While our test management tool TestRail is already a very fast and secure web application out of the box, there are a few things you can do to optimize and secure a TestRail installation. Some things are easier to do (such as enabling SSL encryption), while others (such as moving TestRail to a dedicated server) are more difficult to implement.

Most teams install and use TestRail on a shared application server or in a virtual machine. This definitely makes sense and such a setup is usually sufficient for most teams and scenarios. It’s recommended to optimize such installations nonetheless as there are a few “low hanging fruits” that can make a big difference with relative small effort (such as enabling HTTP compression on your web server). Larger installations benefit from a dedicated server with optimized hardware specifications.

To have all performance and security related installation recommendations in one place, we decided to write and publish the following articles. Just let us know in case you have any questions or additional suggestions on how to optimize a web application server.

• Optimizing TestRail installations
• Securing TestRail installations

We are happy to announce the availability of TestRail 2.3, a new version of our web-based test management software TestRail. With more than 60+ changes, improvements and bug fixes, this is the biggest update of TestRail since we released version 2.0 last summer. The new version comes with major scalability and performance improvements, new alternative views for test suites, runs and plans, and introduces an updated Todo page that makes it easier to track assigned tests for different test runs, besides many other changes. Please see below for a detailed description of the new features and other improvements.

Test suite & run views

TestRail’s test suite and test run pages were always one of the strong points of the application: users can easily add new test cases, group test cases in sections and rearrange items via drag&drop, all without having to leave the main page. With larger test suites, however, having hundreds of test cases and sections on a single page can make test suites difficult to manage. That’s why we are very happy to introduce a new, alternative view for test suites, runs and to-dos that allows you to view just a single section. The new view works like Windows Explorer and similar interfaces and provides a tree of the sections in the sidebar to select and view the associated test cases.

New section tree

The new section tree is also available on the test suite, run and todo pages regardless of the view mode. The new tree makes it a lot easier to rearrange and work with sections, as you can directly drag&drop sections in the tree.

The new tree also makes it easier to rearrange your test cases. While it’s still possible to drag&drop test cases within a section, moving test cases to another section can now also be accomplished by dragging one or multiple test cases to a section in the sidebar tree.

You can also copy and duplicate test sections by pressing the Shift key during the drag&drop operation. The same is true when you drag&drop test cases within a section or when you drag test cases to another section.

Improved performance & scalability

TestRail has always been a fast and lightweight application, but one of the major goals for this release was to make TestRail faster for larger installations and for larger teams. So we looked at every TestRail operation, every database query and the details of all database models to fine-tune and optimize every aspect of TestRail. The result of this effort includes more than 50+ performance improvements, database model optimizations and algorithm changes and we are very happy about the outcome.

Many other user interface changes and new features in this release also make it easier to work and manage more data with TestRail. Especially larger test suites, test plans and projects in general now scale better with larger amounts of data. For example, test plans have a new view that lists test runs in a more compact way. Other enhancements include the option to mark projects as completed and to display user names in different ways (which is useful for larger teams when many users have the same first name).

Updated Todo tab

The new TestRail release also introduces an updated Todo page. The new Todo page now shows a list of test runs that have tests assigned to the currently selected user. You can then select a test run to show the assignments for this particular run. The new interface makes it a lot easier to work with assigned tests if you work on different test runs in parallel.

The updated Todo page also provides the option to group test runs by milestone, test plan or date and also shows useful context information such as the description of the selected test run or test plan. The Todo page has also been updated with the new compact view and section tree in the sidebar.

Support for third-party tools

TestRail 2.3 also comes with improved support for third-party tools. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9.0 earlier this week and the new TestRail version fully supports the new web browser release. We also added improved support for Axosoft OnTime. We now ship a defect plugin with TestRail that allows you to push defects to and look up bug reports stored in OnTime. The defect plugin only requires that you have the OnTime SDK installed for your OnTime system. You can learn more about the OnTime test management integration on our website. It’s now also possible to access all test case details from defect plugin scripts, allowing for more flexible customizations of the plugins and integration.

Other improvements

TestRail also comes with various other enhancements and bug fixes. For example, we have redesigned several parts of the user interface to make it cleaner and more consistent across the application. The Excel export file format has been updated to include the date and time of the last test results. We now also use the configured installation name for the email subjects and from names so it’s easier to customize the generated emails. And to make it easier to backup uploaded attachments, a new admin option has been added to the config.php file to specify the file permissions of uploaded files. To view the complete list of changes for TestRail 2.3, please see the change log.

Getting the new version

Please note: If you are using the extended TestRail API, please email us to receive an updated version of the API as it has changed for TestRail 2.3.

Existing customers can download the new version from our customer portal. New users can download our QA management software or create a hosted trial on our website. If you want to update your existing TestRail trial (download or hosted), please contact us and we will provide you with the necessary details. Please refer to TestRail’s Admin Manual on how to upgrade an existing installation. If you have any questions about the new version, please let us know.

We are happy to announce the release of TestRail 2.4, an updated version of our web-based test management tool. The new version introduces support for UI scripts (a way to customize TestRail’s user interface), time zones, a new defect plugin for Mantis, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. This release is also the base for a new TestRail Hosted offering we have been working on and which we will announce in a separate posting soon. Please see below for a detailed description of the new features and other improvements.

UI Scripts

TestRail 2.4 comes with a new powerful feature called UI Scripts that allows you to customize various aspects of TestRail’s user interface by using standard JavaScript code and style sheets. If you are familiar with the popular Greasemonkey set of browser plugins that inspired us to build this feature, you will feel right at home.

UI Scripts basically allow you to apply custom JavaScript code or style sheets to pages in TestRail. This can be used to customize smaller aspects of TestRail’s user interface such as changing the color of elements or hiding some settings or feature you don’t use. But you could also use UI Scripts to integrate custom applications with TestRail and implement similar larger customizations such as querying and highlighting data from external systems in TestRail.

As JavaScript can be used to manipulate all parts of TestRail’s user interface, the possible uses and customizations this feature enables are endless. UI Scripts can also be limited to just specific areas in TestRail and you can build project and user specific customizations as needed. You can learn more about UI Scripts by reading the documentation and taking a look at some examples.

Time zone support

As more and more distributed teams use TestRail, having the option to use server-independent time zones became more and more important. That’s why we are happy to introduce full support for time zones in TestRail.

TestRail allows you to configure a server-independent global time zone for your whole TestRail installation, or you can use different time zones for different users. Users can also change their time zones themselves under My Settings and immediately see all test times and other time information based on the configured time zone.

Defect plugin for Mantis

TestRail integrates with most (usually web-based) bug tracking tools. TestRail offers various integration options for different tools, and the advanced integration mechanisms to push bug reports from TestRail and look up the status of defects are implemented via customizable defect plugins. We are happy to introduce such a defect plugin for Mantis with TestRail 2.4, making it easier and more efficient to work with TestRail and Mantis. After upgrading to TestRail 2.4, you can find the new plugin under Administration > Site Settings > Integration tab for Mantis test management.

Other improvements

TestRail 2.4 comes with dozens of additional improvements, user interface enhancements and bug fixes. For example, it’s now possible to use different views on the project overview page to make it easier to work with many projects. You can now also use additional placeholders in defect URLs to build custom URL integrations with external tools. Additional improvements include options to override TestRail’s web address, adjust the intervals of background tasks and to use file:// links in Markdown fields. You can view a full list of enhancements and changes in the changelog.

