How Is Jira Integration Beneficial For Test Automation Tools?

Jira Integration With Test Automation Tools

Software testing, one of the most important and crucial pillars of a successful technology business, has been through several revolutionary changes since the world started to realize its value. Automating the tests is an exceptional booster for its growth. Test automation has been serving the product teams throughout the world by making test creation, running, and maintenance matter of seconds.

Previously, in the waterfall model, testing used to be in the end phase of the software development life cycle, and eventually, this approach would end up consuming a lot of time and resources. Then, as the agile methodology started to become the norm and product teams started working in small iterations for maintaining a stable continuous integration & continuous delivery pipeline, testing came to a much earlier stage of development and its occurrence became repeated.

Now, to cope with that requirement of faster and repeated testing, automating the manual efforts turned out to be a highly efficient solution.

In all our articles and many other articles over the internet, you have seen how advanced AI-based test automation tools like Preflight fulfill all your testing needs with maximum efficiency. If you just take the example of Preflight, this simple browser extension is capable of enabling you to create, run, and manage complex tests of different types without making you go through even a single line of coding. It provides you with the advantages like -

  • No additional installations to use the tool.
  • No coding skills are required to use it.
  • Advanced AI features like context awareness, computer vision, OCR, etc.
  • Automatic record and playback features.
  • Allows you to set visual and text checkpoints.
  • Allows you to use randomized or even custom variables for your tests.

Besides the above-mentioned features, Preflight and most other popular test automation tools allow you to easily integrate with efficient CI/CD tools like Jira, Jenkins, Slack, etc. Now, why do those integrations matter so much? Here, we will discuss the importance of Jira integration in your application testing process. So, let’s move along with it.

What Is Jira?

By definition, Jira is a project management tool that allows you to have all your project data in one place and perform all your activities easily. But, its advantages are not so less as they look. A large tech project needs you to deal with so much data scattered in different portions of the project. If you become unable to maintain the logical connections among those data sets and fail to maintain the consistency & workflow in the project, you will most likely end up staying stuck with almost no progress. That’s where Jira comes in as a savior. It allows you to store all your project requirements, and data in one place, and you can make all your project schedules, manage the data, do the testing works, track defects, and perform quality improvement activities in a much more organized way. Let’s take an in-depth look at the limitations of not using Jira and then at the benefits of Jira integration in testing to understand it better.

Limitations of Not Using Jira

Two of the conventional test management strategies are using spreadsheets and legacy testing tools. But, with the progress in modern times, businesses experience some limitations while using them. We have jotted down the prime limitation below.

Limitations of Using Spreadsheets

  • As you proceed with the release of new versions and updates, respective test case data also increases, and it becomes difficult to maintain them with spreadsheets.
  • Spreadsheets are never an efficient approach for project managers and product managers to keep track of different parts of tests that different testers are responsible for.
  • Using spreadsheets as the only way to maintain the results of tests makes it extremely difficult to keep track of the actual test coverage.
  • Spreadsheets often do not provide the necessary infrastructure to integrate with test automation frameworks and as a result, you cannot execute many automation strategies.
  • Using spreadsheets is an overall very inconvenient approach to reporting and visualizing the test data. So, it eventually downgrades the team’s visibility.

Limitations of Using Legacy Test Automation Tools

Although legacy test automation tools are still used while being integrated with Jira, using only them can cause the following limitations.

  • Onsite licensing is a characteristic of legacy testing tools. It needs you to pay for different sets of utilizations and often ends up costing you a lot of money. On the other hand, efficient test management tools like Jira and advanced low-code test automation tool Preflight let you get all-inclusive packages at very affordable pricing.
  • Legacy testing tools often have very limited support for different browsers and different operating systems.
  • These tools often have siloed architecture that limits the use of modern tool sets such as automation and CI/CD tools.
  • These tools normally have steep learning curves that make it difficult for small businesses to spend a lot of resources on training the teams.
  • The overall characteristics of these tools make them somehow exclusive to big companies. As a result, it gets difficult to get information on the product roadmap or the future plans of these legacy offerings.

Benefits of Using Jira

Higher Efficiency In The Overall Process

All the brainstorming always has a common objective which is improving the efficiency of the overall project. Now, as we discussed above, a large project commonly has numerous huge data sets, various important aspects, and different types of activities to take care of. Among all these things, testing the products is an extremely crucial task that ensures the best quality for your product and lets you know if it is going to bring positive results or not. Though efficient test automation tools like Preflight help you a lot in your application testing process, integrating with an advanced project management tool like Jira allows you to have far better control over everything related to your project. You can monitor the work of your teams with real-time details of which portions they are working on, what is still left to be done, which resources are being used, what is the progress according to the schedules, etc. Such clear visibility over everything enables you to make the best use of time & resources, and eventually, you get to experience an overall higher efficiency.

