Because Xray uses issue types for mapping test concepts, you can organize your projects to best suit your organizational needs. You can keep your current projects separate from Xray, or combine them together.
Xray is flexible enough to deal with scenarios where, for security or compliance reasons, you have to manage Jira entities on different projects.
Creating or Configuring Test Projects
Please check the following links in order to:
- Create a new testing project using the Xray project template
- Configuring an existing project with the Xray issue types and screens
Project Organization Use Cases
Below are some common use cases showing how to use Xray in combination with other projects in Jira. Xray issue types support associations from different projects. You can add Tests from one project to Tests Executions on another project, or even mix Tests from different Projects in the same Test Execution or Test Set issue.
All-in-one
You can use a single project to manage your Requirements and Defects, Test-related issues as well as all your Test Executions.
Don't mix my Requirements and Defects with Tests
If you already have a Jira project for managing Requirements and Defects and don't want to have any tests nor executions in this project, you can create a separate companion project just for testing purposes.
Dedicated repository for Tests
Another common use case for Xray is to have a dedicated project for Test (and Pre-Condition and Test Set) issues. Test Executions are the responsibility of other project(s). This separation allows to manage permissions more effectively, so maybe only a few testers have permission to write tests and others only have permission to execute.
Of course, this use case can also be combined with the previous one by having separate projects for managing Requirements and Defects.
Test Execution Versioning
If you plan to have separate projects for managing Requirements/Defects and Tests Executions and you want to analyze Requirements by version, then your Requirement's project version names must match the names of the Test Execution's project. This is how to do it.
Completely separate
In this use case, the Tests, Requirements, Executions & Plans and Defects all separated and being handled on different projects.
Isolated repository for Tests
In this more uncommon scenario, you would have your requirements outside of Jira in some other tool. You use Jira only as a testing repository for creating Tests, Test Sets, Test Plans and Test Executions.
You can use Xray for this, but you will lose the benefits of requirement coverage and traceability.
Users implementing this scenario might gain huge benefits if they are able to synchronize requirements between the other tool and Jira.