When you are starting out on a QA project, with a small team, using spreadsheets to manage your testing is often sufficient.

However, once the project becomes more complex: multiple platform releases, versions or a growing team of testers, managing those spreadsheets becomes another task in itself.

If any of the below mentioned signs sound familiar it’s time to consider shifting your test management to a designated testing tool.

1. It takes you 5 minutes just to figure out what excel you need to run for today’s test.
2. You waste 2 hours a week to get all the information from multiple excel sheets to create a single dashboard for your management to edit.
3. Someone just asked you if you tested a specific platform on a given version of your product, and you can only answer “I think we did.”
4. A tester in your team mistakenly wasted 6 hours running the wrong tests in the wrong environment because they did not understand what their task was.
5. The only way to understand the status of your testing project is by walking desk by desk and asking your team “How is it going so far?”
6. You realize a large portion of the testing of your team is not being documented or accounted for because they see writing-down tests as a “nice to have” task.
7. By one in the afternoon your team still hasn’t started testing the “urgent release that needs to go out today” because they are waiting for you to send them the correct excel sheets for their testing tasks.
8. You wanted to find a specific feature and you realize there are 5 different excel sheets covering it, written independently by different people in your team – and it still is not 100% correct!
9. A tester just came to tell you they tested a feature for the whole day yesterday, but today they cannot find the file where they reported the test results and all the issues.
10. It takes you twice as long to integrate the results of your test automation on your excel sheet than it takes to run the whole set of automated tests.