Getting the new version

Existing customers can download the new version from our customer portal. New users can download our QA management software or create a hosted trial on our website. If you want to update your existing TestRail trial (download or hosted), please contact us and we will provide you with the necessary details. Please refer to TestRail’s Admin Manual on how to upgrade an existing installation.

One of the unique features of our test management software TestRail is that, while it’s a web-based tool, it can actually be downloaded and installed on your own server. Most modern web-based tools are only available as a SaaS/cloud based option, and many of our customers really appreciate that they can install TestRail on their own server.

We expect that the download option will continue to be a popular choice for TestRail, but we also want to reach customers who prefer a hosted edition. That’s why we are really happy to announce TestRail Hosted today, a SaaS edition of TestRail hosted on our servers.

We have been offering hosted trial installations of TestRail on our own servers for quite some time now and it has been a great way to easily try TestRail. We’ve now built our own private cloud service to offer production-ready TestRail instances in a professional data center, and offer TestRail for a monthly (or alternatively yearly) subscription fee. This includes usage of the software, hosting, automated updates and support. No upfront licensing fee or IT required! You can learn more about the TestRail Hosted pricing and other details on our website.

Going forward all new hosted trials will automatically be created on the new infrastructure and you can either subscribe to continue using the hosted edition when the trial expires, or you can export your data for a local installation. If you are already using a hosted trial or a local TestRail installation and want to migrate to our new infrastructure, please contact us. Please also let us know if you have any questions about the new offering.

This has been a very exciting year for us here at Gurock Software and we are truly grateful to have worked with such great customers and partners from all over the world this year. We wish everyone happy holidays and a happy and successful new year 2012 and we look forward to working with you again next year.

As our TestRail test management and SmartInspect logging products become more and more popular, we are looking for more talented people to join our team here at Gurock Software. For now we are mainly looking for local hires (working at our office in Soest, Germany), but we will also consider adding additional remote positions in the future. Please see below for our job postings (on our German website):

• Sales Engineer in Soest
• System Administrator in Soest
• Software Developer in Soest

We would also appreciate forwarding and sharing the job postings if you know anyone who might be interested in this. Thanks!

We are pleased to announce the release of TestRail 2.5, a new version of our web-based test management tool. The new version comes with many new features such as customizable columns for the test suite and run grids, sorting and grouping options for tables, a powerful test case selection filter for test plans and runs and various other enhancements and new integration options. Please see below for a detailed description of the new features and improvements.

Customizable Columns

TestRail 2.5 comes with a new customizable column feature that allows you to add new columns to the grids (such as the test run, suite and to-do pages), so you can show any additional details directly on the overview pages. This allows you to show a list of found defects, test case custom fields or any other detail you and your team wants to highlight. It’s also possible to configure different columns for different projects and views as needed.

Sorting and Grouping

The new version also makes it easy to sort and group test cases and tests directly in the grids. Want to see the tests that took the most time to execute? Or do you want to group your test cases by test type or test status? All this and more is now possible directly in the grids and tables of TestRail.

Case Selection Filter

If you have larger test suites or test plans, but don’t have enough time to execute all tests against a new software build, or if you just want to make sure that no regressions exist in a new version of your software, then executing just a subset of your test case collection is a useful feature. TestRail 2.5 makes this easier by enabling you to select test cases for a new test run or plan via filters. You can just include test cases of a certain type or priority, or filter any other test case attributes (including custom fields) or combination of fields with the new handy test case selection filter.

Redmine, Pivotal Tracker & Lighthouse

We’ve also worked on improved defect tracker integration for the popular Redmine, Pivotal Tracker and Lighthouse project management tools. We now ship defect plugins for those tools with TestRail and you can enable the defect tracker integration either under Administration > Site Settings > Integration (for all projects), or under Administration > Projects (for individual projects).

Rerunning Plans and Test Runs

Many teams have more test cases for a project than they can possibly execute during a single iteration, so concentrating on failed or not-yet-executed tests for new iterations is a good way to ensure that all test cases have been covered at least once for a new software release. TestRail’s new version allows you to select just your failed or untested cases for a new test run or plan, making it easy to ensure that all your cases and failed tests get verified.

Other improvements

TestRail 2.5 also comes with many other enhancements such as an improved administration area, more flexible defect plugin customizations and broader support for image uploading for text fields. The new version also comes with redesigned test run and test plan edit forms, making it easier to select test cases for your runs and listing your plan’s suites in a more compact form. We also improved the way texts wrap in TestRail to make it easier to work with long project, case or suite titles. You can view a full list of enhancements and changes in the changelog.

Getting the new version

Existing customers can download the new version from our customer portal. All TestRail Hosted accounts (paid or trial subscriptions) have already been updated to the new version. New users can download our QA management software or create a hosted trial from our website. If you want to update your existing TestRail download trial, please contact us and we will provide you with the necessary details. Please refer to TestRail’s Admin Manual on how to upgrade an existing installation.

We are happy to announce the release of TestRail 2.6, a new version of our web-based test management software. TestRail 2.6 comes with various new features and improvements including the ability to track tests in progress, improved separate test step fields, user variables to improve the mapping between TestRail and bug trackers as well as new security-related options and capabilities. Please see below for a detailed description of the new features and improvements.

Tests in progress

TestRail already had the option to measure your test times using the handy test timer on the test page’s sidebar. For TestRail 2.6 we’ve updated this feature to become a general In Progress indicator. When testers now indicate that they are working on a test, TestRail not only tracks the test times automatically (also used for TestRail’s time forecasting reports), you can also easily follow the progress status from the test run overview pages using the new In Progress column.

We’ve also added a new window for testers to see which tests they are working on (across all projects) so you have a central place to quickly jump to your tests.

Test steps and expected results

We already had optional separate test steps in TestRail for a while. Instead of using the default configuration of a single Steps field, you could already use TestRail’s custom fields to configure separate test steps (and separate test results per step) if you prefer this approach. Based on customer feedback we decided to make this even more flexible so you can now also configure the separate test step fields to enter the expected results for each step.

In addition to this you can now also optionally configure TestRail to allow testers to enter an actual result for each test step in the Add Test Result dialog. You can learn more about configuring separate test steps and the new enhancements on our website.

User variables

TestRail’s unique defect and issue tracker integration is one of the most popular features of the application. TestRail 2.6 comes with a new feature that allows you to define user variables to be used for the integration settings. For example, this allows you to define separate Bug Tracker User and Bug Tracker Password fields in TestRail that users can fill in under My Settings. This way you can easily map users between TestRail and your bug tracker, without having to customize any integration files. This also makes sure that you don’t need to store your bug tracker passwords in a central place in TestRail. User variables can also be used to implement other options and customizations and because we anticipate that user variables will be often used for user mapping, we’ve specifically documented this option on our website.

API enhancements

We’ve also added additional capabilities to TestRail’s API for the new version. Specifically, we added the following methods/options to the API:

• Added method for closing test runs (close_run)
• Added method for closing test plans (close_plan)
• Added support for custom case selection for test runs

You can download the latest API version if you are using TestRail on your server. If you are using TestRail Hosted then we’ve already updated the API automatically.

