Using Jira to manage project quality

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If you are using Jira to track issues, bugs, project plans and workflow already, you are familiar with the ecosystem and how it enables Agile teams for speedy delivery.

The use of Jira however is not limited to software projects. You will find that many alternative functions into manufacturing, healthcare human resources use Jira for tracking specific tasks like supply chain, recruitment processes or patient information.

The reason why Jira is so popular is that it allows Agile and DevOps teams to track a task or work item of any time or magnitude from start to finish. Its workflow represents the path an issue has charted from creation to completion.

Using Jira to manage the quality of your projects

Jira is now widely accepted as the standard tool for agile software development and testing.

It has powerful features that enable collaboration across globally distributed teams easily. Plan sprints, track your progress and use reporting and analytics to gain visibility.

One compelling reason for recommending Jira for managing project quality is that has support for Scrum and Kanban approaches. Its feature set is designed mainly for the most popular Agile frameworks used by teams globally.

How Jira enables testing

Project quality of course relies on the efficiency and speed of testing and quality assurance. While Jira may be originally designed for project tracking, many teams are using Jira for test case management. This is because it makes things much simpler and easier by allowing developers, managers and testers to work within the same environment.

However, to take it to the next level and truly optimize Jira for test management, you can try using plugins or apps designed specifically for testing inside Jira.

There are two ways you can do this:

1) Apps like QTM4J (QMetry Test Management for Jira) that is a full-fledged test management module build inside Jira and available on the marketplace.

QTM4J enables complete test management from creation of test cases to linking test cases with stories and grouping them together, assigning testers, saving test results, track execution history and automatically maintain the audit of test artifact changes. You can organize your assets using a folder-based hierarchy and make critical quality decisions using QMetry’s advanced reporting and analytics feature.

All this in the same familiar environment of Jira. So, while there is no learning curve involved, you can find significant benefits in the way you test and the overall test coverage visibility and traceability.

2) The second way is to integrate it with a standalone tool like QMetry Test Management. This is an enterprise grade tool that lets you include testing into the project lifecycle. Using a single QMetry project you can integrate with multiple Jira projects/instances. View linkages and traceability for story, test cases, executions and bugs in Jira and in QMetry. You don’t need to hop across different tools. You can view all the test case details and execution history, right inside one tool reducing learning curve for working across multiple environments.

The enterprise tool provides 140+ reports and Visual analytics to enhance the real-time visibility of product readiness across multiple projects.

Standalone tools are packaged with different hosting options that cover cloud as well as on-premise. Large Enterprises concerned with the security of the infrastructure hosted outside their premise can use on-premise hosting which allows them to secure their data within their infrastructure

QMetry extends integration capabilities beyond Jira to support many more CI/CD tools and automation frameworks. It provides the best of both worlds – Working with Jira and Working with other DevOps supported tools
Additionally, with both these tools you can power up by using QMetry’s open APIs to connect with a range of CI/CD and automation tools.

For example, import test automation results into Jira directly by integrating with tools like Bamboo or Jenkins. Similarly, you can integrate results from tools like QMetry Automation Studio, Selenium, Appium, UFT etc.

Manage both manual and automation test results including exceptions in the test runs, inside Jira.

With the right tool, processes and approach you can really build on your Jira experience to delivery high quality projects on time. There’s no need for multiple tool shopping or hopping.