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Scaling Continuous Testing in Jira

Scaling Continuous Testing in Jira
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Scaling Continuous Testing in Jira

Extensive use of manual testing is widely considered to be a significant contributor to increasing project costs and delaying releases. Continuous Testing is the backbone of the modern DevOps approach and enables teams to test early, often and continuously. It takes advantage of automated tests as a core piece of the software delivery pipeline, helping to minimise the friction points that are inherent to integration, testing and deployment processes.

Embedding Continuous Testing into the DevOps pipeline ensures that defects are found sooner and applications are delivered to production with fewer defects. In addition to making testing cheaper and more efficient, Continuous Testing provides a safety net for instances where new code causes unexpected behaviours, regressions and defects. A global study commissioned by CA Technologies suggested that adopting DevOps had benefits across numerous activities:

DevOps benefits

Picking the right tool

There are many tools available for DevOps practitioners using Jira which can be invaluable additions to your technology stack. Jira supports a collaborative environment with the Atlassian tool stack, 3rd party tools and its ecosystem throughout all DevOps phases: Plan, Build, Continuous integration, Deploy, Operate and Continuous feedback.

This is true for continuous testing as well. Tools like Selenium, Robot Framework and Cucumber are open source options that help with automated functional testing and Test Management for Jira (TM4J) acts as the single source of truth inside Jira for developers and testers across the DevOps workflow. TM4J is a full-featured test management app that seamlessly integrates with Jira. With its extensive REST API, which comes free as standard, you can publish automated test execution results to TM4J from any test automation tool.

It supports out-of-the-box integration with Jenkins and Bamboo or your chosen CI/CD compatible tool to eradicate bottlenecks by performing the right tests at the right stage of each DevOps phase. TM4J also allows you to create a BDD-Gherkin test cases from within your user story in Jira. Once the test cases have been signed off, they can be pulled automatically from the CI/CD tool, which generates a Gherkin feature file parsable by Cucumber.

Test Management for Jira tool

Test Management for Jira enables teams with faster and smarter approaches to speed up manual software testing and Continuous Testing at scale. In this case study from Atlassian, Loblaw Digital customised an end-to-end, scalable testing solution with Test Management for Jira, which has reduced testing time, increased productivity, improved communication, and empowered the company to deliver more effectively.

"Our time to deliver has 10x-ed multiple times. Having one suite and one set for both automated and manual tests brought us down to two-week releases from monthly, then to weekly. We’re now at daily, which means this system scales"

 

JUSTIN WATTS - Director of Productivity Engineering

The most critical piece of Continuous Testing is getting real-time feedback. By using Test Management for Jira you get complete visibility and traceability of the testing process across teams and can surface information to the right people at the right time. You can take advantage of up to 70 built-in reports and gadgets to make informed decisions based on real-time metrics across manual and automated test results.

Test Management for Jira reports

Its powerful filtering capabilities enable non-technical users to query and make sense of the testing results across Jira projects, epics and user stories. The low learning curve of the interface means you can quickly create live dashboards to track coverage, progress and quality, and share them with leads, managers and directors for deeper analysis of test data.

Overcoming the DevOps challenge

Practicing DevOps makes integration a simple, repeatable process that is part of the everyday development lifecycle and reduces integration costs while responding to defects as early as possible. Having great tools that are tightly integrated is central to success and overcoming the challenges of DevOps implementation. Atlassian Jira combined with Test Management for Jira is the best fit to address CI/CD and Continuous Testing practices without losing speed or sacrificing quality throughout the DevOps pipeline. 

Start your free trial:

If you haven’t tried using Test Management for Jira (TM4J) yet, get a 30-day free trial here:  

Go to the Marketplace

 

What do you think?

Do you have any thoughts on scaling continuous tests in Jira? Let us know at @Adaptavist using #TM4J.

 

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