Overview

One of the use cases for the Scheduled Reports feature of Xporter could be the health check of the QE efforts within a sprint, especially for stakeholders who do not yet have access to Jira. That would have the benefits of consolidating the important metrics and presenting them in the clear format directly to the stakeholder inbox.

In this tutorial, we will go through the Scheduled Reports prerequisites and configuration for that use case. 

Prerequisites

• To make the templates available for scheduling, you need to ensure the “Scheduled Reports” value is present in the Scope field of each template.

• Scheduled Reports can be used at the Global level or at the Project one. In this tutorial, we will focus on the Project level - to enable this feature, you need to navigate through Manage Apps -> Xporter -> Project Settings and adjust the toggle.

You should then see the Xporter section in Project Settings

Configure scheduled reports

Definition of “QE health” can be subjective, so feel free to customize the number and types of the templates. We will be using Defect Summary, Requirement Report, and Test Runs List. You can only select 1 template per scheduled report, so we will add 3 items using the “ + Add” button above.

The content of the Details section is mostly personal preference. In the Scheduled section, assuming the sprint duration is 14 days and we initiate the configuration a sprint in advance, we can set up the following “Advanced” cron expression to control the frequency: 0 0 12 */14 * ?

In the Export Data section, we can use the following JQL expressions (please refer to the template content for the full list of supported issue types):

• Defect Summary: issuetype = Bug AND sprint in openSprints()
• Requirement Report: issuetype = Story AND sprint in openSprints()
• Test Runs List:  issuetype = “Test Execution” AND sprint in openSprints()

Since these queries can be useful for direct export and other Jira/Xray features, we recommend saving it as filters.

Lastly, in the Actions section, we will add the “Send Email” action with the list of stakeholders:

In the final state, the Scheduled Reports section of your project settings should look like this:

Tips

• To see the history and success/failure details, you can navigate to Manage Apps -> Xporter -> Xporter Audit Logs.
  
• You can minimize the email clutter by enabling this toggle in the Configuration section.
  
  
  
  
• Each scheduled report can support multiple Actions, so you may choose to store files in a server in addition to the email delivery.
• Meaningful report names help with file management in the long run.

References

• Xporter documentation
• Cron expressions for Jira DC