How to enable test automation inside Jira?

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For agile teams, all product release cycles typically follow the same route. Once the story-boarding is completed, backlog is set up in Jira, tasks are being assigned to development after you work out the estimates. Then it is time to ship the application to an initial release.

Most contemporary enterprises use a powerful test automation tool that aligns task development to development goals. Automated testing in the initial phase can give you a fair idea about the accuracy and quality of the build.

Challenges in QA

QA managers and teams line up a series of tests to ensure the development meets customer satisfaction. The ultimate aim is to review the efficiency or reliability and performance of the product.

QA teams test and validate the development against enterprise requirements, accuracy of execution, customer expectations and feasibility of development.

Subsequently, testers carry out defect analysis to identify common defect trends and their causes. Ideally, they should now alert the dev team of these defects to avoid similar bugs/defects in future.

Agile best practice demands that all your QA analysis, testing and monitoring is integrated into each iteration of the sprint. That is from design through to release and maintenance, QA is integral to the Agile approach.

As part of their test strategy, the QA team conduct a series of tests:

• Functional tests
• Usability tests
• Regression tests
• Performance tests
• Defect analysis

As you can see, that is a whole lot of base to cover. And when the project scales and timelines are bigger, this poses potential challenges if your QA is completely manual.

The case for automated testing

Manual testing may be vulnerable to mistakes or oversights. But in some cases, manual testing is not adequate to provide the scale and speed required for Agile delivery.

By automating software testing, one can increase the scope and depth of tests.

Manually testing all the scenarios, workflows and fields is time and cost intensive. Automated tests can be run unattended, overnight without human intervention.

Automated testing also improves the speed of test execution and increases test coverage. Another benefit is the reduced number of human errors and missing results, especially in regression testing.

Additionally, with automation you can re-run the same tests using automation to save time and effort.

Test automation tools produce faster test and defect detection results. Moreover, sharing of all this information is very easy with the entire team and everyone can view the workings of the code. This has an added advantage as development and testing become collaborative. Since developers can interact with the code dynamically.

Integration of testing with Jira

Jira is used for project management, specifically in the area of requirement and defect management. To a certain extent, you can manage manual testing using Jira issue type. However, to manage automated tests, there is no integral method in Jira. Hence, one must rely on integrating with Jira add-ons to manage automated tests. To do that there are two options - either directly integrate with automation tool plugins or integrate with test management add-ons that allow integration with automation tools.

Using a tool that supports integration, you can leverage the powerful features with Jira’s inbuilt capabilities to execute in-depth testing.

This, in turn, enables you to test multiple product cycles, speed up release schedules, validate requirements traceability, manage regressions effectively and track your progress incrementally.

By integrating with Jira, the automated testing tool combines enterprise-grade testing, quality analytics and monitoring with the Jira ecosystem to:

• Define test issues
• Get Jira test requirements
• Manage defects and report on them
• Create linkages between test cases and Jira issues
• Test Jira reports
• Create, manage and execute test cycles and sets
• Monitor traceability
• Use test metrics to analyse results

Use test metrics to analyze results

Using these exhaustive test management and automated testing features, you get a powerful integration of test features and functions that review and validate any project tracked inside Jira.

The importance of Software Testing Metrics

There is great pressure on teams to deliver software products in increasingly shrinking schedules.

Managing QA processes effectively within the tight delivery timelines and releasing high quality products, needs the use of quality metrics.

Test management and test automation tools provide effective software quality insights to assess the stability of a release. Automated software testing metrics help testers to track the quality of software development over a period of time. They can be more confident in their projections about forthcoming schedules and deliveries.

Comprehensive test integration

Automated testing solutions delve deep into complex software environments and execute detailed testing with the help of iterations.

That is a test automation process creates, modifies and details tests. It also builds test plans and execution cycles and implements a powerful set of test functions to any project within Jira.

The testing process thus supports QA teams to manage automated design, planning, development, tracking and revision inside Jira.

This gives more power to the testers with better integration of tools, better visibility and deeper test coverage to meet the scale and complexity of a project.

QMetry Test Management for Jira is one of the top-rated add-ons in the Atlassian Marketplace that provides full support for test automation tools like JUnit, Cucumber, TestNG, UFT, QMetry Automation Framework.

Not only can you Integrate but you can extend QMetry Test management with DevOps/CI using open APIs.

Sign up for a trial version here.