Putting Together An Open Source QA Management System (Part 5) - Information Center

Last week we posted the first 4 parts to this series, which covered Defect Tracking, Test Case Management, Wiki and Forums. In this, the last article, we are going to look at the information center that ties all of the other components together.  In order to provide a "Home" page and tie each of the different open source applications together, we needed a malleable content management system that would provide project managers a way to customize the look-and-feel of their QA management system, as well as offer a way to create a dashboard that could pull information from each of the other applications. Joomla proved to be the answer.

With Joomla, we got a content management system with the capability of creating web pages, customized UI, and online applications. And since it's open source, it fit right in with the rest of the applications selected. Even though our initial evaluation convinced us to go with Joomla, the more we used it and discovered more about the underlying architecture, the more it proved to exceed our expectations. We anticipated that Joomla would serve as a flexible web site tool and had expected that links to the other applications would probably spawn new pages, but we found out that Joomla, and it's extensions, allowed us to keep the UI together and maintain a single page view for most of our needs. Moreover, as we shared this QA management system with others, we were continually asked about having a dashboard feature that would pull data from Bugzilla, Testopia, MediaWiki and Forums. As it turns out, the "article" capability of Joomla, along with some PHP and MySQL calls, we could provide some nice dashboard "widgets".


The dashboard "widgets" we created for defect tracking includes a snapshot of Assigned Defects and a Bug Summary from Bugzilla.  


















For test case management, a widget was created that showed a summary of the current state of test cases development. This information was directly extracted from Testopia.

And to provide a convenient way for testers to monitor forum posts, we created a widget that extracted out the title of the latest articles posted to the forums. 

Likewise, we found a way to monitor what articles have been written and placed on the Wiki.  This particularly useful given the non-hierarchical nature of the wiki - daily notifications with this widget keeps everyone informed about the work going on in the wiki.




In addition to the dashboard widgets, we found that we could create Joomla articles that provided other information that testers should see.  This included an area for daily instructions, Top 5 defects, Top 5 contributors, and a list of the most recent defects.

On top of the ability to create dashboard widgets and articles, Joomla provided a very convenient way to link in all the other open source applications. It allowed us to provide navigation links via a left-hand navigation panel, as well as tabs along the top, complete with a "bread crumbs" mechanism for navigating back to the home page. All-in-all, Joomla proved to be a very powerful application that neatly integrated all the other components. A snapshot of the home page is provided below and at this link.

We will be demoing this system, called My QA Management Toolkit, or myQMT, at our booth at STARWEST 2009 in Anaheim. And we expect to offer myQMT, via Amazon's Web Services, by the end of October.