version numbers, time estimates, priorities and so on. However, we understand that each team and project might require capturing additional information and entering such information in our free-text fields might not be the best way to do this. To allow teams to enter additional details in a structured manner, we are going to allow administrators to add and configure custom fields within TestRail. Custom fields will be restricted to test cases and test results for now and we are going to support various field types such as lists, checkboxes and text fields.

Improved Documentation

While most of TestRail’s user interface is self-explanatory and the built-in documentation is already sufficient in most cases, we are going to improve the online help and add more topics. Especially the upcoming features of permissions and custom fields are going to require some additional amount of documentation and we are going to invest more time in this area.

Test Case History

It is currently not easy to track the changes of a test case or to understand who modified a case. We plan to improve this by adding a history to test cases. Similar to how we track all changes, comments and results for tests, we are going to record all modifications of a test case and make this information easily available on a new tab. Having multiple versions of test cases also makes it easier to understand a feature that is already part of TestRail but most users don’t know about: when you complete a test run, all associated test cases are automatically copied internally to freeze them. This makes sure that future changes of test cases are not copied over to old test runs. Having multiple versions of test cases will make it easier to understand and communicate this feature.

Unicode Support

Last but not least, we are going to improve our support for more character encodings and languages to TestRail. As part of a technology and platform refresh for TestRail, we are going to support Unicode and UTF-8 encodings in TestRail to make it easier to work with non-Western languages.

As always, we are interested in your feedback about our near-term TestRail roadmap, so please feel free to email us, discuss this roadmap in our forum or leave a comment. Thanks!

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TestRail reviewed by TestLab²

By Dennis Gurock | Published: February 8, 2010

Alex of TestLab² just published their review of our test management software TestRail. As TestLab² is a provider of software testing services, we were especially curious to find out how TestRail performed in an environment with regularly changing clients, requirements and test projects:

The system proved to be almost perfect for us, both for its’ features and everyday usability. We’re involved in outsourced testing and run lots of small projects, and because of that the vendors’ license policy really fits us: the limit is applied to active system users only, so we deactivate client accounts at the end of the project.

Not bad for our initial release, thanks Alex! You can read the full review on TestLab’s website or you can check out the original review in Russian on habrahabr.ru (a popular Russian IT site, I was told).

TestRail review by TestLab² »

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Announcing TestRail 1.0

By Dennis Gurock | Published: January 25, 2010

We are really excited to announce the release of our new test case management tool TestRail. After working on TestRail for more than 18 months and running an extensive beta program, it’s great to finally release the product and get it out the door.

We also want to thank all testers who participated in TestRail’s beta test. Without your feature suggestions, ideas and bug reports, the 1.0 certainly wouldn’t be what it is today. We’ve got more than 350 beta signups during the beta and are really grateful for all the feedback and emails we’ve received. Thank you! If you participated in the beta test, please check your email inbox for a small TestRail launch present.

When we released the first beta versions of TestRail last August, we didn’t plan for such a long beta phase. We intended to release a few beta versions and release it in November 2009 at the latest. Based on the feedback we received during the beta, however, it became apparent that TestRail would benefit from a few critical enhancement that we wanted to add before the release (such as test plans and configurations, nested sections including drag&drop, print support and importing/exporting).

The feedback during the beta made us confident that a modern and fresh approach to test management is needed and it was great to see that it was so well received by beta testers. There are still a lot of things that didn’t make it into the 1.0 that we want to see in the future of course, but I believe we’ve created a strong foundation for future enhancements and improvements.

We’ve updated TestRail’s website with new screenshots and a product tour as well as pricing details and licensing information. To celebrate the release of TestRail we are offering special introductory prices, so make sure to evaluate TestRail soon if you are interested in the tool. You can download a free and fully-functional trial copy of TestRail from our website.

As usual, the change log and update instructions for this release can be found in our forum. If you have any question about TestRail or this release, just let us know!

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New Shop and Customer Portal

By Dennis Gurock | Published: January 7, 2010

In preparation of the upcoming launch of our new product TestRail, we have just updated our online shop and customer portal. All existing customer accounts and SmartInspect licenses have been moved to our new system and you can use your existing login details to access your new account.

In case you have any problems accessing your customer account or if there are any issues with placing an order, please let us know.

Please note: Due to technical reasons we unfortunately won’t be able to accept US dollar transactions for up to two weeks. We are sorry for this inconvenience and are working on resolving this issue as quickly as possible. Please either place your order in Euros (your credit card company will automatically convert this to your local currency) or email us to request an US dollar invoice and pay by check/wire transfer.

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Happy Holidays and New Year!

By Dennis Gurock | Published: December 24, 2009

We wish all customers, friends and partners happy holidays and a successful new year 2010! We had a great year here at Gurock Software and reached some important milestones such as completing a critical customer project, launching our new website, improving SmartInspect, relaunching DelphiFeeds.com and releasing the first TestRail beta.

Next year will definitely be an interesting (and busy!) one for us and we will start with releasing TestRail in January, moving to a new office (again) and relaunching our customer portal and online shop.

We are looking forward to working with you again next year!

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TestRail Beta 1.0.4 released

By Dennis Gurock | Published: December 17, 2009

We’ve just released beta 1.0.4 of our upcoming test case management tool TestRail. This new version introduces support for improved printing, importing/exporting test cases, and also adds a feature to copy and move cases between suites and projects. This beta version will probably be the last beta drop before we release TestRail 1.0 in early-mid January.

Print support

As mentioned previously on this blog, we wanted to provide a better way to print test suites, test runs and entire test plans to make it easier to generate reports for customers and management. TestRail 1.0.4 now allows you to easily print those reports.


Print support in TestRail

Importing/exporting test cases

The latest TestRail beta also introduces support for importing and exporting test cases. If you are just getting started with TestRail, you might already have existing test cases stored in other documents (such as Excel) or test management tools. Chances are that you want to import those test cases into TestRail and this is now possible with TestRail’s new import XML file format (please take a look at TestRail’s built-in online help to learn more about the exact file format).

You can now also export test cases and results to XML, CSV or Excel. You can use this, for example, to build additional custom reports with Excel or other tools.

Copy/move test cases

Various beta testers asked for a feature to copy or move test cases between suites and projects, so we have just added this capability to the latest beta release. You can either copy entire sections or just specific cases from another suite to the one you are currently working on:


Copy/move test cases in TestRail

We also improved and fixed a bunch of other things in this release and you can view the full change log of the new version in our forum. Let us know if you have any questions about this release or if you notice anything not working correctly.

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