New security options

TestRail 2.6 also introduces additional security options and capabilities. Until now TestRail used simple rules to make sure that user passwords aren’t too simple. For companies and IT teams with more strict security policies we introduced an option to define password policies. TestRail now already comes with a few built-in password policies you can select, but you can also define a custom password policy using regular expressions. Among other things we additionally added options to disable the Forgot Password functionality as well as options to restrict access to a TestRail instance based on IP addresses (or entire IP ranges).

Other improvements

We also included various other enhancements, features and bug fixes in the new version. For example, TestRail 2.6 lets you configure the number of test cases and tests that will trigger the compact view. This way you can increase the number of test cases that get displayed on test suite pages by default. We also moved all third-party integration settings to a separate main tab in the Administration area to make it easier to integrate TestRail with the defect tracking tool of your choice.

Other improvements include the option to use custom translation files for TestRail Hosted (like you can already use custom translations for the download edition of TestRail) and better handling of test assignments for test plans. You can view a full list of enhancements and changes in the changelog.

Getting the new version

Existing customers can download the new version from our customer portal. All TestRail Hosted accounts (paid subscriptions or trials) have already been updated to the new version. New users can download our QA management software or create a hosted trial from our website. If you want to update your existing TestRail download trial, please contact us and we will provide you with the necessary details. Please refer to TestRail’s Admin Manual on how to upgrade an existing installation.

We are happy to announce the availability of TestRail 2.7, a new version of our web-based test management tool. The new version introduces the often-requested feature to add and define custom statuses, adds support for multi-select fields for cases, results and defect plugins and features support for PHP 5.4, along with various other new features and enhancements. Please see below for a detailed description of the new improvements.

Custom statuses

So far TestRail included various built-in statuses for test results so that teams could mark tests as passed, failed, blocked etc. In addition to the built-in statuses it’s now also possible to define custom statuses and customize their appearance within TestRail’s user interface (such as the chart colors).

We are happy to finally support custom statuses as it was one of the more often requested features. New statuses can now be defined under Administration > Customizations and would be available for new test results in all projects.

Multi-select custom field type

TestRail supports custom fields (and various custom field types) so you can record additional details for your test cases and for test results. For example, if you would like to store additional configuration details as part of your test cases, you would simply add relevant fields for this. TestRail 2.7 introduces the new multi-select custom field type so you can now select multiple dropdown values for such fields and even use this to tag your test cases. The multi-select custom field type is supported for both test cases and test results and you can also filter for multi-select values in the test case selection filter.

Defect plugin multi-select

Similar to custom fields, TestRail allows you to customize the defect plugin to add your own fields (such as custom fields you have defined in your bug tracking tool) or to customize the integration workflow. If you are implementing such customizations, such as adding an Affects Versions field to the Push Defect dialog for Jira, you can also use the new multi-select custom field type.

Improved test case importing

TestRail allows you to import test cases into the system using a simple XML-based file format. This feature is especially popular with customers looking into migrating their existing test cases from Excel or another test management tool to TestRail and we even have conversion scripts available for this. With TestRail 2.7 you can now also ask TestRail to update existing test cases in your suites when re-importing cases. So far you were only able to append the imported cases to the suite. The new functionality allows you to export your cases, modify them (e.g. using a script) and then update your cases in TestRail via the import.

PHP 5.4 support

We also updated TestRail to work with PHP 5.4 and improved various things and refactored various aspects of the application to optimize it for this new PHP version. As more and more environments and Linux distributions come with PHP 5.4 pre-installed, this is an important step to continue making it as easy as possible to install and configure TestRail on your own server. If you have been holding off installing TestRail because you are already using PHP 5.4, now it’s a good time to get the installation up and running.

New grid columns

TestRail 2.7 also introduces additional columns for the test suite grids. You can now show additional columns to track the Created By/On and Updated By/On fields. This way you can easily identify new or updated cases and easier review changes of your test suites. Another often requested enhancement is the new ability to also show test result custom fields in the grids of the test run pages.

Other improvements

We also added various other improvements and features to TestRail 2.7. For example, new JavaScript hooks make it now easier to customize the Add Test Result dialog and the Push Defect dialog using UI Scripts. TestRail now also warns users when they try to navigate away from the test case edit form when editing/adding cases, so they don’t lose the entered case description by mistake. Other new improvements include the ability to select the blocked/retest status for test steps, better support for background colors in the print views for Google chrome and better support for new OnTime versions. You can view a full list of enhancements and changes in the changelog.

Getting the new version

Existing customers can download the new version from our customer portal. All TestRail Hosted accounts (paid or trial subscriptions) have already been updated to the new version. New users can download our QA management software or create a hosted trial from our website. If you want to update your existing TestRail download trial, please contact us and we will provide you with the necessary details. Please refer to TestRail’s Admin Manual on how to upgrade an existing installation.

Last year has been great for us here at Gurock Software and we are very grateful for all the new customers, partners and teams we had the opportunity to work with. Just like last year we are looking into expanding our team in 2013 and we have some great projects lined up, especially for TestRail (stay tuned!).

This year we want to try something new though: instead of just concentrating on hiring local talent, we will also support working remotely for some of our job openings and we will consider the best candidates regardless of their location.

We will of course make sure that every new team member is fully integrated into our existing team, whether they are joining us here in our office in Germany or if they prefer to work from their home office (or a nearby co-working space, which looks like a great alternative we are happy to explore). We currently have the following job openings available:

• Product Evangelist (for experienced test managers, trainers or sales engineers)
• Software Developer (for web developers with a strong technical background)

For some positions (such as trainee positions) we prefer candidates to join us and work from our office here in Germany. See our local job openings on our German website:

• Developer Trainee (for students/recent graduates; posting in German)

If any of the above mentioned job openings is a good fit, we would love to hear from you! You would join a very experienced and motivated team, work on products our customers love and receive competitive benefits.

We are happy to announce that we just released an improved JIRA integration as part of TestRail 2.7.1, a new version of our test management tool. JIRA is one of the most popular issue tracking tools among TestRail users and we worked on a new defect plugin for JIRA’s new REST web service API.

The new integration requires JIRA 5.x or later and comes with the following new capabilities:

• The new integration now uses JIRA’s REST API
• We support more built-in fields by default
• Support for customizing fields in the Push Defect dialog
• Improved support for JIRA custom fields (no code changes required!)

To use the new integration, simply select the new Jira_REST defect plugin in TestRail under Administration > Integration. If you are still using JIRA 3.x or 4.x you can simply continue using our existing Jira defect plugin and you don’t need to change anything. You can also learn more about the JIRA integration on our website here:

• JIRA Test Management
• Configuring the JIRA integration

The new integration is already available in all TestRail Hosted accounts and customers can download the new version through their customer portal accounts. If you are using a trial version of TestRail and would like to try the latest version, please contact us.

We are excited to announce the availability of TestRail 3.0, a new version of our test management tool. When we started to design and plan this release, we reviewed tons of feedback we received for TestRail over the previous months, went through internal notes and our feedback system as well as discussed future roadmap options with various teams (both new and existing TestRail customers). It quickly became clear that there were a few things many of our customers would benefit from, namely better reporting capabilities, more native defect integrations as well as a redesigned API.

So for the past 6 months we have been working on the new version to implement all this and more. TestRail 3.0 features an awesome reporting engine to generate new built-in reports, to make it easy to schedule and share statistics as well as allowing teams to develop their own custom reports. The new release also features a redesigned and improved API to automate various things in TestRail and to integrate your automated tests and tools. TestRail 3.0 also comes with improved integrations for tools such as Rally, Assembla, Bitbucket, GitHub, JIRA and OnTime. We also included various other improvements and new features in this new version and you can review all changes below.

