How to use JIRA as a test management tool besucher Follow Feb 25 · 4 min read

While there are companies which are heavily working on incorporating artificial intelligence into the software testing automation tools, on the other side of the spectrum are some other ones which still don’t spend any resources on testing at all ─ and you have anything between, mainly in form of some kind of manual testing only.

According to the ISTQB® WorldWide Software Testing practices Report 2017–18, test management activities like test metrics and test effort estimation is a topic at only 23.5% of the companies of whose representatives even filled out the questionnaire at all.

This article is for those who are at the beginning of testing a large project, involving other testers and who started looking for options of a test management tools to be able to track the and analyze multiple testing efforts and test results. There are multiple ones on the market, and even if they can really ease your work, only a small number of companies use them.

Why to use JIRA?

Since JIRA is widely used as an issue management tool, there might be a chance your company already uses it. Thus, you don’t have go through the effort of convincing all the financial stakeholders about purchasing and implementing a new tool, you can use it as a Swiss army knife of issue management in this case. All you need is an admin right (on the whole JIRA, not just on a single project) and a project to play around with.

How to set it up

After you have the rights mentioned above, you have to create a “Test Case” issue type if it still doesn’t exist. Next, assign this new issue type to your particular project. From now, let the test team fill these items with steps of the particular test cases. You can even define a template for the test cases and expected results, thus making the test planning easier.

You also have to set up the test case workflow and the test case states. All these require a few hours’ work at the test planning phase. Don’t worry if you have the test cases in an “offline” document like a csv file: JIRA allows you to bulk upload them, just make sure the file is well-formatted.

Having the test cases set up, you can put pretty handy graphs together. One I’ve found particularly helpful was the Created Issues vs. Resolved Issues one. Setting it up to be cumulative, you can easily see the progress of the testing, also the resolution, having an optimum momentum where the two lines meet each other. You can also draw a conclusion on the state of the testing cycle having in mind “The Magic Number,” where you can connect stopping to a pre-identified number of bugs, after which the chance of finding another one is reduced dramatically.

Another useful chart can be where you sum up the status of bugs: Fixed, Won’t be fixed etc. If you have an exit criteria on the number of unfixed bugs, this pie chart can serve as a perfect semaphore for that. It can also show the success rate of bug fixing at the end of a testing cycle.

Having a new system in place, I’ve also set up two group of test cases: a “critical path” to perform smoke testing at the beginning of the testing cycle and all the other test cases. Having the charts among each other could show a pretty good overview of the current state of the system. As these groups can be separated by the labels of the JIRA issues, specifying other labels you can set up all kinds of test case groups.

The disadvantages of using JIRA as a test management tool

Unfortunately, JIRA doesn’t know the concept of test run so you have to store the results of the separate tests in the same issue, or copy them to new instances, making special queries for reporting run again and again.

As mentioned, JIRA was not planned for test management, so there is no such thing as a main test report in it. If you want to generate and publish one, you have to put together metrics and export their results in a report document, then send it out to your project stakeholders. Though this requires less effort than struggling around with test cases in Excel, it might still require around half an hour to put every relevant information into the document, proofread and share it.

Even the manufacturer Atlassian itself declares there are many test management tools out there, and the manuals for using only JIRA are dated from 2018, making them kinda outdated in this industry.

Evaluate the options

Using the experiences you collected with JIRA as a test management tool, you can step forward to evaluate more sophisticated test management tools. You can consider building one for yourself, integrating JIRA with a test case manager, or choose one from the market like TestRail, TM4J, Zephyr or anything else.

The author was not supported by JIRA manufacturer Atlassian to write this article.