3 Killer JIRA Test Management Hacks

We talk with teams everyday who are looking for testing tools that have the best integration with JIRA. Often we find that most teams are not utilizing JIRA for its full potential. Today we talk about three tips for JIRA Test Management to help testers get faster and more efficient.

Personalize and Team-imize your Dashboards

In JIRA, the dashboard view is your friend. The dashboard view can provide instant information within your current project, or across projects, which can be viewed as a team or individually. This helps with prioritizing the testing work you need to accomplish while also seeing a team view on how your issues are moving within the current sprint/iteration. For example, do you need to see which User Stories need Test Coverage? What about seeing which bug issues have been moved to “Ready for QA” with your name in the “Assigned to” field? Below are a couple commonly used reports that can benefit your testing:

• Sprint Health → This helps see the big picture of what you team is aiming towards. Always good to see how the team is trending to help prioritize your work.

• “Assigned to” and “Ready for QA” Filtering → If leveraging a status of QA notifications, you can create “Ready of QA” or “Ready for Test” filters and charts to visual the issues that need to be worked on.

Meaningful Relationships Last Forever

We all know that the more you relate to someone, the better relationship will be. Relating your issues is easy to do in JIRA by utilizing the “Relates to” and “Links to” fields. These are commonly forgotten fields that can alleviate all the headaches involved with issue relation.

Everyone wants to be on the same page. And by everyone, I mean your Product Owner, Developer, Tester and Stakeholders when you are talking about issues in JIRA. Sometimes the PO wants to know what Test Cases “Link to” their User Story so they can help validate test scenarios. However, they may also want to know what bug issues “Relate to” their story as testing has progressed. A developer might want to know what Test Runs link to their Bug Issues and potentially what user stories “Relate to” their unresolved bug is blocking from ever getting to production. Linking bugs to one another can also show where there might be duplicates. This can help consolidate bugs so developer time can be spent elsewhere.

Get Notified!

Remember when you signed up as a member for “xyz company” and you needed to give them your email address? You probably got bombarded with emails that you don’t care about through their marketing dripp program. However, I bet when you buy something through that membership that ONE thing you want to know is when the arrival of the product will get to your home. Obviously you don’t want to be notified of everything single change on a JIRA issue. JIRA comes with extremely customizable email notifications so that you can avoid all the constant notifications for an issue. Whether you simply want to “watch” a high priority bug issue, or set up rules for all issues in your project, JIRA has you covered.

We‘ve had over 5,000 people watch our webinar, Using JIRA for Test Case Management. Watch a replay of the webinar here.