Ok, so I am the Team Lead for an agile project and can't wrap my head around why there seems to be such a big disadvantage (at least for my project as it stands) to the Zephyr integration with Jira.
Previous companies I have worked for, we had no Zephyr, but we had a story which was worked on by a developer and handed to a QA for testing. When bugs were found, we added a "bug" subtask and handed the story back to the developers to resolve the bug and so the loop continued if necessary. For any really minor issues, in discussion with the PM, we could split them out into separate bugs so we could close and release features nd resolve minor issues in a later release.
The current project using Zephyr means we now have a story, a test case and as many separate bug tickets as we have bugs for a single story. For the detail, the story is as you would expect, the test cases are created, linked to the story, closed and then managed in Zephyr (so almost useless from Jira side) and we raise separate bugs from the Zephyr "raise a defect" button so they are linked to the test case.
The end result of this is that the swimlanes in my teams scrum board are crowded with masses of bugs (most of which are minor issues) and the story along with the bugs is passed back and forth. Apart from the mess, making sure the story is in the correct column with a number of bugs floating around that aren't linked to it (but only to the test case).
Zephyr was set up before me, so maybe this is a setup issue (fingers crossed), but Zephyr seems like a great move for the Testing team, but no one seems to talk about the negatives like above which muddies the water for the developers and Team Leads/Scrum Masters.
Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions on how this should be managed to avoid the mess here?
Personally I think it would be awesome if Zephyr created the defects as sub-tasks under the story which would give really clean visibility of the status of a story from the Jira side and minor bugs could be moved out of the story before closing it.
