The Best 101 Guide to Zephyr Jira Testing

Are you having trouble keeping track of test cases in Jira? Test Management teams must manage the product’s whole life cycle in order to bring a high-quality product to market. To do this, such groups employ a variety of methods tailored to their individual requirements. When test management tools are integrated into project management platforms like Jira, there is no need to set up new infrastructure or train people when a new tool is introduced. In addition, all information about the testing process is in one location.

You need more than spreadsheets to maintain track of the testing process as your project expands. The most extensively used test management solution is Zephyr for Jira. Jira has benefited greatly from it. For projects that are actively handled in Jira, the Zephyr Jira Integration allows you to organize, author, manage, search, plan, execute, and report on your testing operations.

This article will introduce you to the key features of Zephyr and Jira. You will also learn the need to integrate Zephyr with Jira. In addition, you will understand the steps to set up Zephyr Jira Integration. At the end of this article, you will explore the key benefits offered by this Integration. So, read along to gain insights and simplify your Jira testing workflow using Zephyr Jira Integration.

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Introduction to Zephyr
  • Key Features of Zephyr
• Introduction to Jira
  • Key Features of Jira
• Understanding the Need for Zephyr Jira Integration
• Understanding the Types of Zephyr Jira Test Processes
• Steps to Set Up Zephyr Jira Integration
• Benefits of Zephyr Jira Integration
• Conclusion

Prerequisites

To set up Zephyr Jira Integration, you need to meet the following requirements:

• A Jira account with Administrator rights.
• Basic understanding of Jira.
• Basic understanding of Testing workflow.

Introduction to Zephyr

Zephyr is the most popular testing software. Every day, Zephyr’s feature-rich solutions are relied on by 18,000+ companies and 5+ million users in 100+ countries. Zephyr is a top Atlassian Marketplace seller based in San Francisco. Zephyr’s clients benefit from increased production and significant cost reductions all around the world.

Zephyr enables you to integrate testing into the project life cycle, allowing you to track software quality and make better decisions. The ability to develop, track, and produce reports on test problems is one of the key aspects of this tool. Zephyr quickly developed its first Jira app, gaining 100+ clients and $100,000 in revenue in the first quarter with support from Atlassian. In this article, you will learn more about Zephyr Jira Integration.

Zephyr offers various plans such as Zephyr Squad, Zephyr Scale, and Zephyr Enterprise. The following are displayed in the image below.

Key Features of Zephyr

Zephyr allows easy test management, Jira native development as well as secure on-premises development. Let’s understand some of the other key features offered by Zephyr.

• Designed for Everyone: Everyone from a single user to an enormous business, working at scale is supported by Zephyr. Your testing staff, test cases, and test data all expand. But Zephyr is unfazed by anything. It can easily handle your large-scale data storage needs.

• Cloud and On-Premise: Zephyr remains committed to helping you with on-premise solutions as well as cloud-based solutions that are simple to adopt. In any case, they’ve got you covered with a deployment strategy that fits your requirements. 

• Manual & Automated Test Execution: You can organize your manual test runs with simple dashboards. Zephyr allows you to start and monitor automated test runs straight from Zephyr, ensuring that you have complete control over the process, not just the manual part. All of the major automation frameworks are supported as part of the basic package. Furthermore, you may create bugs directly in Zephyr and track them in Jira in real-time.

• Agile Test Management: Zephyr is designed to improve and enhance your test management process with one of the easiest test development, execution, and traceability workflows on the market. Whether you need bespoke dashboards, comprehensive reports, or in-depth analytics data, Zephyr has you covered. Everything was built to assist you in implementing and scaling your continuous testing efforts in an agile environment.

• Complete Liye Cycle Management: Connecting to technologies that record direct consumer feedback helps teams focus on what customers are truly saying about your services. To gain real quality insight into your test management application, you may integrate Zephyr with Hipchat, Service Desk, Zendesk, and Salesforce. You may obtain information that is truly focused on what the end-user need rather than what you believe they require.

To learn more about Zephyr, read the Zephyr Documentation.

Introduction to Jira

Jira serves as a one-stop shop for all of your project management needs. It began as a bug tracking tool for software developers and has now evolved into an issue tracking and Agile project management tool. Atlassian, a renowned Australian software firm specializing in software for software development teams, developed it.

Jira’s dashboard provides a number of useful features and capabilities that make dealing with issues simple. It has grown into a powerful task management tool for a variety of applications, from requirements and test case management to agile software development. Jira is a software family that helps teams manage their work more successfully. 

Jira software is available as both a cloud-hosted SaaS (Jira Cloud) and a self-managed solution (Jira Server). Jira Cloud is built for speed and simplicity, whereas Jira Server gives you additional control and customization choices. 

Key Features of Jira

Due to its incredible capabilities, Jira is one of the most popular project management platforms among developers. Let’s take a look at some of Jira’s prominent features:

• Agile Project Management: All of the features of Scrum Boards and Kanban Boards may be used seamlessly with Jira. Jira also has a variety of reporting tools, such as Burn-down/up Charts, Sprint Reports, and Velocity Charts, that allow teams to monitor their progress in real-time. Jira’s Agile Roadmaps may be used to plan long-term project efforts, pinpoint bottlenecks, and streamline your Project Workflow.

