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Many companies have discovered the benefits of integrating their automated and manual test systems. Perhaps you have been putting this kind of investment off, thinking that you will need to purchase expensive, top of the line equipment from a corporate retailer like HP if you want to hook your test management system's tracking capabilities with your automation routines. This is not necessarily the case, as there are plenty of low and mid-range solutions currently available which can help. With comprehensive interfaces for programming, many of these can be easily used in conjunction with an open source project like Selenium.

Many companies are taking this route because the cost of integrating in house tools comes in far cheaper than picking the all singing all dancing top end solutions. If you opt for the top end tools you're likely to have significant challenges getting the budget to purchase the solution that you need. If you opt for a combination of a mid range test management tool along with open source automation you get the best of both worlds. The two biggest benefits of taking this route are integrated reporting and the ability to schedule your runs from a central system.

Integrated reporting gives you the ability to see up to the minute status reports covering both your manual and automated progress. It removes the requirement to manually spend time combining statistics from different places using tools like Excel. Whilst this might not seem like a big benefit, as your team grows and the number of tests executed increases, the time you start to save quickly ads up. The combined reporting also helps you to see trends much sooner. For example regression testing is usually covered by your automation. Manual testing usually covers new feature tests. When you can seen combined and comparison automated/manual reports you can start to uncover many interesting conclusions about the quality of the product under test. For example if your automated results start to show significant numbers of failures against a manual results trend which remains steady then you may conclude that your development team is introducing regression issues unnecessarily.

Scheduling your automation runs from your test management application is another significant benefit to integration. Two scenarios deliver benefits. The first is when you only have access to the test management system and you don't have access to the automation application. Perhaps you're at home and decide that you really should have set off that automation run before you left work. With the scheduling centralized you kick those runs off directly from your central system. The second scenario covers the increasing number of automation clients that teams tend to end up with. When you have 2 or 3 clients it's easy to directly access those clients and kick off an automation run. When you start to hit 20 or 30 clients starting runs on each client becomes far more time consuming. The ability to schedule multiple runs, on multiple clients from one user interface is a significant time saver.

So we can see that the tracking and management of both automated and manual tests becomes a much more complex and time consuming thing as the test processes themselves become more advanced and complex. Being able to use a single control interface to access and get reports on an integrated system of automated and manual tests can save money as well as time. A central test management tool will also increase your status visibility and overall control.