When you start creating your first test cases, the fastest (and, often, cheapest) way to keep track of everything is almost always to use a free tool that your team already has access to, like Excel or Google Sheets.

As the number of test cases increases and your team grows, most teams find that tracking everything on spreadsheets doesn’t scale. Spreadsheets make it difficult to organize your test cases over time, capture test evidence like screenshots or defects, follow results across different test runs, cycles, sprints, or releases, manage access and permissions, or integrate with your automated tests or CI pipelines.

In this article, you will learn why many teams that start growing usually end up switching to a dedicated test management tool and the steps to migrate from Excel or Google Sheets to Testmo successfully.

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Why Switch to a Test Management Tool

Tools like Google Sheets are not scalable, and the time you spend maintaining them could be much better used to do what you actually like to do: test!

Enter dedicated test management tools like Testmo.

As soon as you open a test management tool, it is clear how easy it will be to manage your tests and how much productivity and time you will gain back for actual testing by:

• Giving you an efficient way to store all your test cases and results in one place (no more multiple-versioned spreadsheets with different permissions spread across different locations in a drive somewhere!)
• Getting real-time updates to your reports and dashboards, which means you can share any updates to stakeholders much faster
• Being able to add detailed descriptions and comments to your test results with rich text formatting and uploading screenshots, logs, or other attachments to make it easy to share all the details about issues discovered during testing with other team members
• Integrating with your CI/CD Pipeline and automated test framework to streamline your workflows
• Integrating with your Issue Tracker makes collaboration between teams fast and gives you full traceability from requirements  to test plans to results
• Tracking every change on a test case and seeing the full history of results across various versions, configurations, and iterations so you can make decisions faster and with confidence in the validity of your information

Once you have decided that a test management tool is the way forward, it’s time to think about how to prepare for that migration.

Preparing for a Smooth Migration to a Test Management Tool

As you prepare to migrate from sheets, one of the first steps is to identify what data or objects you will actually migrate.

For instance, some teams think they might try to import historical test result data into their new test management tool. However, this is not usually an advisable approach.

Besides the fact that most test management tools don’t support importing historical test results, trying to import old results isn’t likely to be a worthwhile use of time.

• Migrating to a new tool is a perfect opportunity to improve and restructure your test suite, but that means older results wouldn't fit the new structure
• Your old tool usually uses different ways to store, visualize or structure test runs and results, and trying to reformat that data to fit in your new tool is often not worth the investment of time or effort (not to mention the fact that your new TCM tool will give a higher level of reporting and faster workflows that will ultimately make old data obsolete)
• Detailed records of older test runs and results for past releases are often not that interesting or important, especially since tools like Excel and Google Sheets don’t make it very easy to track trends in historical results

Your team can keep your existing documentation of old test results and historical data as an archive for future reference if needed. Focusing on improving and restructuring your test suite is a much more useful use of your time.

For these reasons, teams migrating to a new TCM tool focus on migrating their test cases, which will be relevant for future testing, even if you take the opportunity to refine and restructure them.

The most common way to import your test cases is by using CSV files, which is usually the first step to migrating from your current Excel and/or Google Sheets. This will allow you to easily export your current test cases and easily map columns to the fields in your new tool.

The following suggestions will simplify the process of importing your existing test cases to your new TCM:

• Clean up and De-clutter: This is a great opportunity to clean up the test cases you have on your sheets and review what you really need to move to your new tool. Remove duplicates, get rid of unnecessary test cases and steps, review test names for clarity and typos, and name all your columns
• Organization and Structure: Plan how you want your repository to look like. You can take this opportunity to restructure your test cases to reflect an easier and more intuitive organization that will make finding the right test cases easier and optimize your workflow. It's often a good idea to structure your folders based on your application structure or user interface
• Divide to Conquer: Split your test cases into multiple CSV files. This will help you detect any import error faster and make it easier to correct it. The first splitting rule should be by template, and then you can mirror your folder organization and split them into as many or as few files as you see fit
• Templates and Custom Fields: Plan how many test case templates and how many custom fields you will need by checking what are the default fields and templates of your TCM tool:
  • If you have columns on your CSV file that don’t match the default fields of the TCM tool, create those custom fields beforehand so you can match them correctly on import. Make sure to choose the right data type for them so you won’t have any formatting issues
  • Templates will help you cater to different testing needs. For example, a test case with steps will probably have a different template than a test case with only a simple description so you can capture each step's result
• Backup, Backup, and Backup: We all should back up our data regularly and you can take this opportunity to save all this work somewhere secure for future reference if needed. Even after starting to use a TCM tool, make sure you back up your repository and instance regularly and in a secure place

Importing Into your New Test Management Tool

Now that you have all your test cases cleaned up, your CSV files split and organized, and your templates and custom fields created, it’s time to import everything into your new TCM tool. We’ll use Testmo as our TCM tool for this example.

In the Testmo Repository, you’ll have the Import button. That will open a new window where we’ll do the entire import process:

Here you should:

• Select the CSV separator. It might change according to your sheets' settings. If you don’t know what it is, just open your CSV file in any text editor and check what character appears between each column name
• Select the first row Testmo should start parsing by entering a row number, and check if it has the column names. The first row should have the column names to make importing easier
• Choose the correct file encoding to make sure any special characters are correctly parsed and imported
• Choose the Template for the CSV file you are importing
• If your test cases have multiple steps, make sure you choose the option A test case can span across multiple rows so Testmo can correctly parse the CSV

If you want Testmo to automatically create a folder structure of hierarchy and correctly place each test case in its folder, make sure you include a column with the folder hierarchy for each test case and you can select one of the options that starts with Add test cases & new folder (...)  and Testmo will do everything for you. If you are importing a folder at a time, without any folder structure in the CSV file, just select the first option and choose the folder to import the test cases.

After that, you’ll have a chance to specify the type of data in each field and map values from specific fields. 

Fields of type Checkbox, Dropdown, and Multi-select will allow you to map the CSV values to the field values available:

Fields of type Date will allow you to choose the date format:

Fields of type Steps and Text will allow you to choose the text formatting:

After this, you’ll be able to see a preview of a couple of test cases to make sure everything looks good before import. If you need, you can go back and adjust any mapping, and if not, just choose Import cases and you’ll have all test cases created on your repository in no time.

Double-check if everything is correct with the imported test cases and repeat the process for all CSV files.

What to Do Post-Import?

You’ve finished the import, double-checked your test cases, and you are now ready to start testing!

If you haven’t done these yet, here are some things you might want to do now:

• Invite users to your instance and set their roles and permissions
• Set up integrations with your issue tracker and pipeline
• Set up your automation workflow
• Create your first Milestone/Cycle/Plan/Sprint with your first Runs
• Create a sandbox project where users can try the tool without fear of messing things up

With your TCM tool, your team will be more productive and efficient. Take any extra time you’ve gained to improve your knowledge, read other articles and guides, and become an even better tester.

Happy Testing!

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