New reporting section

TestRail’s built-in reports have always helped teams track the status and progress of their software tests. But it became clear that teams would benefit from more comprehensive reports to generate snapshots of project statistics, to trace the coverage of references, test results and defects, as well as having reports to compare test results across runs or to compare the workload of testers. TestRail’s new reporting section makes all this possible and provides some of the most flexible reporting capabilities available in test management tools today.

Besides shipping various new built-in reports and reporting options as explained below, it’s now also possible to develop your own custom reports for the new reporting engine. We specifically designed the new system in a way that you can easily extend it with custom code. Instead of bundling a limited reporting system with TestRail (which wouldn’t allow us to generate many of the advanced reports we now include), TestRail’s code-based reporting engine is much more flexible and works similar to how you can already customize TestRail’s defect plugins.

New built-in reports

One of the major new features of TestRail 3.0 is the addition of new built-in reports. Based on customer feedback we added more than a dozen new reports to generate useful statistics of your test results, to track the coverage of test cases, defects and references, as well as reports to compare test results and runs over time and various other key metrics. All reports are highly customizable so you can choose the scope, time frame and level of detail you want to include.

Summary reports

The summary reports allow you to generate detailed statistics of your testing efforts for test runs, test plans, milestones and entire projects. The summary reports are especially useful to share your progress with all team members, management or customers. They can also be used to generate snapshots of your test status and activity at various points of your projects for archival and auditing purposes.

Coverage reports

TestRail allows you to link test results to bug reports in your defect tracking tool and to link test cases to external requirements. TestRail 3.0 now comes with useful coverage and traceability reports to easily get an overview of your requirement coverage, see all bug reports for your test cases at a glance and get a detailed matrix of the relationships between requirements, test cases and bug reports.

Comparison reports

Have you ever wanted to see how your tests perform and change between releases, configurations and runs? The new comparison reports for test cases and references make this extremely easy and allow you to see results of multiple test results side-by-side. In addition to this, the new comparison reports also allow you to track the latest status of your tests across all selected runs.

Additional reports

TestRail also comes with additional useful reports to e.g. easily track the workload of your team and to see the distribution of your test cases for various attributes such as test types or priority.

TestRail’s new reports also make it easy to identify test cases that had a high number of failures over time or to identify problematic functional areas of projects based on other test statuses.

Schedule and share reports

Adding more useful built-in reports that help our customers answer important questions about their testing efforts and help teams make informed decisions during development was a major design goal of TestRail 3.0. Making it as easy and flexible as possible to run, schedule and share said reports is equally important, so we added a bunch of useful options for this. TestRail now allows you to generate new reports on a pre-defined schedule so you can, for example, automatically generate new reports once a day or once a week so your team or project stakeholders get fresh reports automatically.

TestRail’s new version also makes it extremely easy to share reports with both TestRail users as well as external stakeholders such as customers. Besides hosting and displaying reports inside TestRail, you can now also forward reports as HTML attachments via email or download reports to archive them. Combined with the above mentioned scheduling feature you can keep your entire company updated on your latest testing efforts automatically and run your reporting on autopilot, awesome!

New REST-like API

TestRail’s existing Mini API has always been useful to integrate automated tests and to automate various tasks such as starting test runs, submitting test results and creating new test cases programmatically from your scripts. However, because of a few design choices we made with our earlier API it was difficult to add more advanced API capabilities, so we designed and built a new REST-like API that we are now shipping with TestRail 3.0.

The new API addresses various issues and will also allow us to add more API methods and capabilities in future updates:

• API calls now use JSON universally for both requests and responses
• The API is now part of TestRail (no separate download/activation needed anymore)
• You can now authenticate against the API with your standard TestRail user login credentials. There’s no need to link the API to a single user account anymore and you don’t need to configure any API keys
• The new API supports various new API methods (such as methods to manage projects, milestones, test plans, change test case selections and retrieve information about custom fields)

The new API is part of all TestRail 3.0 instances and can be enabled under Administration > Site Settings > API. You can learn more about the new capabilities in the API documentation and also refer to our migration guide if you’ve already been using our previous API. We also updated our previous Mini API to add various new API methods and we will continue to support the old API for now. Please use our new API for new projects as we will deprecate the old API in future TestRail updates.

Redesigned charts

We included various real-time charts in TestRail from the very first version and making your test statistics and activities easy to understand and to follow has always been a major priority for us. While the charts in TestRail have always been useful, there were some limitations that the new TestRail 3.0 release addresses. For the new version we migrated all charts to a new system so that TestRail’s charts are easier to print, can be accessed from mobile devices (such as your phone or iPad) and don’t require Flash anymore.

We use the new charting system for both the real-time charts on the status, activity and progress pages, as well as in all new reports we added to TestRail. Besides making it easier to view, print and share charts with the new version, you can now also change charting options such as the time frame of any built-in activity charts.

New defect integration

Integrating with existing defect and issue tracking tools has always been one of TestRail’s major features and almost all of our customers integrate TestRail with additional tools. We are constantly working on adding more defect plugins and we are happy to announce new and updated defect plugins as part of our TestRail 3.0 release.

The new defect plugins allow you to directly push bug reports to tools, look up the status of issues from TestRail and link test results to bug reports. We now include the following new defect plugins in TestRail:

• Rally test management
• Assembla test management
• Bitbucket test management
• GitHub test management

TestRail 3.0 also includes updated defect plugins for OnTime as well as JIRA. For OnTime we now include a defect plugin for their new REST API, which makes it much easier to configure and use the integration. We also included an updated version of our recently introduced JIRA REST defect plugin that addresses some previous limitations:

• JIRA test cases
• OnTime test cases

Other improvements

TestRail 3.0 also comes with various other improvements and new features. For example, we improved various parts of TestRail’s user experience and navigation and made it easier to add images and screenshots to test steps, added section names to breadcrumbs, added pagination support for lists such as completed test runs, activities and milestones, as well as included improved milestone grouping.

TestRail’s new version now also includes support for the latest versions of Microsoft’s web stack, such as SQL Server 2012, Internet Explorer 10 as well as Windows Server 2012 (you can of course also install TestRail on a Linux server or use our SaaS/cloud edition). We also improved TestRail’s background task for faster processing of queued tasks such as email notifications & report generation and optimized various built-in reports to use less resources and scale better for large projects.

We also made TestRail easier to customize with the new version. For example, our unique UI Script feature supports additional context information and JavaScript hooks now. Based on popular demand we now also support changing the names of the built-in statuses under Administration > Customizations.

Getting the new version

Want to upgrade to and benefit from TestRail’s latest version? Upgrading TestRail is very easy and we’ve included all the necessarily details below, depending on the edition you use:

• TestRail Hosted: your account has already been updated!
• TestRail Download (licensed): you can download the latest version or renew your support plan from your customer portal account. If you have been using TestRail’s existing API, it needs to be updated as well.
• TestRail Download (trial): please contact us to download the latest version.
• New user: want to try TestRail? Get a free trial.

You can read the full change log to learn more about all new features, improvements and bug fixes included in TestRail 3.0. If you have any questions or feedback about the new version, we look forward to hear from you. We hope you enjoy the new version as much as we enjoyed building it!

