Hello testers, recently we had a chat with Gjore Zaharchev, a QA manager at Seavus and Testing Coach at SEDC Software Testing Academy in Skopje. Here is their story and how they use Kiwi TCMS!
Seavus Educational and Development Center is a private company as part of the Seavus Group and a specialized training center for education of staff in the fields of programming, design, computer networks and software testing. Around 90 students pass through their software testing academy every year with 60 students enrolled thus far. The training program is 6 months and covers many basic IT skills, manual testing, ISTQB fundamentals and automation testing. SEDC is located in Skopje, North Macedonia.
Hands-On Lab Activities
The study program includes multiple individual and team projects, intermediate exams and a final project. These are intended to exercise the most commonly used test design techniques and practice writing up the test scenarios. All scenarios are written directly in Kiwi TCMS. We've even seen test plans and test cases created during Christmas and the New Year holidays last year!
The software under test is usually the programs developed by students from our Academy for Programming, says Gjore. Later in the program we use real websites in order to show some bugs in the wild, he continues. On occasion students have found interesting problems with the websites of Booking.com and WizzAir. They've also managed to find a critical issue on one of our local systems. These are the trials and tribulations of teaching & testing in the wild.
Kiwi TCMS team still remembers one of Alex's training sessions where we used the website of an actual cinema. Unfortunately they went out of business and shutdown the victimized website right in the middle of the session. ;-)
Why did you decide to use Kiwi TCMS
When searching for a TCMS platform for the academy one of the decisive factors was cost. By being open source Kiwi TCMS has the side benefit of having zero initial usage cost which was very important for us. Regardless of that Kiwi TCMS is very easy to install & setup using Docker, very easy to on-board new users and generally well received by everyone.
This is a huge benefit for students because they can experiment with Kiwi TCMS and immediately see how some items work when executing testing workflows. For example they can visualize how a regression test run looks like compared to a test run for a critical security fix; or they can simulate working in groups to cover execution of a larger test plan.
What do your students say
Overall they like the workflow and can easily navigate within the user interface. They feel very positive because there is no complexity in the system and it is very intuitive. One of the areas which often receives questions is the ability to record test automation results!
Answer: Kiwi TCMS has the ability to fetch names and test results directly, via plugins for several test automation frameworks while others are on our backlog - TestNG, Jenkins, C#/NUnit! Anyone interested is welcome to Subscribe to each GitHub issue and follow the progress. Some issues are also part of our open source bounty program so we urge students to take a look and contribute!
Anything you want to ask our team
At SEDC we'd like to know what are your plans for Kiwi TCMS in the future?
Answer: Our plans, like our software, are transparent, check-out posts tagged roadmap! For 2020 this is refactoring of the last remaining legacy bits, continue work on our Telemetry feature and more work towards integration with various bug trackers and test automation frameworks. An extension to that is tighter integration with the GitHub platform!
Help us do more
If you like what we're doing and how Kiwi TCMS supports various communities please help us!
- Join our newsletter - project news only, GDPR compliant
- Donate via Open Collective as low as 1 EUR;
- Nominate Kiwi TCMS as GitHub Stars;
- Become a customer and we'll share our profits with the community
Thanks for reading and happy testing!