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What is Test Management Software?
Test management is the process of taking your project’s requirements, building a test plan, writing the tests, planning the test activities, and capturing the results. This section explains what test management is, and what features you should look for in a test management tool.
List of Best Test Management Tools:
Zephyr Enterprise
PractiTest
Jira Software
TestCollab
QACoverage
Requirements and Test Management for Jira (RTM)
TestRail
TestFLO for JIRA
SpiraTest by Inflectra
Qase
Here are the most popular test management platforms that we use in our real-time process of testing. I have worked and executed my test cases in Jira Software & TestRail.Let's have look at the tools.
Jira Software
JIRA was an open-source tool available for anyone to download. Its popularity drove thousands of users to adopt it within organizations across the globe. Jira Software is a work management tool for software teams that need to organize and track their work. Jira is incredibly flexible and can be customized to work with your team’s unique workflow, meaning teams of all kinds can enjoy increased productivity and visibility as they march toward releasing amazing software.
How To Create Tests In Jira
Before you write test cases in Jira, you must create a new issue type.To demonstrate, I’m using a Kanban project template in Jira. You will need administrator permission on the project to create a new issue type in Jira, which needs to be done only once. New issue types in Jira can be stand-alone or sub-tasks. Let’s take a look at both.
Standard issue type
To create a new issue type in Jira, you can go to the settings and navigate to Issue types. Here, you will have the option to create a new type. I named my new issue type “Test case”:
jira create new issue type screenshot
Then, you have to add it to the project. Alternatively, you can create the new type directly on the project, unless you plan on using it on multiple projects.
From the project settings, you can also add new statuses. I added Passed and Failed:
From the Issue features menu - Issue linking, you can also add a new way to display how the items are linked together. I added a new way of linking tests because I want my test cases to be linked with the user stories or bugs they are testing:
After the type is created, you can select it from the New issue window:
Jira is a very customizable tool so that you can define specific statuses for the issue types. For testing purposes, you can add statuses matching test results, such as Passed, Failed, and Blocked.
The benefits of using this approach are:
Test cases can be linked to multiple user stories/bug/issues in Jira, therefor existing test cases can be reused.
Test case creation is easy - the test cases are just like any other Jira issue.
However, there are some disadvantages, too:
After the test execution, the status of the test changes, and the previous status is not tracked anymore.
Test steps don’t have dedicated fields, so you can’t add individual test step results.
You can’t create a test suite or a test plan for the test execution.
Tools To Help With Jira Test Case Management
A different approach is the one where you use a test management tool that can integrate with Jira. These tools are designed specifically for test case management and usually provide a lot of features that can help in the testing process, such as:
Traceability
Reporting
Tools integration - and I don’t mean only integration with Jira, but also with test automation tools, communication tools (such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.), email, and so on.
There are several Jira Test Management tool available, among which I will name Zephyr Squad, TestRail, XRay - but the list can go on.
Conclusions
Jira can be a very useful tool in the software development process, and while it’s not specifically a test management solution, it can aid in that direction - either standalone, as discussed above, or by integrations with other tools.