How do you organize your release tests?

Question

In the company where I work we have major releases twice every year. Extensive testing (automated and manual) is done the weeks before. The automated tests produce logfiles, the results of the manual tests are written down in test plans (Word documents). As you can imagine this results in a lot of different files to be managed and interpreted by the test engineers.
How do you organize your release tests?
E.g. Do use a bug tracker? Do you use any other tools? How do you specify what has to be tested? Who does the testing? How is the ratio developers / testers?

Answer 1

You could use combination of a bug tracker (JIRA, Mantis, Bugzilla) and test case management tool like testlink

Answer 2

If you develop with MS products and technologies you could always look at Team Foundation Server. I find it fits perfectly for managing automated Unit Testing/builds, managing bugs, managing test results, assigning testing tasks, etc. That is what we use. Its not cheap thoguh, but worth the investment if its in the budget.

Answer 3

It's almost impossible to properly organise the testing without keeping good track of your test and their results. We use PMC suite(1) and it has a very useful organisation structure for the tests:

• Test Scenarios (batteries of tests)
  • Test Cases (linked to the Requirements)
    • Test runs with their respective results

These are linked to the Bugs which are in their turn linked to the Tasks etc.

When a manual test is run the tester executes a scenario and goes through the test cases, with the results being tracked. All found issues are documented as Bugs.

1. it's developed by my company but please don't consider this to be a ad :)