At Spongecell, we used automated testing with Selenium as much as possible, but manual testing was still necessary.

When I arrived at Spongecell, the developers had created a spreadsheet of test cases. They would divide up the test cases verbally, then email the spreadsheet back and forth to communicate about who carried out which tests, when.

It was a terrible system—there were so many spreadsheets flying around, and you never knew if the information you had was up to date. We tried moving the spreadsheet into a wiki, which was a little better, but we still had problems when folks would edit the wiki at the same time and overwrite one another, or when one person would keep the wiki locked for hours at a time.

I decided there must be some sort of test case tracking webapp—sure enough there were several. I settled on TestLink. It's not pretty but it's fast, not buggy, and gets the job done.

TestLink allowed me to create a database of well written test cases, select a sub–set of them for a specific testing period, have an instance of the test case for each browser (we ran many of our tests in each of several browsers) divvy them up between individual team members, and then track to see which test cases had been executed, and which needed to be completed.

It remained a staple of our testing periods, with maintenance and assignment of the test cases taken over by Allison Wamback, when I was promoted to be Spongecell's Product Manager in August 2007.