Putting Together An Open Source QA Management System (Part 4) - Forums

In the last article we covered the knowledge management piece of our open source QA management system - the Wiki. To complement the Wiki and provide a place for conversation threads and the ability for testers to create their own topics for discussions, we chose to add forums to our QA management system. With forums, managers, test leads and testers can create topical threads to discuss issues, concerns and explore ideas. We chose a forum system (Agora Forums) that would integrate well and had all the things you'd expect in a forums package: public and private posting, moderators, WYSIWYG editor, stats, user participation reports, polls, search, etc.

At RTL we use our forums to create discussions on everything from current projects to important client information to information specific to our different labs.  Our forums are organized by major topic, such as Test Engineering or Inside RTL, and testers customize their online persona with their own icons and graphics.  Addtionally, we use the forums to link to Wiki articles.  Sometimes discussions that ensue are easily answered by pointing others to articles that reside in our Wiki.

Tuesday, we'll post the final article of this series and talk about the "information center" that integrates all the components into a single landing page and offers a dashboard with summary information from each of the components.