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Test Management for Jira by Smartbear

Thanks to the incredible power of Jira, software development teams have been able to shift into warp speed. They’re developing more features, sprinting faster, and releasing more code than ever. This is great for everyone, except test engineering.

If your test engineering (TE) team is like Loblaw Digital’s – the software lab for Canada’s leading food and pharmacy retailer – they may be struggling to keep up with the testing demands of continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD).

For a large enterprise like Loblaw, it can be challenging to run every test case through hundreds of permutations for different browsers, languages, devices, and user agents. Add to this the fact that the TE team had just one tester for every ten developers, and you have a very strong case for automation.

“Managing so many high traffic digital properties with numerous updates per week presented a resource intense challenge for the test engineering team,” explained Justin Watts, Senior Manager of Engineering Productivity at Loblaw Digital. “This requires systems and processes that can manage, automate, and interpret the test results. We needed a solution that would work for the smallest and largest projects, provide visibility of results across the business, and enable us to scale testing to meet the demands of large-scale Agile development.”

Loblaw Digital identified four key requirements for the solution:

  1. The ability to assign tests to a user. “That might seem ridiculous, but not many plugins offer it. It’s important to have complete clarity on what our team is working on.”
  2. An extensible API that would allow Loblaw Digital to use test data in other systems and integrate other systems with the test management solution.
  3. Clear visibility of what was going on at any given time, particularly visibility of the status or ‘health’ of any given sprint or targeted release on any given day.
  4. The ability to execute tests and immediately generate traceable artefacts (bugs/reports/ logs) that are easily actionable by anyone on the TE/Development teams.

The company reviewed Jira compatible test management apps for nearly two years, but failed to find a solution that met its needs. Until it found Test Management for Jira

Built for Enterprise users, the test management app seamlessly integrates with Jira’s user interface to provide a complete testing control center directly within Jira. Theapp met all of Loblaw Digital’s initial criteria. Plus, it gave them a solution where developers and test engineers alike were able to view and manage tests.

The API provided the automation the team needed, enabling test results to be uploaded and stored programmatically without human intervention. “If I want to run a login test,” explained Watts, “and I want to say I have one hundred percent coverage, we only need to write that test once and save it once. It has just one set of steps, and we can use environments to see how that test is running in all 366 permutations.”

Test Management for Jira has helped increase the quality of work produced by Loblaw Digital in several ways:

  • Results are uploaded in real-time, meaning issues can be detected more quickly.
  • Coverage is more comprehensive, so more issues come to light.
  • Developers and testers can closely collaborate over the course of feature implementation, allowing for continuous adjustments and improvements, resulting in higher quality code.
  • The traceability provided by the app’s reporting engine ensures that no untested ticket ever goes out and nothing gets missed.

Loblaw Digital is now able to deliver higher quality software at higher speeds than possible before. Test Management for Jira gives the team complete visibility into sprint performance, plus traceability and increased coverage.

“We could finally say okay here’s a sprint of twenty tickets – we don’t have tests for these three – someone needs to ensure that they have tests,” said Watts. “And as we’re going through the week, we can start to see whether the tests are being executed and how they are trending as we start to gear up for release. We can start really having a look at the quality of the tickets and the tests.”

With automated test management, Loblaw Digital can innovate faster and deliver more value to its customers in a fast-moving world.