This is our first small update in 2014, so Happy New Year! Most software teams use a mix of manual testing and automated tests to test their projects nowadays, and quite a few teams use our test management tool TestRail to manage those tests. Manual testing is usually conducted using TestRail’s web interface and automated tests can be integrated using TestRai’s API. TestRail’s API uses simply HTTP requests and allows you to automate many parts of the application, such as submitting test results, updating test cases, starting new runs and so on.

While the API is quite easy to use, we found that we regularly received requests from customers asking for more details on how to use the API with their favorite programming language. To make it easier for customers to use TestRail’s API, we decided to publish some basic bindings for popular programming languages to hide some of the finer details of consuming the API (and to be honest, some languages make it really difficult to build and consume JSON records out of the box, I’m looking at you .NET and Java!). So we just published the first bindings here:

• Java
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• .NET (C#/VB.NET)

We might add bindings for additional languages if there’s demand. You can also view the GitHub repository if you would like to contribute. With the new bindings, retrieving the details of a test case from Python would look like this:

client = APIClient('http://<server>/testrail/')
client.user = '..'
client.password = '..'
case = client.send_get('get_case/1')
pprint(case)

Each API binding comes with examples on how to retrieve information from TestRail and on how to post data to TestRail using the API. If you have any feedback or questions about the bindings or would like to see more bindings published for additional languages, please just let us know.

We are happy to announce TestRail 3.1, a new version of our popular web-based test management tool. This new version introduces various new features such as improved user management with user groups and bulk user adding, test plan & configuration enhancements and better test case selection filters.

TestRail 3.1 also adds custom defect templates (for pushing bug reports to your favorite issue tracking tool), enhanced test run grouping and sorting options, additional often requested API methods and various other improvements. Please see below for detailed descriptions of the new features and improvements.

Improved user management

TestRail already comes with various features to make it easy for both small and large teams to get started and to integrate the product with your existing infrastructure, including capabilities such as Active Directory integration, extensive security options and a flexible permission and role system. If you have a lot of different project and product teams though, assigning project permissions can be a time consuming task. To make this easier we added a new Groups feature in TestRail 3.1 to easily create user groups and quickly assign project permissions to many users at once.

In addition to making it easier to manage groups of users and their project permissions, the new TestRail version also introduces a feature to add many users at once. This is especially useful when a new team starts using TestRail or if you are inviting a new external team or department to help review and contribute to your testing efforts. The new bulk user add option allows you to enter or copy a large number of users and automatically send account invitations via email.

Configuration selection & settings

TestRail’s test plans and configurations make it easy to execute your test cases against different configurations and platforms, such as different operating systems, web browsers or mobile devices. TestRail allows you to select different configurations and automatically creates test runs for each selected combination. In some cases you might want to skip certain configurations (e.g. if they don’t make sense such as Ubuntu Linux + Internet Explorer 10) or concentrate on specific configuration combinations. To support this TestRail 3.1 now allows you to directly select and pick specific configuration combinations to test against.

In addition to selecting specific configuration combinations, the improved test plans now also allow you to assign specific test runs to different testers and use a custom test case selection for each resulting test run. This way you can split the testing efforts for different platforms across your team and also select different test cases for each platform.

Case selection enhancements

Allowing you to select test cases for new test runs based on their attributes has always been one of TestRail’s more powerful features. TestRail 3.1 now allows you to more easily combine, add and subtract test cases from the selection with new selection options. Combined with the new Or/And Match options as well as the existing Rerun feature to select test cases based on their previous results, selecting cases for your new test runs and plans has become much more powerful. We also added similar filtering options to various report forms in the new release.

Custom push defect templates

Most teams integrate TestRail with an issue tracking tool such as JIRA, FogBugz or Redmine to directly push bug reports from TestRail to their issue tracking tool. TestRail includes the entered test result comment as well as a link back to the test by default so your development team can directly look up additional details in TestRail. Some teams prefer to include additional details in the pushed bug reports and we already supported this via custom defect plugins.

As many teams don’t have the resources to build a custom defect plugin and because this is also becoming less practical with TestRail Hosted accounts, however, TestRail 3.1 now allows you to directly customize a bug report template as part of the integration settings. So you can now freely customize and define the content sent to your issue tracking tool and include additional details such as the test steps and expected results.

Test run grouping & sorting

If you have a lot of active test runs at a given time, it can be difficult to get a clear picture of your testing efforts from the Test Runs & Results tab, especially if you test multiple milestones at the same time. To improve this, TestRail 3.1 comes with additional grouping and sorting options so you can group your test runs by milestones or sort your tests by different attributes.

TestRail API updates

We also included new capabilities in TestRail’s REST-based API to make it easier to use some of the new features of TestRail 3.1 and also to make it easier to integrate automated test results. To use the new configuration features mentioned above with the API as well, we added support for configurations to the add_plan and add_plan_entry API methods, which has been an often requested feature.

We also added a new get_configs call to request details about a project’s configurations as well as new add_results and add_results_for_cases methods to submit multiple results at once. This is especially handy for test automation integrations and makes submitting many test results at once much faster. Please refer to TestRail’s API documentation to learn more about the new API methods.

Other improvements

TestRail 3.1 now also officially supports PHP 5.5, so you can install TestRail on newer platforms and OS versions. Please note that we also updated the minimum PHP version required for TestRail to PHP 5.2.4, so please make sure to update your PHP version in case you are still using a very old PHP release (also there’s currently no ‘sqlsrv’ driver for PHP 5.5 so for Windows-based installation we still recommend PHP 5.4).

The new TestRail release also comes with various other new improvements such as better warnings and end-user documentation, better logging to diagnose and troubleshoot issues as well as making it easier to track the total number of test cases your team manages. Please see the link to the changelog below for a full list of changes in this new version.

Getting the new version

Want to upgrade to and benefit from TestRail’s latest version? Upgrading TestRail is very easy and we’ve included all the necessarily details below, depending on the edition you use:

• TestRail Hosted: your account has already been updated!
• TestRail Download (licensed): you can download the latest version or renew your support plan from your customer portal account.
• TestRail Download (trial): please contact us to download the latest version.
• New user: want to try TestRail? Get a free trial.

You can read the full change log to learn more about all new features, improvements and bug fixes included in TestRail 3.1. If you have any questions or feedback about the new version, please just drop us a note.

Many of our customers integrate our test management software TestRail with issue trackers (such as JIRA, Redmine or FogBugz), test automation tools or existing infrastructure like Active Directory or LDAP systems. To make this easy and to allow customers extend and customize the application, TestRail comes with various options such as our extensive API, authentication scripts, defect plugins and UI scripts.

Some of our amazing customers developed and published additional plugins, API bindings or migration scripts and today we want to highlight some of the great third-party extensions and scripts available for TestRail:

• RetailMeNot Java API library

  This is a ready-to-use Java library for TestRail’s API developed and published by the RetailMeNot team. The project’s GitHub page also comes with extensive documentation on how to use the library. As an alternative you can also take a look at our basic Java API binding.

• Zoosk .NET API library

  If you are using .NET (e.g. C# or VB.NET) to develop your automated tests, you will find this .NET API library developed by the Zoosk team useful. As an alternative you can also take a look at our basic .NET API binding.

