Quality Boards: Test Automation in Jira

For agile teams, all product release cycles typically follow the same route –

• Once the storyboarding is completed,
• backlog is set up in Jira,
• tasks are assigned to development after you work out the estimates.
• Then it is time to ship the application to an initial release.

Agile teams across the world are familiar with Jira – the collaboration tool designed for issue and project tracking developed by Atlassian. While the basic use of Jira is to track issues, bugs etc. with your mobile and software apps, many teams have extended its use beyond just planning, managing and reporting.

For example, some DevOps teams like using Jira for test case management. And with a little creativity, a little customization, it can absolutely be configured to support manual test case management.

However, when it comes to supporting Test Automation in Jira, there is no direct way of doing that in Jira. The only way to incorporate or support Test Automation in Jira is by installing supporting apps from Marketplace in your Jira instance.

Now there are two categories of apps that could help your agile teams achieve test automation in Jira.

One is – Test Automation Apps. The problem with these apps is they only support automated test cases. Now to manage manual test cases, you will still have to rely on some other marketplace apps or do it in Jira as suggested earlier.

The other option is to install – an app from the category Test Management Apps.

QMetry Test Management for Jira (QTM4J) offers complete test management capabilities to Agile and DevOps Teams inside Jira. QTM4J provides powerful test authoring capabilities for Manual Testing as well as provides seamless integration with Automation tools.

QTM4J has integration capabilities with automation tools such as QAF/QAS that is QMetry’s Selenium based framework and IDE developed as part of contribution towards Open Source Community. It also allows integration with other automation tools such as HP UFT, Cucumber, Specflow, JUnit and TestNG.

So how does this Test Automation work inside Jira?

QMetry Test Management for Jira integrates with Automation Tools which then allows users to import automation test results into Jira.

Now there are two different ways of integrating with the automation tools –

• Users can directly import their automation test result (JSON/XML/Zip) files using a REST API as soon as the automation test gets executed, which creates a new test run in Jira with all associated test cases and results as executed in the automation test.
• QMetry can easily integrate with other CI/CD tools. There are ready made plugin available for Maven, Jenkins and Bamboo for importing test results.

So next question that arises is – How does Test case reusability work to avoid repeatability between manual and automated tests? This is how QTM4J ensures reusability –

• If Test case summary and Test step summary (for all steps) matches with the automated Test case, Test case key and version will be reused.
• If Test case summary matches and Test step summary do not match (for any of the steps) with the automated Test case, Test case key will be reused but new version will be created.
• If Test case summary does not match, new Test case will be created.

Combining the power of Jira and automated testing can remarkably speed up your cycles, improve collaboration and execute metrics that help with project delivery and visibility.

To see this in action, sign up for a free trial of QTM4J.