Hi, I’m Glen Holmes and I’ve recently joined Qase as VP Product. Prior to Qase, I held senior positions at a variety of companies such as AWS and Workday, amongst others. I’ve always been an advocate for releasing software that not only solves customers’ problems, but also has the requisite quality standards to ensure that it doesn’t create new problems for my customers. That’s why I’m excited to join Qase, where we have an unrelenting focus on helping our customers ship quality products, quicker.
2023 was an exciting year for Qase. On the back of impressive growth, we secured our Series A funding. This allowed us to invest heavily in the Qase team and ensure that the Qase product adheres to our principle of high quality. Whilst we delivered a number of exciting features in 2023 (more on these in a moment), our main focus was to invest in our product infrastructure.
Investing in the infrastructure of our product rather than constantly adding new features is like reinforcing the foundation of a house instead of adding new rooms. Imagine Qase as a house — the features are the rooms, and the infrastructure is the foundation, walls, and roof. If we keep adding new rooms without strengthening the foundation, the house might become unstable and eventually collapse under the weight of its own complexity. On the other hand, investing in the infrastructure ensures that the house is built on a solid and reliable foundation, making it capable of supporting any new additions and ensuring long-term stability and durability. It may not be as immediately gratifying as adding new rooms, but it's a strategic investment that pays off in the long run, providing a robust structure for future expansion and preventing potential issues down the line.
At Qase, we take a quality-first approach; we don’t ignore the hard work that ultimately, if neglected, means our users end up with bad quality and buggy features. However, we know that you, our users, want and need continuous improvement and that’s why we delivered various features in 2023.
2023 Qase product updates
Here’s an overview of what we delivered in 2023:
Usability improvements including:
- Making it easier to create Test Runs
- Iconography to easily distinguish between automated and manual tests
- Improved filtering when searching for test cases
- Improved Text Editor
Qase Query Language (QQL) improvements including:
- Using QQL in your test runs
- QQL Syntax Highlighter and auto-suggest
Additional improvements such as:
- CI/CD Integration - Support for Gitlab and Jenkins
- Autotest Code Generation using ChatGPT
- Status mappings in our Jira Integration
Qase 2024 product plans
In 2024, we’re investing heavily in new features to solve more of your testing requirements. I’m glad to announce a number of important features we are releasing over the coming months, including, but not limited to:
Notifications
At Qase, we truly understand what proper Quality Assurance looks like. We diligently test our software for all types of scenarios, so we know that testing is not an isolated activity, but rather a collaborative, team-driven effort.
That’s why we’re developing Qase notifications, where team members are notified, by whatever medium they prefer — such as email, in-app notifications or integration with third-party apps like Slack — whenever specific relevant events occur. For example, if a team member is assigned a test case, or is part of a test-review, they will be immediately notified, improving team collaboration by ensuring that they understand where to focus.
Requirements Traceability
Too often, there is a disconnect between the requirements that need to be tested and the tests themselves. We hear from customers that QA teams are scrambling to ensure that they have all of the tests in place to cover all of the requirements. Product teams are worried as they have little visibility into the testing process. Questions often arise — are all of the requirements being tested, do particular requirements require more testing than others, or do specific requirements cause more bugs than others? And what happens when requirements change, as they inevitably do? Are the tests updated to reflect these changes? How can we tell?
These are all things that keep Product teams awake at night. But soon, you’ll be able to sleep comfortably knowing that Qase will be able to answer these questions. In Q1 2024, we will launch our Requirements Traceability feature, rolling it out along with our Jira integration and following up with releases for various other integrations.
Qase Analytics
Qase already comes with a rich set of out-of-the-box data widgets and visualizations but, in 2024, we will deliver a rich tapestry of analytics to suit all of our user personas.
In order to better manage their teams, many of our customers need team performance metrics such as who opened/closed the most bugs, which team member has the most tests assigned to them, and who has executed the most tests. Metrics make it easier for QA managers to balance individual team members’ bandwidth as well as estimate the entire team’s workload.
QA managers also need to answer questions such as which test cases take the longest to execute, which tests fail the most, how much test coverage there is, what percentage of tests are automated versus manual, etc. They also want to be able to answer these questions via multiple different dimensions such as teams, time, releases etc. In 2024, Qase will deliver our advanced analytics beta that will make it easy for users to answer these and many other questions regarding their testing performance.
Continuous improvement driven by user feedback
On top of these features, we will consistently be improving all areas of Qase. We pride ourselves on listening to our users and taking feedback seriously. Our Canny board, where users can leave feature requests and provide feedback on our product, is a large source of our requirements. We are passionate about solving our users' problems and strongly urge our users to get in touch with us with any requests.
That’s it from me, for now! I’ll be posting regular product updates and keeping you all informed about the exciting features we will be introducing in the future.
Thanks for reading,
Glen
