Software Quality Assurance Forums: Testuff - test management software as a service

Below is the response I sent Joe over email. It's rather long, but I thought some of you might be interested in reading it, especially since he also published his questions in the forum:

Thanks for your feedback, I must say you asked some interesting questions

Please allow me to answer.

1. It is unusual indeed that we provide a client installation. We do so because we believe that today it's very hard, close to impossible, for web UIs to provide the silky smooth experience that desktop clients can provide. We've tested various technologies and they simply didn't have that smooth look and feel that the Testuff client has. Since we'd like to provide the best user experience to our customers, that's what we decided to go for. I've seen and tried out some web based test managements, and the ones I've seen just suck. But don't take my word for it. Try some yourself, then go back to Testuff, and ask yourself which one provies better interaction.

If there is some other reason why you'd like to have a Testuff web GUI, for instance if you'd like to use Testuff on several OSs, please let me know so that we could discuss a specific solution for your needs.

2. Icons are a matter of taste of course. Nonetheless, another idea from our philosophy is to make testing fun. If people had as fun testing as they do, say, playing Guitar Hero III, they would do more testing, more in depth, and enjoy it a whole lot more. I also rejected our cutesy icons the first time I saw them, but I have grown to love them. Let everyone else use borring and gray corporate icons, we'd like something with color and life that people could enjoy.

3. Could you be more specific about the tooltips? Tell me which parts confused you, and we could easily add tooltips for them.

4. About the huge fonts, that kind of goes with item 2.

5. Using blank lines is an odd way to separate steps. But when you're writing a test, or even many tests in a row, it makes the test writing very fluid rather than needing to use the mouse to click some icon to add steps or to have no separation between steps at all. After a few minutes of getting used to it, it works great. Don't you agree?

6. Same thing with the => for expected results. As you're writing a test, instead of stopping typing on the keyboard to use the mouse and click some icon to put in an expected result, you can write tests really fast with =>. In fact, we would like to provide wiki syntax for the test editor so that you could change font styles, add links, pics, and more. Some people really don't like wiki syntax and it does take some getting used to. However, after that process happens, and it's a rather short process, you can format text in a breeze without interrupting the flow of your writing.

Let me know if you have any other questions or comments. Thanks again for the ones you wrote!

Best Regards,

Ido
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www.testuff.com