What is a Test Reporting Tool? Top 5 Test Reporting Tools for Better Productivity

Software solutions are crucial for rapidly evolving technologies worldwide. You and your development team are committed to offering the best products and services to your customers, and QA testing helps you ensure your applications show optimal results.

However, your Agile development cycle can slow down significantly without proper test automation, and you can quickly get overwhelmed by the amount of testing data.

You need robust test reporting to detect problems in your development cycle early by testing your applications and viewing your test data in an organized format.

Read our article to learn more about test reporting tools, how to choose the perfect one for you, and the 5 best reporting tools in the market today.

What is a Test Reporting Tool?

Test reporting refers to the documentation of the various processes related to product testing, such as performance, goals, and test results. A test report helps dev teams understand the successful elements of their product and the defects they need to fix early on in the cycle.

Test reports give stakeholders a clear idea of the quality of the product or service that will be released. They can make informed decisions with detailed analytics and choose to delay the release of a product if it has too many defects or does not work as intended.

A test reporting tool summarizes the critical aspects of the testing process, from details of the test activities performed and their results to noting the defects discovered during the test cycle to gauge the quality of the product accurately.

How to Choose the Perfect Test Reporting Tool

While it may seem like any test reporting tool would suit your business needs adequately, there are a few considerations you would need to make before you choose one. Not every test reporting tool is created equal.

Here are the standard criteria business users need to make before they select test reporting tools:

1. UI design

User-friendly UIs and interfaces are essential factors in test tools. The UI must be clean and easy to use to get your teams’ required analytics as quickly as possible.

2. Usability

Since you, your dev team, and stakeholders will use your test tool; you need to ensure the tool itself is simple to use. Additionally, the tool needs to meet your specific business requirements.

Users of any technical level need to navigate the features without any hassle. If there is some requirement for training, the reporting tool must provide learning material and practical tutorials alongside technical support from the company itself.

3. Functionality

Similar to business requirements, test tools need to help your team members produce meaningful insights and analysis so that you can make informed decisions throughout the development lifecycle.

4. Pricing

Automated test reporting is essential for small and big businesses. Your test reporting platform depends on your company's budget and scale, the features on offer, and the transparency of the pricing scheme.

Challenges in Test Reporting

Test reporting is often overlooked by developers and stakeholders, which often hurts the overall quality of the product. Here are a few challenges faced during the test reporting process and how test reporting platforms combat them:

1. Short Deadlines to Work on

Product testing is one of the last few processes of the development lifecycle. Since the process is done close to the release date, the accurate testing of the product, reporting their results, and fixing possible defects must be quick.

The tight deadlines can often lead to incomplete fixes or cause delays in the release. It automates collecting automatic and manual test result data and provides insightful analytics to view your workflow performances at a glance.

2. Noisy Data

The test results acquired from different test results for various devices and platforms can quickly pile up. An overwhelming amount of data can make it hard to determine the specific cases that need your attention.

Furthermore, outdated data give you improper statistics to work with and are potentially harmful. A testing platform like Allure TestOps comes with features that automatically update your test documentation based on test run results so that you avoid junk data.

3. Simultaneous Dataflows

Larger organizations have a considerably more significant number of sources, teams, and frameworks to gather test result data. Without proper organization and storage, brands can lose track of pressing concerns.

The testing platform offers integrations to several testing frameworks and visualizes test result-related data and metrics in a graphical format.

Top 5 Reporting Tools

Now that you understand test tools and their importance in upholding the quality of a product, here are the top 5 testing platform in the market today:

1. Allure TestOps

Allure TestOps is an open-source software quality management platform that enables you to bring together manual and automatic testing. Allure TestOps aims to integrate into your pipelines by providing a single platform to run tests through native integrations.

The Live Documentation feature updates multiple test cases automatically based on the results of each test run for better tracking and analysis. For manual testing, our Test Cases as Code feature grants superior version control through a user-friendly UI.

You can reduce the manual work required to conduct failed test processing as Allure TestOps identifies defects and sorts them into predefined issue trackers.

We provide a central hub that links all manual and automatic tests so your team can access them readily and speed up your CI/CD pipeline. You can pause, resume, and rerun build jobs directly from Allure TestOps on build servers.

Additionally, you get accurate and real-time insights that provide unparalleled reporting through visualizations.

Allure TestOp Analytics allows you to create targets, review product status, and observe the testing processes closely. With Allure Query Language, you can create your KPIs alongside powerful, flexible dashboards.

