Software development has an integral part in the industry of information technology. However, while technological advancement is such a blessing, it significantly adds pressure for software development professionals to cope up with the current technology trends, especially in software product development. Also, not to mention the increasing customer demands as well as time limitations. Thankfully, there are tools such as Jira software that help with the process of software development.
What is Jira Software?
Jira is a software that can be used for tracking software bugs and issues, as well as for project management. What’s funny is that the name “Jira” was derived from the word “GOJIRA,” which also means “Godzilla.” Moreover, the software is popularly used for the development and testing of mobile apps before making it available in the market to ensure quality. It offers powerful tools and features that can be used throughout the software lifecycle, from planning to development. It is also highly customizable so the software can fit any workflow.
How can Jira help the process of software development?
A lot of IT companies these days embrace agile project management methodology to provide custom software applications within a brief amount of time. Agile project management methodologies focus on continuous planning, testing, and integration. In an agile atmosphere, QA professionals ought to perform different testing activities consistently. Hence, they need specialized tools and frameworks such as test management for Jira to gauge the software efficiently in an agile environment.
Most software testing tools often come with programs to speed up test case execution and development. Jira is specifically designed as an agile project management tool. Dedicatedl testing tools, on the other hand, is used widely by QA professionals for tracking project-level issues aside from bugs and defects in agile and non-agile environments.
As an agile software management framework, Jira is specifically based on three fundamental concepts — project, issue, and workflow. A software issue can be anything like a bug, help-desk ticket, enhancement request, which are tracked in JIRA. Also, workflow refers to the series of steps an issue goes through from the time of project planning to completion. Jira also comes with various features to meet the different requirements of agile QA teams.
Essential Jira Features for Software Testing Professional
Look for any Issues
One good thing about Jira software is that it allows its users to look for any issues efficiently. With this, the quality assurance staff can easily find any software bugs, project issues, and even enhancement issues. They can also further find or create new issues by simply clicking on the relevant button, along with adding vital parameters like a priority, summary, due date, components, versions, fix versions, or assignees.
Option to Categorize and Link Issues
During the creation of new issues, the quality assurance staff can easily specify its type. For example, they can label a particular issue as a bug, task, or new feature or enhancement. In an agile environment, the project manager can even label an issue as epic or story. A story can be any prerequisite that must be tracked all through the project, while epic is a cluster of stories. The QA even has the option to link any issues to specific versions or components of the software. These features help your quality assurance staff to analyze similar issues and track each of them more efficiently.
Option to Clone Issues
In addition to linking issues to specific projects, your quality assurance staff also have the option to clone any issues seamlessly. Especially in an agile environment, the QA can take advantage of this tool to allow multiple people to access and manipulate an issue simultaneously. They can also adapt to any changes made by other users seamlessly by linking the cloned issue to the original issue. They can even compare the cloned issues from original issues by using some key attributes.
Kanban and Scrum Boards
As an agile project management framework, Jira software enables its users to use either scrum or kanban boards. A quality assurance staff use scrum boards to focus on incremental and iterative chunks of work. On the other hand, Kanban boards help QA increase output delivery and reduce cycle times by monitoring the workflow and making sure that the next task is visible to different members of the team. Moreover, the quality assurance staff can make necessary changes to both scrum and kanban boards, depending on the specific needs of the project.
Provide Filters, APIs, and Add-ons
Your quality assurance staff can also customize the Jira software by downloading different plug-and-play add-ons from the Atlassian Marketplace. Also, they can use specific APIs to integrate Jira software seamlessly with other development and testing software used by QA in an agile environment. The QA professionals can also write custom filters in the Jira software Query Language (JQL), allowing them to integrate Jira software with other frameworks and tools smoothly.
Assist Data-Driven Decision Making
Project managers can take advantage of the Jira’s robust, agile portfolio management tool to create a real-time agile portfolio plan even in multiple projects. They can easily create a portfolio plan using a single roadmap, and make it available to different teams. The said tool can be used to analyze multiple scenarios, manage resources, and forecast the software release date.
Furthermore, project managers can also generate graphical reports to easily monitor ongoing projects and forward test results to the project stakeholders.
Generate Reports
The QAs can use Jira software to generate different types of reports using real-time data and actionable insight. They can create reports that narrate the status of various fields within an issue. They can also create reports that show recent resolution time, the average age of issues, created issues, time tracking, and workload. The reporting feature also makes it easier for quality assurance staff to forward test results efficiently to stakeholders in the project.
The QAs can also opt to deploy Jira software in various ways, like in servers, cloud, and data centers. With this, they can deploy and scale the testing platform depending on the available infrastructure. Moreover, they can save money by choosing the right subscription plan based on their current users and deployment option.
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