Enhanced Productivity In Teams

It is evident that if hardworking people are given the infrastructure to perform their tasks in an easier and more organized way, they will work more efficiently and more work will be done in less time. That’s what Jira’s purpose is all about. Jira provides the teams with features that enable them to have seamless communication among them, and as a result, their effective collaboration becomes much more productive. For example, Jira also allows the teams to stay connected over mobile devices so that they can communicate with each other at any point if there is a crucial situation. Hence, if you compare it with manual testing, test automation using Jira significantly increases overall productivity by reducing project downtime and improving the project output.

Faster Time To Market

This is kind of the result of all the benefits that Jira integration provides. As Jira allows you to manage your project data, requirements, schedules, teamwork, testing, etc. in a much more efficient way, you get to experience a higher test coverage in significantly less amount of time. One of the main contributions of Jira in the software development life cycle is that it allows different teams to easily communicate with each other and efficiently determine the priorities, which results in earlier detection of defects, faster debugging, and quicker release of product versions.

Cost Effectiveness

Being cost-effective is one of the prime goals for every business. In a tech business, if you use numerous apps to perform your actions on different aspects of the project, and to maintain the workflow, you will surely end up spending a lot of money just on the development and testing phase. On the other hand, Jira offers a lot of functionalities that consolidate the distributed work of different teams in one place while being a truly affordable solution. Hence, using Jira can remarkably cause huge savings on your overall costs.

Justified Return on Investment (ROI)

No matter how little you need to spend for using Jira, that is still an expenditure or better to say, an investment. That means you need a proper return from using it to justify your investment. Also, a project management tool is not the only expense in a project. There are also a few expenses on arranging different resources for different phases of the application development and testing life cycle. Jira justifies all such investments by providing the teams with everything they need during different stages of the project. As far as software testing is concerned, Jira may need the QA team or anyone who is going to look after the testing part to know about a few basic things. But, using such a full-proof tool like Jira enables you to get the necessary training material within it and provides you with a totally complete experience in a compact form. Hence, Jira can be considered a tool that provides you with a justified return on investment.

Ease In Maintaining Workflows

You must already know the importance of a stable workflow in the complete software development life cycle. The complete process often has a lot of stages and involves a lot of team members. The smooth and highly efficient test management in Jira makes it quite easy for the analysts, testers, and developers to collaborate easily. Using Jira to implement the testing processes makes it possible to store all requirements, test cases, defects, epics, and user stories in one place while they are seamlessly linked to each other. That makes it significantly easier for them to work on them and the workflows are easily customizable to make the best use of them.

Advantages of Using Jira With Preflight

You might have already read about Preflight, one of the most popular low-code/no-code test automation tools. Its awesome features are something that can surely convince you to make it your only choice for automating your tests without the hassle of coding. And, if you don’t know much about its features, do remember to check them out in the article “10 Amazing Software Testing Benefits From Preflight In 2022”. Now, we always encourage our users to integrate the highly efficient project management tool Jira with it. The advantages of that integration are mentioned below.

  • Preflight is highly capable of letting you create, run, and maintain complex test cases but, you need to manage a lot of data, requirements, schedules, etc. for the success of your entire project, and Jira is the best project management tool that can help you there.
  • Jira allows members of different teams to efficiently collaborate and work together on the project and the objective of Preflight is also to allow different members of the team to work collaboratively on testing the products. Hence, these two tools can do wonders when they are systematically integrated.
  • Preflight and Jira both are capable of allowing you to run and manage complex tests within seconds. Hence, using them together can be remarkably advantageous for your business.

Conclusion

Jira is evidently one of the finest products from Atlassian. Its features are highly beneficial for different aspects of project management. It provides a consolidated platform for your teams to effectively store the necessary information, data, and requirements, set schedules, plan working steps, monitor progress, and perform various other activities for making the project successful. This article tells you how this tool also offers numerous benefits for efficiently running and managing complex tests on your products to ensure their best quality. You got to know how it -

  • Improves the overall efficiency of the product’s journey.
  • Enhances the productivity of your teams.
  • Causes a faster time-to-market.
  • Makes the project cost-effective.
  • Provides you with a justified return on investment.
  • Helps you to easily maintain workflows.

You have also seen how marvelous it can be to use Preflight and Jira. The amazing no-code test automation experience using Preflight is just a demo away. So, book your free demo now.

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