5 ways Xray improves your agile testing in Jira

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Is your team able to pivot with changing demands, accelerate new features, and provide the highest product quality? Being agile allows you to move fast, make changes, and keep quality at the center of your work. 

Xray empowers your team to strive towards continuous improvement, optimize testing efforts and exceed quality goals with features and workflows that support agile methodologies.  

Built-in features directly support agile testing and development practices like the agile board enhancements and the Jira native issue types. Not to mention the tight integration with Jira that opens up a channel for clear communication and collaboration between testing and development 

Here are 5 ways Xray improves your agile testing in Jira

Promotes collaboration

Xray easily adapts to your team’s needs and gives you the freedom to use the tool how you want. Because Xray is so tightly integrated with Jira, everyone is encouraged to contribute to quality. 

Xray also empowers your team to collaborate throughout the entire testing process and every member on the team can easily create, plan, and execute test cases. Xray's agile board enhancements are key to this since they provide full visibility over the test cases and who is responsible for each. 

Xray-agile-board-enhancements

Increases transparency

Immediate information visibility means there’s never a need for handoffs and time wasted on passing information. A customized dashboard provides you with immediate visibility into the testing progress. This way, you don't have to ask someone about results, testing progress, or the coverage status of any given test, test plan or requirement 

You can see how a user story is from a QA standpoint, right from the story issue screen. Likewise, you can see QA feedback in your existing Agile/Scrum Boards

  • With Xray you can see what is happening on your existing Agile Boards or on your stories. 

  • You have real time testing/coverage feedback on the issues you’re working on providing clear insights on quality.

  • Quickly analyze test results and evaluate how a Story is on different versions, besides the actual one

  • Get immediate visibility into the testing progress with Xray's dashboard gadgets 

xray-dashboards-and-gadgets

Optimizes efforts

Optimize your test management efforts across planning, executing and reporting in several major ways. 

  • Easily create and share reports around your testing progress using the Xray Document Generator 

  • Get real-time information of your project status using Jira dashboards

  • Avoid wasting time on unnecessary activities and automate your testing

  • Easily synch your automated test results with frameworks including JUnit, TestNG, Robot, Cucumber, etc. 

You can also adopt BDD to align your team and automate testing. BDD encourages all team members to work closely using a common, non-technical language to set the expectations and behavior of a feature. Because of BDD, they share a common understanding of the work that they have to deliver.

Xray-bdd-cucumber-test-automation

Sustains commitment

People are at the center of your organization and that means they need to have quick and seamless ways of communicating with each other. Since Xray is a Jira native application, your testing and development teams are working in the same tool and have full visibility over the testing progress.

  • No need to go to different tools to have access to all the information

  • Testers can clarify PBI's (product backlog items), assess risks and provide better estimates

  • Developers, product owners, and business analysts can also provide feedback on testing related activities

  • Put the focus on quality by having developers and testers working together in the same development and testing related activities  (Mob programming) 

xray-issue-screen-test-runs

Encourages flexibility

Xray is a flexible tool that you can adapt to your team’s needs. Don’t be afraid to make changes in your processes as you see fit, as that contributes to an agile and flexible mindset. 

  • Add fields, customize screens, take advantage of the many Jira benefits for issues also for testing related entities
  • Use all or a subset of the entities provided by Xray
  • Use one or more Test Plans per sprint to track the progress of different subset of Tests
  • Use Sub-Test Executions, if you want to track your test execution work as sub-tasks of your stories similarly to other development related tasks 

xray-test-plans-screen

Boost team productivity and collaboration with agile testing in Jira

At the center of the agile methodology is a mindset of flexibility and collaboration. Don’t forget that mindset is the most important element. Once your team is used to an agile mindset, use tools to support your journey. 

You’ll find that a tool is only a means towards an agile way of working but it can be a valuable asset. At Xray we want to empower teams to adopt agile to their own needs and use it to accelerate their testing practice to boost quality.

Want to know more about How to adopt agile testing using Xray? Check out our eBook: Unlocking Agile Testing.

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