• Simply Measured Jenkins Plugin

  Many TestRail customers integrate their automated tests with TestRail and many teams use Jenkins and similar CI systems to schedule and trigger their automated tests. So we were very happy to see that Simply Measured decided to publish their Jenkins plugin to integrate JUnit-like result files and automated tests with TestRail.

  They are also accepting pull requests and feedback via the above GitHub project and you can also use this project as a starting point for other custom Jenkins plugins.

• Unofficial Crowd authentication script

  TestRail can be integrated with third-party systems to implement single sign-on so that users don’t have to remember a new set of login credentials. We currently offer ready to use integration scripts for Active Directory and LDAP systems but you can also develop your own custom authentication scripts. The above project features an authentication script for the Atlassian Crowd directory server.

In addition to the above libraries and scripts, please note that we also have simple API bindings for popular programming languages such as Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP and Python that you can find in TestRail’s API documentation. You can also find various other scripts and examples in the relevant section of our support forum.

There are also many additional TestRail-related projects available on GitHub that you might find interesting as a starting point for your own customizations and that you can contribute to, such as alternative migration scripts, a basic Python API wrapper, a project that implements an API wrapper for node.js, another Python wrapper and many more.

If you or your team developed any additional libraries, plugins, UI scripts or extensions for TestRail that you would like to share, please let us know by emailing us or by posting on our forum.

We have demonstrated our test management tool TestRail to customers in hundreds of online product demos and training sessions over the years and we want to enable more customers to benefit from viewing TestRail’s capabilities in action.

Based on our experience from previous product demos and the typical questions we regularly receive from customers, we produced training videos to help teams learn about TestRail’s features, workflow, integration and customization options. And today we are happy to publish the new training videos for free on our website for new and existing customers to watch:

We have produced a number of training videos that focus on different aspects of using, integrating and customizing TestRail:

• Introduction to TestRail and projects
• Test suites and test case management
• Test runs and test results
• Issue, defect and bug tracker integration
• Milestones and Todos in TestRail
• Test plans and configurations
• Reporting and test metrics
• Administration and customizations

We hope you will find the new training videos useful and we recommend forwarding the videos to your team if you are just getting started with TestRail. If you have any feedback or questions about the videos, please let us know!

Over the last months our team has been hard at work redesigning TestRail’s user experience and adding many often requested features to the application. And today I’m excited to announce the release of TestRail 4.0, a new major version of our modern test management tool!

The new version features a redesigned user interface, bulk editing for test cases, new powerful filter and grouping options, significantly improved navigation, baseline & single-suite support, new reporting options and much more. With more than 80+ new features, enhancements and fixes, this is our biggest TestRail release yet.

All TestRail Hosted accounts have been updated to the new version automatically and TestRail Server customers can upgrade their installations starting today. See below for a detailed release description and you can find additional screenshots in our updated TestRail tour. We can’t wait to see how teams will use the new version and added capabilities!

Try TestRail Now

Get started with TestRail in minutes
and try TestRail free for 30 days!

Redesigned User Experience

TestRail’s user interface has always been all about speed, ease of use and productivity. For TestRail 4.0 we carefully reviewed all areas of TestRail and improved many interface elements, the typography, dialogs, navigation and how users interact with the application. We also updated TestRail’s interface with a fresh, modern look. The resulting design and user experience makes it even easier for small and large teams to manage their testing efforts with TestRail.

Test Case Bulk Editing

You have always been able to quickly add test results to many tests at once. TestRail 4.0 now also introduces a powerful way to bulk edit your test cases to update any of the case attributes. Whether you want to change the preconditions of all test cases in a section, update the type of your cases in an entire suite or carefully filter and change the priority of thousands of cases at once: the new bulk editing feature makes this super easy.

You can either select the test cases you want to update manually, or you can use the bulk editing feature together with our new powerful filtering options. We’ve also updated TestRail’s suites to make it easier to move, copy and delete many test cases at once so you can better organize and refactor larger projects. In addition to editing many test cases at once, we’ve also improved assigning tests on the test run pages.

Improved Navigation

We also reviewed TestRail’s suite, run and section navigation and implemented various improvements based on customer feedback and feature requests. The result is that TestRail 4.0 now also works beautifully with huge test suites and projects when using just a single test suite, making it easy to build deep section hierarchies and organize your test cases. And the improved test case navigation makes TestRail even more productive for both small and large teams.

Remembering where you left off

For TestRail 4.0 we invested a lot of time to make sure that the application remembers where you left off. In practice this means that TestRail now remembers the sections you previously expanded or collapsed, automatically restores the position when you use your browser’s Back button and make it easier to share links.

New view modes for sections & cases

When working with larger projects it’s sometimes difficult to focus on the relevant test cases. TestRail 4.0 introduces new view modes to choose between viewing all your test cases at once, or to focus on just specific sections or sub sections. You can now conveniently switch between modes from the sidebar.

Improved scrollable, resizable sidebar

We redesigned the section and group tree on the suite and run pages to better scale for large suites and deep section hierarchies. To support this we made the sidebar resizable, added support for independent scrolling of the section list and made the list sticky when you navigate through your cases.

Suite Modes and Baselines

Based on our experience working with thousands of teams adopting TestRail over the years, we found that many teams would benefit from using just a single test suite per project and use TestRail’s flexible section hierarchies to organize their test cases instead. With the new improved suite navigation and scalability we are adding a new default mode to use a single suite per project. This means that when you click on the Test Cases tab, you are redirected directly to your test cases. We still support separate test suites for existing and new projects for teams who prefer this.

In addition to the single suite mode, we are adding another alternative option to use test suites for baselines and versions in your projects. If you have the need to maintain multiple separate copies and branches of your test cases for different project versions in parallel, TestRail’s new baselines make this easy. Baselines allow you to maintain a single test case repository per project and make repository copies for separate versions and branches.

Filters and Grouping Options

TestRail always had advanced filtering options to make it easy to select your test cases for new test runs and plans. With TestRail 4.0 we are extending the existing capabilities and add powerful filter, sorting and grouping options to the test suite and run pages. This means that you can now easily filter, sort and group your tests and cases by any of their attributes to make it easier to find and work with your tests.

We redesigned the suite and run pages to include a new filter and edit toolbar at the top of the pages that stays in place when you scroll through your test lists. Together with the new bulk editing options, the filter and edit toolbar makes it super easy to update, organize or remove test cases.

Better Case Copying & Selection

Making it easy to reuse your test cases for different testing phases, releases and projects has always been one of TestRail’s design goals. In many scenarios you don’t need to duplicate or copy your cases, as you can simply start new test runs against your existing suites. For situations where you want to duplicate your test cases, we have completely redesigned TestRail’s copy functionality.

TestRail now uses a three column layout for the Copy/Move dialog to include a full section tree and test case filters. This allows us to scale the dialog for very large projects, make it easier to select and navigate sections as well as choosing test cases based on attribute filters. We’ve also redesigned TestRail’s test case selection dialog for runs and plans in a similar way.

Improved Todo Tab

TestRail 4.0 comes with a redesigned Todo tab to integrate with and benefit from the new test run page and its filtering options. The new Todo tab makes it easy to see the workload of your team at a glance and track all tests assigned to you. You can then select any test run to drill down into the data and work with your tests.

New Reporting Options

Since our big reporting release for TestRail last year, we regularly receive feedback from teams that the new reporting section is one of their favorite features. We continue to add more reporting capabilities to TestRail to make it easier for teams to gain insights from the data they track with TestRail. In the new release we are adding various new options to existing reports and introducing the Activity Summary report to easily track new and updated test cases.

