Jira, as a collaborative tool that is designed for issue tracking and project management by Atlassian, is known by agile teams and organizations in the software industry. Even though the initial intended use of Jira was to track and manage the reported issues in the system only; with the development of software and mobile applications, project teams across the board have extended the use of Jira beyond planning, tracking, and organizing. Despite some limitations and lack of some aspects, DevOps and agile teams around the world are using Jira software for test management in projects. By banking on the flexible and customizable features of this software, along with a dash of creativity, Jira can be configured completely to be used as an end to end test management solution. As agile and DevOps methodologies continue to grow for teams, more and more firms are leaning towards Jira. This is large because project managers prefer keeping the development and testing activities in one platform to increase their visibility. Therefore, it is pertinent for organizations to embed adept test management tools for Jira and integrate it to attain the best results.
Configuration of Test Management Tools for Jira
Regardless of apparent lack of support in Jira for testing processes, many teams have been able to use it exclusively for test management by customization issues in two main ways; using a user story, or adding a test case issue type.
In order to create a test case issue type in Jira to facilitate the testing process, it is imperative for the project managers to implement the following steps thoroughly.
- Creating the test case issue type in Jira
- Adding steps in it, which are required to achieve the desired results
- It is also required to convert the test case into the parent issue to perform the testing process for the project
- In order to execute the test, the managers should create a subtask and rename it as ‘test run’
- The affected versions, the results of the testing process, and the team member who’s running the test should all be added in the subtask ‘test run’
This sounds ideal in textbook form, however, the project managers encounter some challenges when they apply these steps in projects. Jira is especially challenging when it comes to rerunning or reusing tests as it closes the test cases once they have been executed. Every time the project teams need to test a new version or rerun the execution of tests, they would have to make new subtasks as test runs. Similarly, whenever there is a need to log the history of a particular test case, the team members would be required for new subtasks. This process can get tiresome and time-consuming, especially when managers are closing in on deadlines. Usually, in test case management, the project managers have to reuse old test cases if they are applicable or relevant to current features or aspects or to simply gain visibility into the logs of the said test runs. However, this process gets complicated in Jira as it generally marks the tasks (test runs or test cases) as done when they are executed so the teams cannot use them again as subtasks.
In the context of using ‘user stories’, the project managers are able to customize issue types in Jira by tweaking or making slight changes to the user stories. The first step in this process is to create a user story as a test case, which is similar to using a test case issue type as parent issues in the first option. Secondly, a subtask should be added in the model which again serves as a test run or a test case, and it should be linked back to the user story. The successful completion and execution of all subtasks pave the way for the user stories to be moved into production.
Similar to the case of test case issue type, the application of this customization, in reality, poses challenges in terms of reusing test cases, and the alignment of test cases. In Jira workflows, all issues that have been executed and completed are marked as done and are closed out. Therefore, if the project managers want to re-open the issue or the subtask and then convert it again to a test case type or template, the organization would have to bear a lot of overhead maintenance. In addition to this, if there are multiple test cases that are linked to various user stories, the alignment becomes highly difficult.
