What Is Jira And How Does It Help Testers?

By Author: ZenQ
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Many businesses nowadays use customized tools to effectuate test management in agile environment. Atlassian has designed JIRA with features to help businesses to effectuate project management in an agile environment. At the same time, the commercial tool also makes it easier for QA professionals to track a variety of bugs and issues. There are also a number of reasons why JIRA is hugely popular among both enterprises and QA professionals.
Features that Differentiate JIRA from Other Project Management Tools
Refer Anything as an Issue
As noted earlier, JIRA helps testers to track a variety of issues and bugs. It further allows users to treat anything as an issue. For instance, the users can refer a software bug, any specific project task, a leave request form, or a helpdesk ticket as an issue. So they can use the software to track and mange all aspects of the software testing project.
Categorize and Link Issues
JIRA further allows testers to categorize and link various issues in a flexible way. They can categorize individual issues by assigning them to a specific component or version. The labeling ...
... makes it easier for users to find issues based on their labels. Likewise, the users can establish connection between two distinct issues hosted on the same or different servers.
Clone Original Issues
JIRA allows testers to clone individual issues. So they can easily duplicate the original issue, and allow multiple users to access and manipulate a single issue simultaneously. The clone issue can also be connected with the original issue efficiently to accommodate the changes made by multiple users. The software further allows testers to differentiate the cloned issues by adding relevant information like description, summary, issue type, priority, environment, assignee and reporter.
Create Two Types of Boards
JIRA allows agile teams to create and manage issues efficiently using boards. The testers can refer to the custom boards to monitor issues from a single or multiple projects from a single place. They also have option to create two different types of boards, i.e., Scrum and Kanban. The scrum boards help users to focus on iterative and incremental chunks of work. On the other hand, kanban boards make it easier for testers to monitor the workflow and reduce work-in-progress to deliver maximum output on a continuous basis.
Use Filters, Add-ons and APIs
JIRA further effectuates agile project management by providing a variety of add-ons and APIs. The testers have option to customize and extend the software by downloading plug-and-play add-ons from the Atlassian Marketplace. Likewise, they can use a variety of APIs to integrate JIRA with other tools used by the agile team. At the same time, the programmers can simplify the software by writing custom filters in JIRA Query Language (JQL).
Make Data-Driven Decisions
The project managers need to monitor teams, resources and projects consistently to manage software testing process efficiently. They can use JIRA as a project management tool to create realistic roadmap for the project, while monitoring the teams, resources and project continuously. JIRA can even be used by managers to take various data-driven decisions quickly.
Generate Different Types of Reports
JIRA further helps testers to generate a wide variety of reports to facilitate decision making. The reports can also be used by various stakeholders in the project to take crucial decisions. Based on their requirements, the users have option to generate recently created issues, resolution time, resolved vs. created issues, time tracking, and user workload reports. They can even use pie charts present the information in a more appealing and readable format.
However, each enterprise has to incur additional expensed to avail these benefits of JIRA. Atlassian allows business to choose from several pricing options according to their team size and requirements. At the same time, the users also have option to host the software on their servers or in the cloud. So it becomes easier for businesses to use JIRA without spending a lot of money.
ZenQ is a an offshore functional testing company which caters to businesses worldwide
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