Additional Improvements

TestRail 4.0 also comes with many additional new features and improvements and we included a select list of additional enhancements below. Please see our full changelog for a complete list of changes.

Section descriptions

TestRail now has support for section descriptions to include additional rich context information in your test suites. This also makes it easier to work with exploratory testing and plan your test sessions in advance.

Drag & drop improvements

We’ve also improved the existing drag & drop functionality for copying and moving test cases to make this functionality easier to discover and use for new users. You can use drag & drop to duplicate and move test cases on the test suite pages.

New API capabilities

TestRail’s API is especially popular for integrating third-party tools and test automation. We added new capabilities to the API such as improved filter and pagination options, added new result methods and improved the error reporting.

JIRA integration enhancements

For the JIRA defect plugin integration we added options to include links to other issues when you push a bug report to JIRA (e.g. “related to” or “duplicate of”). The integration now also supports JIRA custom fields that use the Label field type.

Responsive test steps

Teams using separate test steps in TestRail now benefit from UI improvements to edit test steps and expected results side-by-side. The UI automatically adjusts based on your browser size and you can now also resize the edit boxes.

Getting the new version

We recommend upgrading to the new version to benefit from the new functionality and redesigned interface. Upgrading TestRail is very easy and we’ve included all the required details below, depending on the edition you use:

• TestRail Hosted: your account has already been updated!
• TestRail Server (licensed): you can download the latest version or renew your support plan from your customer portal account.
• TestRail Server (trial): please contact us to upgrade your download trial.
• New user: want to try TestRail? Get a free trial.

You can read the full change log to learn more about all new features, improvements and bug fixes included in TestRail 4.0. If you have any questions or feedback about the new version, please let us know!

Older browser support in TestRail 4.0: similar to most other applications we are dropping support for older web browsers in new releases from time to time. Specifically, we are dropping support for Internet Explorer 7.x and 8.x with TestRail 4.0. If you cannot upgrade Internet Explorer we recommend using Google Chrome to access TestRail.

The past year has been a turbulent year for everyone in the software quality and security sector, with many high-impact security vulnerabilities and software bugs keeping IT and dev teams busy throughout the year. We noticed that many companies and teams focused more on software quality this year and spent more time and resources to make their projects more robust. Various teams told us that customer expectations for software quality are steadily increasing, especially as it becomes easier for customers to switch to alternative products at any time.

At the end of a year we always like to look back to review what went well, what didn’t go so well and to set our goals for the next year. For us here at Gurock 2014 has been a great year and it was especially intense with various major feature releases of our flagship product TestRail, designing and building our improved cloud infrastructure and the release of our new website. We worked with many fantastic new and existing customers this year and look forward to continue working with you all in 2015! We list some of our major milestones of 2014 below and include a short outlook of our upcoming plans for the next year.

TestRail

TestRail is our modern test management tool that helps software testers and dev teams manage and organize their software tests. We have seen an incredible growth of TestRail usage this year with many new teams adopting TestRail and existing customers expanding their usage. We are really happy to see that TestRail has become one of the top test management tools and that more and more teams are making the switch.

With last year’s TestRail 4.0 announcement we’ve released the largest TestRail update yet and we’ve spent a lot of time adding often requested features based on customer feedback. This includes an all-new design of the user interface, many advanced features for both new and power users as well as various improvements to make TestRail more flexible and scalable. The major improvements we’ve released for TestRail this year include:

• All-new design with a fast and modern user interface
• Fast and scalable bulk editing for test cases and results
• Significantly improved navigation between suites, runs and tests
• Major TestRail API updates and new API bindings for various languages
• New test suite modes with project baseline support
• Improved Todo tab and new project reporting options
• Better JIRA and third-party integrations and scripts
• New filtering, grouping and test case copying capabilities
• Updated security options and user/group management features

One of our main goals for TestRail is to build the fastest and easiest-to-use testing tool while still providing many advanced features for teams who need them. So we are really thrilled to see that our design efforts have been paying off as both small and large teams enjoy using TestRail for projects of all sizes and levels of complexity.

SmartInspect

SmartInspect was our first product that we released almost 10 years ago, how time flies! SmartInspect is used by an enthusiastic and loyal user base for .NET, Java and Delphi logging. Developers, testers and support teams can use SmartInspect to debug applications and to see exactly what happens under the hood when an application is causing issues or crashes. SmartInspect is a pretty mature product and we continued maintaining and releasing platform updates for SmartInspect during the past year.

We plan to continue maintaining SmartInspect and further growing its user base so more teams can benefit from rich and easier to analyze application logs (and we of course use SmartInspect to build and debug all our products).

Customers

In 2014 we continued working with a lot of fantastic customers, including many small teams as well as larger enterprise customers. One of the things that impressed us most (and made us really happy) is that many teams and users helped us improve our products. This included providing us with detailed and useful feature feedback, supporting other customers in our forum, helping us test new product versions and publishing various third-party libraries, scripts, extensions and integrations for TestRail. Some fun facts about our customers in 2014:

• We now work with many thousands of teams located in 86 countries (see the above map)
• TestRail’s usage more than doubled in 2014 from new and existing customers
• Our products are used by more than half of the top 30 US technology companies
• Teams of all sizes use TestRail, including freelancers, growing startups and 1000+ tester teams
• Most of the major game studios have used TestRail for at least one of their AAA titles last year
• Customers include Formula 1 racing teams, sport leagues, central banks and space agencies

Website and Design

We also built and shipped our new website this year to make it easier for customers to find and learn about our products. Together with the new website we published many additional resources for TestRail and SmartInspect customers. Specifically we improved and plan to further work on the following areas:

• New product tours for TestRail and SmartInspect to better highlight all product benefits
• We produced detailed TestRail training videos to help with customer onboarding
• TestRail’s documentation and API reference received many updates with detailed examples
• We also got a new, fresh company logo (thanks to the team at Fixel for the design!)
• We are still working on building new community, forum and resource sections; stay tuned!

What’s Next?

We have some big and exciting plans for 2015 but we are not ready to announce most of them yet. We will continue to focus on TestRail this year with multiple larger feature updates, going live with our new and improved cloud infrastructure and announcing more partnerships & integrations.

Another major goal in 2015 for us is to expand our team so we can help more customers find, adopt and use TestRail. If everything goes as planned we should have some first big news to announce in this area in February.

If you are interested in working with us, please see our available job postings and we would love to hear from you. To get notified when we announce some major news or release a big product update, please subscribe to our newsletter or Twitter feed below.

We’ve always offered options to import and migrate your test cases to our test management tool TestRail, so you could continue using your existing projects after making the switch. We have import scripts for select legacy tools and offer an advanced migration tool for Excel/CSV files. Our existing migration scripts work great to convert your tests from various tools and formats, including other test management tools and spreadsheets. This is especially useful if you want to customize and adjust the migration for your specific file format.

Not all teams need this level of flexibility and not all file formats require custom logic to map your data to TestRail’s test cases though. Before adding a direct CSV import option in TestRail, we wanted to make sure that we have a very flexible design that allows users to import a wide range of files and formats. And all this without having to adjust or prepare the files first. With today’s TestRail 4.1 release we are happy to offer such a direct CSV import option that will make it much easier to import existing test cases from third-party tools, issue trackers and spreadsheet files.

