What is Test Management?”

Test management commonly refers to the activity of managing test process in lifecycle of the project. It is primarily divided in two phases Planning and Execution.  Test management allows you to objectively measure quality and track the progress. Test management by utilizing tool, brings in more standardized approach, reduces waste, better organized way and thus helps organization to expedite taking better strategic decisions.

Need of Test Management Tool?

Teams face many challenges over a period of time which resulted in a need of a solid Test Management tool which would help to overcome below key challenges

  • Collaborative tool and provides same view
  • Realtime data availability
  • Managing increasing/incremental test data
  • Efficient management & tracking of changes to requirements, test cases, artefacts and defects
  • Integration with automation frameworks
  • Excellent built-in Agile way reporting
  • Excellent collaborative dashboards for better visualization and decision making
  • Effective Test case management
  • Sharing the artefacts with multiple team members and work collaboratively

JIRA as Test Management Tool – An effective solution

JIRA provides high flexibility, good set of features and seamless integration which makes it very effective. Even in certain limitations, integrating with other tools helps to make it a kind of complete test management tool. Some of the key features it provides are:

  • Excellent requirement management
  • Create and Configure workflows – With this feature, the process is enforced, standardization is implemented and in parallel its transparent and accessible for different functions and actors.
  • Due to standardization, across various teams and their functions (Dev & QA) the interpretation is same which reduces a waste & conflicts, rework, logging incorrect defects etc.
  • From agile perspective it also helps pulling up people from traditionally separate teams and builds better collaboration
  • Reporting and Dashboarding – JIRA provides excellent reporting & dashboards. The dashboards also can be customized to suite the needs of stakeholders. From Agile perspective, the built-in reports fulfill most of the requirements with no or little customization
  • Dashboards provide real-time view and even configured to get role-wise accesses and views.
  • Custom issue types can be created and configured to create Test cases and execution of the same

Inspite of these rich set of features, JIRA has some limitations like sharing of test artefacts, reuse of test artefacts, share test cases, integration with external automation frameworks, test cycle and automated execution & generating traceability matrix for the same. This calls for integration with Zephyr. Zephyr acts as complete test management plug-in for JIRA.  Zephyr works within JIRA.

Diagram illustrating benefits of Zephyr integration with JIRA

Conclusion

  • JIRA with its rich list of features forms a quite userfriendly, effective and highly scalable test management tool helping to manage E2E process in lifecycle and helping to strategize better in short span of time

-By Prathamesh Kuvalekar