• Workflow Customization: Whether it’s for Project Management, Issue Tracking, or Task Management, Jira can be modified to meet any need. Workflows, reports, Scrum Boards, and other parts of the system can all be customized easily.

• Robust Integration Support: Developers have access to flexible REST and Java APIs, as well as the Atlassian Marketplace’s 3,000+ add-ons and plugins, making it simple to extend Jira’s capability and tailor it to your company needs. In a nutshell, Jira may work in any Software environment and is ready to use as soon as your account is set up.

• Rich Toolkit for Developers: Developers can use Jira Query Language (JQL) to quickly develop filters and manipulations. Jira can be integrated with BitBucket and GitHub to offer backlog-to-deployment traceability, and new processes can be created to manage the many ways users develop, test, and release their apps. 

• Enterprise-Grade Security Control: Jira Software and other Atlassian Cloud solutions use Bank-Grade Security and centralized management to protect data and files. Admins can create a plan that doesn’t limit access or cooperation while still allowing them to use the tools and processes they require.

To explore more about Jira, visit the Homepage here.

Understanding the Need for Zephyr Jira Integration

A Jira Test Management tool is a Quality Assurance (QA) and Testing Management solution that can be employed within Jira. The Jira add-ons are often created to help QA teams achieve test automation, real-time information exchange, and the ability to reuse test cases. QA testing, tracking, and analysis can all be integrated using test management solutions like Zephyr for Jira.

Zephyr for JIRA is a native JIRA Software or JIRA Core application that offers test management to any JIRA project. The Zephyr Jira Integration allows tests to be generated and seen in any JIRA project, connected to other issues, conducted instantly or as part of a test cycle, and precise test data can be tracked via customizable metrics.

Understanding the Types of Zephyr Jira Test Processes

Testing-related functionality in Zephyr JIRA can be used in a variety of ways, whether for project teams with well-established test processes or those just getting started. Here are some test process types that you might use to include testing in your project using Zephyr Jira Integration. You can also create your own test approaches depending on what works best for your project team.

• A Simple Test Process helps in building or cloning an existing test, executing it right away, writing a bug, and keeping track of your testing with the metrics.  This is the most basic method to use this test, and no prior planning is required.
• A Test Process with Basic Execution Planning allows you to organize your test executions into Test Cycles so you can keep track of what has been tested,  how much time is remaining, and so on. It entails very basic planning in terms of establishing a Test Cycle in a Version and then ensuring that each test execution is logged against those Test Cycles.
• A Test Process with Structured Execution Planning entails setting up Test Cycle(s) as well as creating/modifying a lot of tests, assigning them to the appropriate Test Cycle for future execution, and then executing them during your project’s designated execution phases.
• As the name indicates, a Structured Test Process divides your testing activities into discrete phases of the organization, planning, execution, and tracking.

Steps to Set Up Zephyr Jira Integration

Now that you have understood the need for Zephyr Jira Integration, in this section, you will learn the key steps to set up Zephyr Jira Integration.

Step 1: Log in to Jira and go to the Administration page. 

Step 2: Now, select Add-ons from the menu bar as shown below and then click on Find New Add-ons.

Step 3: In the Search box on the left side of the window, search for Zephyr for Jira.

Step 4: Now, click on Buy Now or Free Trial, as per your need. Next, you can create your user id and password or create a new account. The software will be installed. Moreover, the License key will automatically be added to activate it.

Kudos! You successfully set up the Zephyr Jira Integration. You can refer to Zephyr for JIRA Cloud documentation, to create, manage and organize your tests.

Benefits of Zephyr Jira Integration

Using Zephyr Jira Integration, tests can be developed inside Jira and performed as needed or as part of a test cycle. Detailed test metrics can be analyzed and tracked with some customization using relevant tools. Let’s explore some of the key benefits that Zephyr Jira Integration offers you.

• Test Right Inside JIRA: Testing is included in project cycles, allowing you to monitor software quality and make informed choices. For instance, when a Project Manager or a Business Analyst adds a story, the Quality Engineer can submit defects that are linked to the storyboard and attach them to the same storyboard.
• Create, Plan, and Execute Tests: For individual tests, you can have test steps and attachments created, viewed, and modified. In addition, you can create test execution cycles, run the tests, and associate problems with particular tests.
• Track Quality Metrics: Zephyr provides an easy-to-use dashboard that displays testing metrics for each project’s testing activity. It displays the execution of test cases as well as additional graphical representations of the findings. This makes it easier to analyze the data. Zephyr allows test cases to be exported to Word or Excel formats.  After integrating Zephyr, a user can simply evaluate test cases on the agile board.

Conclusion

In this article, you gained a basic understanding of Zephyr and Jira. You discussed their key features and understood the need for integrating Zephyr Jira. Moreover, you learned the steps to set up Zephyr Jira Integration. At the end of this article, you also explored the various benefits Zephyr Jira Integration offers. 

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