How to write effective test preconditions with TestFLO

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Preconditions are one of the essential parts of a test case, besides test steps and IDs. There’s certainly more valuable information you can add to your test cases, but those three elements are a must-have.

TestFLO is a flexible test management solution for Jira that allows establishing testing processes that suit your teams best. Just a few days ago, we have released a new version with a dedicated field to manage your preconditions fast and easy. Here’s a quick how-to.

Activate the field

The Preconditions feature is available to every Jira project with enabled TestFLO. To activate it, simply go to the Test Management section of your Project Settings, open the General tab, and click on the Preconditions slider. If you are launching TestFLO in your project for the first time, the field will be enabled by default.

That’s it! Now you’re ready to go.

Define preconditions in the repository

Activating Preconditions adds the precondition repository to your Jira project. You can find it in the navigation sidebar of the project, right under Preconditions menu item. Here you can define, search and edit common preconditions used in your test cases. From now on, you won’t have to write that a user has to be logged in as an administrator over and over again. Preconditions from the repository will be available for future use in your test cases.

Preconditions on test cases

After activating the field in the configuration and defining a few preconditions in the repository, we can start designing our test cases. When creating a Test Case Template or a Test Case issue, you will see a Preconditions field. It allows you to write single preconditions ad-hoc or add common ones from the repository. Just enter at least 3 characters and the autocomplete dropdown will show you matching preconditions. Select the one you were searching for and it will be imported automatically. Fast and easy.

Saving ad-hoc preconditions

Sometimes when you’re writing preconditions ad-hoc, you may realize that a particular precondition is really useful and you might want to reuse it in the future. Of course, you can go to the repository and add it just as you did before. But there’s a better way to do it now. Simply click on the plus icon on a chosen precondition to send it to repository directly from the field. You can continue writing the test without changing the context.

 Try out TestFLO - Jira Test Management and QA Tool on the Atlassian Marketplace.

If you have any questions regarding TestFLO or test management in general, reach out to me at marcin.zurawiecki@deviniti.com or leave a comment below; I’m always happy to share my knowledge about best practices in testing.