Allure Report is a flexible multi-language test report tool that is community-driven and aims to create visually appealing and clear testing reports. We offer integrations for programming languages, frameworks, and test automation tools.

These include Java (JUnit, TestNG), Python (PyTest, Nose), JavaScript (Jasmine, Mocha), .NET, Cucumber, Go, and PHP, among others on any CI system such as Jenkins, Bamboo, GitLab, GitHub, CircleCI, TeamCity, etc.

Once a report is set up, you can drill down on particular test cases to get full transparency with insights into success rates, duration, flakiness, and other metrics on a tree-based representation.

Pricing

Allure TestOps has two different pricing plans based on your company’s technical requirements. Allure TestOps Server installs directly on your server, and you are charged for every named active user. You can try out our features risk-free with a 30-day free trial.

Allure TestOps Server Grants complete control over your instance and provides private services integration. We also offer no-code integration to your preferred CI/CD.|

Allure TestOps for 1 - 50 users = $30/month or $27/month (annual)

Next 51 - 100 users = $20/month or $18/month (annual)

Next 101 - 250 users = $10/month or $9/month (annual)

Others = $5/month or $4.5/month (annual)

Allure TestOps Cloud is the cloud platform for Allure TestOps Software Quality Management, where we will maintain and secure your TestOps instances if you lack IT expertise. You can try out our cloud features with a 14-day free trial before choosing one of our subscription plans.

Allure TestOps Cloud for 1 – 30 Users = $39/month or $35/month (annual)

Next 31 – 50 Users = $36/month or $32/month (annual)

Next 51 – 100 Users = $34/month or $30/month (annual)

Others = $30/month or $27/month (annual)

2. ReportPortal

ReportPortal is an open-source test reporting platform powered by AI technology that collects and centralizes data for results and reports in a single location. QA testers can examine historical data to analyze failure patterns and root causes for various issues.

ReportPortal’s built-in analytical features significantly improve the quality and time to conduct test reporting. You get a detailed view of test cases through screenshots, logs, and execution results.

When an issue or defect is identified, you can submit an issue ticket while the tool marks test results automatically. The tickets notify the developers to look into the problem and find fixes.

ReportPortal supports report types such as SQL, OLAP, SSRS, etc., and integrations for ScalaTest, Node.js, SpecFlow, etc.

3. Katalon TestOps

Katalon TestOps provides solutions for test planning, management, and orchestration to businesses of all sizes. Katalon TestOps uses shareable dashboards to give valuable insights to your team members on important metrics.

You can manage testing activities, frameworks, and operations across your workflows without compromising speed. The analytics-based features ensure you get quality test data with minimal DevOps expertise.

Katalan TestOps integrates with frameworks like TestNG, JUnit, Selenium, Jest, Bamboo, Jenkins, Jasmine, CircleCI, etc., and management platforms like Jira and Slack. Additionally, you get visualized representations for better failure analysis.

4. Extent Reports

Extent Reports is an open-source HTML-based test tool built to integrate with Selenium and utilizes systems like JUnit and TestNG to help create customized reports for your tests. Your reports can be visualized as pie charts and stepwise representations.

Extent Reports enhances presentation to users and stakeholders by enhancing your data with logs, screenshots, labels, etc., to improve presentability and documentation. Extent Report’s association with Klov enables better launch tracking for projects.

5. JUnit + Jenkins

The JUnit plugin for Jenkins enables users to generate XML test reports with graphical visualizations during development. With JUnit + Jenkins, you can utilize a web interface to view test reports, verify test outcomes, count failures, and more.

With the JUnit plugin, Jenkins can provide further insights from test results, such as trends, or you can utilize TestNG to gather data like failure patterns.

Conclusion

Your brand is dedicated to creating software solutions that can help enhance the quality of life for people worldwide. You and your development teams need an accurate overview of the efforts they put in while they near the launch date.

Test reporting is essential in guiding you to create the product or service you envision by focusing on issues early into the development cycle and enabling you to fix them instantly. But the overwhelming amount of report data can remove your focus from pressing matters.

Allure TestOps can help you circumvent these problems by providing tools for better documentation and visualization so that you are always ahead of your competition with superior analytics and actionable insights.

Contact us to get customized solutions for your business requirements. Try out Allure TestOps Server for 30 days or Allure TestOps Cloud for 14 days before committing to our subscription plans. Experience the power of better QA testing with Allure TestOps today.