Why we built this: a guide to collective testing, for engineering leaders

, CPO, Testlio

As an engineering leader on Testlio’s platform team and former product leader at Skype and Microsoft, I’ve evaluated many new tools and concepts to elevate engineering practices and processes. To ensure better efficiency and team empowerment, I ask myself these three questions:

  • How can I simplify my DevOps toolchain and team operations while achieving our goals?
  • How will a particular tool affect each stakeholder? Does it make the way they relate to each other easier, faster, or more cost-effective?
  • What tactics and capabilities could I implement with the help of this tool?

Our software testing management platform’s latest iteration, Testlio 3.1, is engineered to fit within this context. First, it consolidates the testing toolchain. Second, it creates a single, high-visibility, boundaryless channel for our Testlio network, Testlio employees, and client stakeholders to conduct, manage, and review tests. Third, it opens up possibilities for collective testing – the constructive interference of Testlio’s experienced software testers combined with our client’s internal experts.

We asked ourselves: what if there was a single quality feedback tool, for all stakeholders, in the testing toolchain?

Collective testing via Testlio 3.1 is our most powerful testing management platform to date.

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Improving client processes

Quality assurance is a form of risk management—so launching without testing is a blind leap of faith (that usually ends badly.)

In turn, great quality assurance is more than checking if something is working. Risks need to be evaluated with full context and deterministically. That’s a tall task for any organization—which is why internal testing often supplements with tools and partners. These external resources are often critical assets for deploying with confidence.

The problem is that many of these tools and groups work in isolation and are internally hosted with restricted access and single-user invite/access for external collaborators. These boundaries lead to a lack of context, data duplication, and slow processes. More, they often come with overwhelming integration setups and maintenance.

With Testlio 3.1, we broke these boundaries for our customers. You can leverage a single test management system for your internal team and Testlio’s external resources on-demand, whenever it makes the most sense. All without complicated internal versus external workflows. The core objective is end-to-end collaboration: allowing your team to scale while keeping data integrity within a streamlined and straightforward process.

We established a Teams module to manage your team with full transparency and control of who you work with within our Network. Conduct testing internally with your team, work directly with our Network and Services, or work together – it’s just a matter of how you assign work via the same tool, using the same processes.

Our customers have asked if they could use our platform for their teams, internally. With, Testlio 3.1, our answer is a resounding YES. Customers end up with a single holistic test management tool to conduct testing and source insightful feedback at scale. The best part: our tool comes free of charge with our services.

Integrating and maintaining seamlessly

For me, no matter how data-rich or cost-effective a product is, there are always concerns about adoption and maintenance.

How will it integrate with other flows and tools in the chain? How easy is it to implement and maintain new solutions in-house?

At Testlio, we use our own tools and processes to test and use our platform. I look to my teams to design the system to our needs and aspirations, with the same principles in mind as our customers.

Our goal is to offer a set of plugins, APIs, and out-of-the-box solutions for connecting your workflows – but we also provide transitions from current systems if a customer wishes to leverage and modernize their setups. Our data structures, workflows are compatible with other common test management tools, making it easy to convert over and start right away.

We work to make adopting and implementing Testlio easy, intuitive and fast.

The bottom line

For engineering teams, adopting new products is about impacting existing processes and capabilities. The adoption of new products either improves processes and decision-making or hurts because of longer adoption times and constant maintenance.

Testlio 3.1 provides a simplified, scalable, and collaborative tech stack that leads to faster development time. And easy integration and maintenance mean less time making our product fit, and more time creating yours.