You will still be able to use our advanced migration scripts if you need them, but for many scenarios our direct CSV import will now make this unnecessary. You can use our new test case import options starting today, so give TestRail a try if the data migration has been a blocker for you so far!

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Get started with TestRail in minutes
and try TestRail free for 30 days!

Flexible Direct CSV Import

The new direct CSV import feature allows you to migrate existing test cases from a CSV/Excel file using a simple wizard dialog. We support all typical CSV variants, the conversion of common character encodings and various CSV formats. We carefully tested the new import wizard with dozens of different formats and sample files we received from customers to make sure that most files can be imported without any additional steps.

Customizable CSV import and automatic conversion of encodings

Field and Value Mapping

One of the main goals we had when we designed the import feature was to make it as easy as possible to import CSV files without having to prepare, update or convert your data first. This way you can often directly export any existing test cases from Excel or legacy test management tools and import your data to TestRail in just a few clicks. To support this for as many CSV formats as possible, you can easily map your CSV columns to TestRail’s test case fields. We also support importing separate test steps and expected results if you use multiple rows for a single test case.

Map columns in your import file to TestRail fields

Mapping columns to fields is great, but mapping the actual values to dropdown options, checkboxes or multi-select fields is at least as important. So TestRail’s CSV import allows you to do all this and it supports configurable value mappings for both built-in and custom fields. TestRail also provides options to clean your import data, such as removing unnecessary HTML tags from texts.

Automatically convert values from your import files

Store Migration Configs

If you have to import similar CSV files regularly, wouldn’t it be nice if you could reuse the same migration options for your imports? With our new CSV import wizard, you can now also save your import options as well as your field & value mappings to a configuration file, so you can easily reuse settings for additional migrations. And because we use simple config files to store the settings, you can easily share these files with other teams and we plan to build a collection of reusable import configurations to easily migrate your data from many different tools to TestRail.

Improved Data Export

While we were at it, we also reviewed our existing CSV, Excel and XML export options and added often requested improvements. For example, alternatively to exporting all your test cases, you can now select specific sections and sub sections you want to include in the export files.

We also added another often requested feature: supporting the selection of individual columns you want to include in your CSV files. Not only can you select any built-in or custom test case field, we also added options to select the details of the latest or all associated test results.

Upgrading to TestRail 4.1

If you are using a TestRail Hosted (cloud) account or trial, your TestRail instance has already been upgraded and you can start using the new import and export options immediately. For a TestRail Server instance you can download the new version and upgrade your installation. If you have a trial server installation, please contact us for the latest download link. For a licensed server instance, simply login to your customer portal account to download TestRail 4.1.

You can read the full change log to learn more about all changes and improvements included in TestRail 4.1. If you have any questions or feedback about the new version, please let us know!

Today we are making TestRail 4.2 available to all our customers, a new version of our modern test management tool. For the new release we reviewed and added some of the options most often requested by our users. So as part of TestRail 4.2 we are happy to introduce new productivity features such as keyboard shortcuts, make it easier to customize TestRail’s built-in fields as well as add various additional security options such as API keys.

The new version has already been applied to all TestRail Hosted accounts automatically. TestRail Server customers can download the new version starting today. We have also been working on additional new TestRail updates based on customer feedback in parallel, so stay tuned!

Try TestRail Now

Get started with TestRail in minutes
and try TestRail free for 30 days!

Keyboard Shortcuts

Making TestRail as productive for teams as possible has always been one of our main design goals. TestRail always had unique productivity features such as drag&drop support for test case organization, lightning fast navigation, real-time reporting and bulk adding of test results. With TestRail 4.2 we are now also adding keyboard shortcuts for often used features so you can more easily save test cases & forms, add new test steps, jump to the next test or add test results.

We used shortcuts you are most likely already familiar with from other applications, so you can save your test case changes via Ctrl+s, edit most entities by pressing e or navigate between tests via j and k. Please refer to our our detailed overview of key shortcuts we added to TestRail.

Built-in Field Configuration

TestRail makes it easy to configure the fields for test cases and for test results. In fact, many of the fields we ship with TestRail by default (such as steps and expected results) come as pre-configured custom fields so you can easily change or remove them. Some of the fields in TestRail are built-in as TestRail expects these fields to be available for statistics and other features.

Prior to the new release the built-in fields had limited customization options. In TestRail 4.2 we are introducing new options so you can easily hide various built-in fields from your test cases and test result forms, such as the milestone, estimate, version or reference fields. You can also hide or show these fields on a per-project basis now and we also added new options to make it easier to switch other custom fields on and off.

Security Options & API Keys

With TestRail 4.2 we have also changed the behavior of the forgot password and user invite features, so it’s easier to directly choose and set your new password in TestRail. This adds to TestRail’s already very flexible security options such as password policies, IP approval and single sign-on integration. Another useful addition in TestRail 4.2 are API keys. So far you were able to use your TestRail username and password to authenticate with TestRail’s API. In addition to the existing option, TestRail’s new version allows you to configure API keys for the authentication.

By using the new API keys you can easily embed your API authentication details in your test automation scripts or share API keys with external applications without having to worry that your actual user password is leaked. You can also more easily change your user password without affecting any API calls. TestRail also allows you to create multiple API keys per user. This way you can use different keys for different systems, integrations or third-party apps and also easily revoke keys at any time. New API keys can be configured in TestRail under My Settings and you can learn more about accessing TestRail’s API in our documentation.

More Enhancements

TestRail 4.2 also comes with various other enhancements, such as better upgrade options for large instances, new CSV import features or support for deleting closed test runs. Some of the new features and improvements include:

• Deleting closed runs: sometimes it’s useful to delete closed and archived test runs, e.g. when a test run was closed by mistake or if you want to delete old automated test runs you don’t want to keep anymore. By default users don’t have the required permission to delete closed runs, but this can be enabled as part of TestRail’s user roles.
• Additional upgrade and customization options: TestRail was designed to work great for small to very large teams. TestRail 4.2 adds new features to make it easier to upgrade and customize massive TestRail databases. For example, starting with TestRail 4.2 it’s possible to upgrade the database from the command line, and custom fields are added by the background task for better performance if you have large number of test cases.
• Section descriptions for CSV import: TestRail’s new CSV import functionality has been very popular since we introduced it earlier this year. Starting with TestRail 4.2 you can now also import section descriptions from CSV files and select a separate column to import the description from.
• New test case details in sidebar: we also added additional information about test cases to the sidebar of the test case page. This makes it now easier to directly identify when a test case was added, who originally wrote the test case and when a specific test case was last changed.
• Full PHP 5.5 support: while we supported PHP 5.5 for some configurations already (namely under Linux with MySQL), the new update also introduces full PHP 5.5 support for all configurations. We are also working on adding full PHP 5.6 support for TestRail Server instances and we expect this to be available soon.

Upgrading to TestRail 4.2

If you are using a TestRail Hosted (cloud) account or trial, your TestRail instance has already been upgraded and you can start using the new import and export options immediately. For a TestRail Server instance you can download the new version and upgrade your installation. If you have a trial server installation, please contact us for the latest download link. For a licensed server instance, simply login to your customer portal account to download TestRail 4.2.

You can read the full change log to learn more about all changes and improvements included in TestRail 4.2. If you have any questions or feedback about the new version, please let us know!