In a Product development cycle Quality Assurance plays a vital role in building an error free product. To build and sell a high quality software product Quality management system has to be used to document and track the process that has been done in the complete life cycle of the product. Implementing and maintaining QMS is a crucial part. A QMS is a great way to demonstrate that your company’s development, testing and deployment practices are reliable, repeatable and traceable. JIRA is Quality management software that helps to coordinate software operations to meet both regulatory and customer requirements. For All of the services we provide we use these kind of softwares to maintain product quality.
Jira Quality Management
A Jira ‘issue’ refers to a single work item of any type or size that is tracked from creation to ompletion. For example, an issue could be a feature being developed by a software team, a to-do item for a marketing team, or a legal contract being developed with a customer. Jira projects are flexible on-line working spaces that allow you to group similar issues by team, business unit, product, or stream of work. Examples of projects are a software development project, a marketing campaign, a helpdesk system, or a product enhancement request system. A Jira workflow represents the sequential path an issue takes from creation to completion. Here’s an example of a basic Jira workflow:
In this case, Backlog, To Do, In Progress, QA Verify, Verify and Done represent the status an issue can take, while the arrows represent potential transitions from one status to another. Workflows can be both simple and complex, and can include collaboration features like notifications, comments and assignments that will help get everyone engaged in the Jira Quality Management process.
Jira Quality Management on Agile Software Projects
Making sure the code one writes complies with quality standards is not just a management responsibility but also a team level responsibility, especially when doing agile development and testing. One of the principles of agile development is “working software over comprehensive documentation,” which means agile projects shouldn’t get bogged down by checklists and documentation when work is handed off from one group to another. Agile project management focuses on continuous improvement, scope flexibility, team input, and delivering high-quality working software rather than documentation. Managing quality and compliance on agile projects requires tight collaboration between all team members.
Regulatory Compliance
In certain markets and industries such as the Medical Devices and Pharmaceutical industries in the United States, a formal Corrective Action Preventive Action (CAPA) process may be required as part of a QMS. CAPA is a process that investigates and solves problems (identified by customer complaints, internal audits, etc.), finds causes, takes corrective action and prevents recurrence of the root causes. While it’s possible to comply with CAPA standards with a manual paper-based QMS or one built in a program like Microsoft Excel, the reality is that these kinds of solutions don’t scale and are outdated if your team is doing agile development and testing.
As described above, Jira workflows have forms, rules and automatic escalations that can be built and/or customized to follow almost any regulation or process (like CAPA). Jira also has dashboards and custom reports that help your entire agile team see the bigger picture and highlight opportunities for improvement, an important part of any QMS.
Jira and Testing
Although Jira Software is designed for issue, project and workflow tracking on IT projects, many agile teams are also using it for test case management so that development and testing teams can work together in one system.
There are two types of integrations you can use to add testing functionality to Jira:
- Add-ons like Zephyr for Jira, which are internal integrations that live inside the Jira application and add testing functionality. Test issues can be created, executed, tracked and reported on just like any other Jira issue in Zephyr for Jira, which has a look n’ feel that is exactly like Jira’s.
- An external integration with a dedicated test case management tool like Zephyr Standalone, a test management solution managed independently outside the Atlassian ecosystem that offers real-time Jira integration.
Because Jira currently offers no direct integration with automated testing frameworks like Selenium or JUnit, the preferred approach is to handle automated testing via a continuous integration (CI) server and to use Jira primarily for manual testing. This means setting up acceptance, integration and functional tests inside Jira, which can involve considerable workflow customization.
Automated
Testing with Zephyr for Jira
Test cases are written and executed to ensure that each of your Agile Stories are successfully implemented. Zephyr for Jira allows test cases to be documented and linked to stories and linked back to requirements in Confluence. Test cases can then be organized into test cycles, or groups of tests to be executed
together. The results of these test cycles can also be stored as test executions, giving a clear view of the current status of the project in terms of how many of the test cases are passing successfully.
Click Here to see our portfolios where we have alreday used this software.
Conclusion
Agile software projects thrive in a culture of collaboration. Thanks to its ability to integrate with powerful tools like Confluence, Zephyr for Jira and Zephyr Standalone. Jira provides a solid way for agile development and testing teams to collaborate in real-time on requirements, user stories and test cases. This approach adds to the transparency needed to make sure your Product has a successful Quality Management System in place and your agile development, testing and deployment practices are reliable, repeatable and traceable.