Have you ever had to ask whether your defect fix was deployed to a particular environment? You shouldn’t need to, because the answer should always be readily available. Having to request information on the status of your defect fix indicates inefficiencies and a lack of maturity within your organization’s process.

Test management tools help improve the efficiency of development and testing teams by prioritizing test cases, so it makes sense that they would appeal to companies that have adopted an agile methodology to enable quicker release cycles. Here are five ways test management tools make a difference in agile environments.

For decades brainstorming has been our go-to method for ideation, yet it holds back our success when the environment doesn't encourage everyone to contribute. Instead, try brainwriting—writing ideas on paper and letting teammates iterate on them. It improves not only the quantity of ideas you get, but also the quality.