TestLink after one year...

We used Word documents and Excel worksheets as our documentation tool for scripted testing, and at one point I was given the task to evaluate and choose a new tool.

TestLink is a browser based tool to document Test scripts (planning) and execution results. It was chosen because it has some interesting features:
-there is an area for the tests design and another for the tests execution. Same test Plan (design) may be instantiated several times, for example for different platforms. It also supports Builds. Every result is easily stored and consulted.
-Main metrics are built-in. For example we may see at any point how many tests have passed, failed, blocked, not run
-Roles are supported: a tester has different privileges than a team leader, an administrator or a test designer
-Through Access rights, test executions are easily assigned to testers. Each tester only sees what matters.
-It is possible to import test cases from excel worksheet (though we had to make a macro to convert word to excel…)
-It is possible to connect to a bug tracking system

Note that this is not a tool for automation, or for calling automated scripts. It is a tool to store test documentation.

Now what is not so good:
-it does not link smoothly with exploratory testing; so one should think what is the real value of scripted testing for the System Under Test; in our case we do have to guarantee some basic features recurrently, so we do need some detailed test execution record. If the tests are not to be re-utilized, the usefulness of TestLink should be questioned.