Well, it doesn’t look like blogger is fixing my admin access any time soon, so on with the blogging.
I’m sick of evaluating open-source QA software, or at least the QA software that is full of bugs! However, I really needed to find some free test management software so my quest continued.

First of all, I tried Testopia, the test management software from the Mozilla foundation/corporation which also requires Bugzilla to run at all. I actually like Bugzilla, though I wish they’d scalp more features from other programs at some point.

I can’t give Testopia too much gruff, the version I downloaded was clearly marked as a beta. However, I have to find something to use right now, and right now Testopia is nearly impossible to get running without numerous errors on my Linux server. Invariably I’d fix one problem, and then have another big red bugzilla guru meditation error. Possibly if I were more experienced with perl and had unlimited time to work on this problem I could fix it and have a working test management tool.

I don’t have unlimited time, and I’m not Larry Wall (though naturally I’m upset with Larry Wall just like anyone else who has used perl for any amount of time).

Next I got lucky when I tried QA Traq, the website for which almost looks like a domain squatter. I think it might be a little overly complex for my use which is why I ignored it before for Test Case Web and others. After the endless problems with TCW, I looked back over every application on the open source testing site for test management, QA Traq seemed to be the most promising one.

Yes, after playing around with it for some time (demo l:demo/p:demo) I found out that I was right, it is much more complex than what I need right now, however it does work. So I installed it on my Linux server and tried it out. For the first time, one of these pieces of open-source software worked without incident! It even includes the excellent FCKEditor for editing all input forms longer than a line, with the option of editing the raw html. This was near-perfect, the templates work, I can edit the html and include images, and throughout my testing of the software so far, I haven’t encountered any errors. So, I’ll play with this one some more tomorrow and throughout the coming weeks. If it continues to work fine, I’ll let you all know.

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