What's wrong with Silk Central

Silk Central is quite possibly one of the worst tools I have encountered. Ever. If anything bad was to come from the years leading up to the new millennium it wasn't some fundamental date bug, or 90s pop, it was shoddy software projects like this that somehow made it mainstream. Worse yet, ended up getting companies on board to mandate that teams rely on these shoddy products. *Shudders*

It staggers me how a piece of software can be so full of truly unintuitive and useless rubbish.

The nearest rival, HP Quality Centre, is by no means without flaws (of which it has many), but it is light years ahead of where Silk is pottering, by simply being intuitive and obvious to a user. Sure they're adding slightly more complex concepts in there now, but your basic (and arguably advanced) projects are easy.

My plea: if you find yourself trialing a product, work out your present team workflows (think about these in great detail: for new assets you need review, for old assets you need maintenance, for executed assets you need triage) and see whether or not you can actually do these things easily.

I should apologise, I am aware that Silk probably has hints at useful behaviour buried in there that could be used to satisfy my exampled requirement workflows; my real issue is that it is convoluted and non-intuitive. My finest example is that, after clicking a number of non-intuitive buttons to initiate a test execution (latest version of Silk, early 2013) you then cannot seem to complete a test run via any visible means. If perchance you are in to your car races - which let's face it, how many testers are interested in someone driving around in circles, really - then you may notice a black and white checker flag in the top left corner which either conveys that we have some clipart slapped on the UI to make us feel like we're racing through our tests, or actually this is a button to finish all. Top left corner. No text to guide. An intelligence test that I failed.

Having worked on creating a brand new trading platform (claim to fame), and seeing how easy it is as a QA to question usability, I am genuinely shocked at how such useless UI can be produced. It's not hard to think how users will find your product. Or, if all else fails, just ask them.

</rant>