In case you weren’t already aware, everyone who’s anyone uses JIRA to manage their software development processes. Sure, if you take a walk around the shop floor of your engineering department, you’ll no-doubt see the odd Kanban board with some Post-It’s hanging on a whiteboard or wall for dear life! And while I agree that you definitely can’t beat the feel of physically moving those stories from one column to another in your daily standup; let’s face it – when it comes to managing your backlog, development activities and burndown metrics day-in, day-out – you need something a bit more hardcore. And that’s exactly where JIRA excels!
One place JIRA isn’t quite so hot, is on the Test Management front. If your Definition of Done includes rigorous testing throughout the development lifecyle, then at some stage you’re definitely going to want to expose the scope and results of all that testing to some of your stakeholders. More often than not, certainly in my experience, instead of being available to everyone who needs them – the tests and their results are buried in a variety of tools that are not easily visible to more business focused users.
Your Product Owner for example, probably doesn’t want to go looking through your build server logs to see whether integration tests are being run and what the results are. And your developers and testers don’t want to have to go hunting for evidence of testing in JIRA issues should they need to refer to how something was tested and what the results were, if a problem crops up a couple of months down the line.
Issues like those, and many others – are what turn people to dedicated test management tooling. Nothing too heavyweight. Just enough to be able to record what’s being tested, how, when, by who, and what the results were – and then to expose all of that testing by turning it into reports that can be exposed directly to people who care; presenting the information they need about the quality of your software in a format they can easily digest.
TestRail does all this and more. It provides whoever is doing the testing with an easy to use, lightweight interface that helps users stay focused on the task at hand.
It turns the results of those tests into easy to digest reports. And combined with our API, you can hook TestRail into your automation framework(s) so the value of those tests get exposed also.
And the best thing of all? We integrate with JIRA so you can see what’s being tested directly in your Jira tickets. Oh, and did I mention you only pay for people using TestRail – not for all your JIRA users.
How awesome is that? No more hunting around for evidence that testing is being done. You can just go straight to your story in JIRA and see exactly what test cases are being run for a specific feature. And if you want to know more, you can launch TestRail directly from the JIRA issue, and take a deep dive into your testing processes.
The TestRail team will be at the Atlassian conference in San Jose, September 12-14th – booth #636. We’d love to say hi, and talk to you some more about your software testing needs. Why not swing by and we can give you a warm Californian welcome? 🙂
