Xray integrates with Agile to give you a flexible way of viewing, managing and reporting some Xray issue types.

Agile boards are an excellent way to visually keep track of the progress of a project's tasks.

Usually, you use Agile boards to manage sprint-related issues, such as user stories, tasks and defects.

You can extend the usage of Agile boards to also make them testing-aware.

Agile boards are great, but they do not replace other types of reports where more information may be consulted and analyzed.



Using Xray issues in Agile boards

Since Xray uses Jira issue types for most of its entities, in theory, you're able to include them in your boards. However, the reason for including them may be different for each one.

Having in mind that Tests and Preconditions are like test case templates, including them in a board does not make sense unless you want to track the specification progress, in case you have a specific workflow implemented for that purpose. The same applies to Test Sets. Some may prefer to use one or more Task issue(s) for dealing with the specification effort of Tests and/or Test Sets.

Including individual Test Runs would not be that useful. Since a Test can have multiple runs, your board would be over-populated. Moreover, Test Runs are not issue types, so they cannot be included in Agile boards.

Test Executions may be assigned to a sprint and may be tracked on a board. However, this may not scale if Continuous Integration is being used, due to the potential huge amount of Test Executions that may be created.

Sub-Test Executions are an excellent way to visually identify the associated Test Executions that validate a given requirement, since they're created as sub-tasks for the requirement issue and will appear accordingly in the board. A limitation is that a Sub-Test Execution is a sub-task of only one issue, in this case, a requirement. Sometimes, this may not be applicable because it may be necessary to have Test Executions with Tests associated with multiple requirements.

A Test Plan tracks a group of Tests, regardless of the number of Test Executions for a given version of the SUT. Test Plans may be used to group the Tests in the scope of a given sprint and thus, consolidate the test results.


In summary, you may extend Agile boards for testing purposes to address two points:

  • Specification & organization;
  • Planning & execution.



Use caseNotes
Test
  • track the test specification progress/lifecycle (e.g., a specific workflow is being monitored for reviewing purposes)

Precondition
  • track the test specification progress/lifecycle (e.g., a specific workflow is being monitored for reviewing purposes)

Test Set
  • track the test specification progress/lifecycle (e.g., a specific workflow is being monitored for reviewing purposes)

Test Execution
  • track the daily execution-related tasks
  • hard to scale, especially if CI is being adopted

Sub-Test Execution

  • for each requirement, track the execution of the related Tests
  • hard to scale with multiple executions
Test Plan
  • using scoped Test Plans (i.e., in a context of a sprint) quickly provides an overview of the progress of the execution of your Tests

  • requires adding the "Sprint" field to the Test Plan


Usage scenarios

Here are possible scenarios for integrating testing into your Agile boards. Feel free to adapt each one to your needs.

Quick view of Executions for Requirements from the Agile Board

Creating a Sub-Test Execution from the Requirement Issue will let you track related executions on the Agile Board, so you will see all the work that needs to be done to “finish” a requirement, either by developers or testers.

You can have a quick view of all test executions of a requirement, directly from the Jira Agile board, as long as the executions are created as Sub-Test Execution issues.


Test Plans as a way to consolidate test results

You may create one or more Test Plans and associate them with a given Sprint.