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Agile follows a set of values and principles that allow teams to collaborate and have more agility while producing better, working software more tailored to customer needs.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Back in 2001, a group of people wrote a manifesto to make better software development. Agile software development is backed up by 4 values and 12 principlesdepicted depicted in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, quoted next.
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In fact, Xray does not differentiate a tester from any other role within the team; they're equal team members that have assigned or self-assigned tasks and that can easily collaborate with each other.
Working software over comprehensive documentation
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All tests implicitly provide some sort of documentation on how the system should work. Automated tests, as long they are written in a clear way, are living, executable documents that constantly describe and validate the system. Xray provides the support for many different automation frameworks based reports, which in turn allow you to choose whatever language plus framework combination to implement automated tests.
One of the automated frameworks natively supported is Cucumber (or Gherkin based frameworks in general) which is used in BDD context. Documentation "produced" by BDD is simple, overall clear and yet focused on real usage scenarios.
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Xray has native support for Cucumber and other Gherkin based frameworks (e.g. Behave, Calabash, SpecFlow), allowing customers to collaborate with the product/development team by writing and reviewing Scenarios.
But besides supporting BDD, Xray also promotes collaboration on any work item, including user stories, bugs, and all testing related entities (e.g. Tests, Test Executions, Test Plans). Since Xray uses issue types as a way to abstract testing related artifacts, you can leverage the built-in collaboration features, among others, that Jira provides for any issue in general.
Responding to change over following a plan
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In fact, if you're implementing more and more automated tests as a means to add additional coverage, they can be dynamically added to Test Plans along with their results, as soon as you start running them in your CI/CD pipeline. Thus, you don't have to plan ahead what exact list of test cases you'll need. You may assess the risks (at the start and during development), enumerate them in your Test Plan and use them to create Tests and execute them at any moment.
Scrum values
Focus
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- From specification, to organization, execution and planning, all testing related entities including Test, Test Set, Test Execution, Test Plan, Test Runs can be assigned; users get notified and can track their work (what they have to do and what they have already done). All Xray issue type based entities can also be watched if you want to follow more closely what is happening.
- If you want, you may configure email notifications to get notified upon relevant events, such as knowing that you're assigned some Test Run(s)
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- Use Jira dashboards with real-time information that can be shared with all your team members
- Create, if really needed, reports as document assets, that can be downloaded, sent and stored (for regulatory/conformance reasons)
- After having an Xporter report template, you can manually generate a report from the issue screen (e.g. from a Test Plan) but you can also automate the creation of the report to make it happen upon the transition of a workflow or even on a periodic basis.
- After having an Xporter report template, you can manually generate a report from the issue screen (e.g. from a Test Plan) but you can also automate the creation of the report to make it happen upon the transition of a workflow or even on a periodic basis.
If your testers/SDETs/developers are implementing automated tests then should be focused on doing the right tests and implementing them; they should not loose time on side activities for having visibility of those results being reflected in Jira/Xray. Therefore, with Xray they can easily submit the automated test results using either one of the free CI plugins or by using the REST API directly. Upon submission, Xray will automatically, if necessary and possible, create Test entities mapping to each automated test. It is also possible to link automated tests to stories (or any "requirement" like issue) right from the automated test code. All this lets your team focus on what matters most.
Openness
The Scrum Team and its stakeholders agree to be open about all the work and the challenges that come with performing the work.
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Xray provides the ability for any team member to collaborate on any testing activity, including, and not limited to, Test Runs and Test Plans.
Respect
Scrum Team members respect each other to be capable, independent people.
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Team members work on their assigned tasks and the team trusts them to deliver their work. However, each team member does not work in isolation; the team collaborates in order to successfully complete each task. How? No matter the role, team members can contribute at any moment.
- Developers:
- can interact and leave comments on user stories, on Test cases, on Test Plans
- review PRs
- Testers:
- can interact and leave comments on user stories and ask for clarifications, define and review Test cases
- can define the goals of Test Plans, based on risk assessment, discussed together with the team
- PO:
- review comments on user stories
- clarify acceptance criteria on user stories
- work with team to identify the risks, so a proper Test Plan can be built accordingly
Courage
Scrum Team members have the courage to do the right thing and work on tough problems.
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Thus, testing progress can be promptly and automatically evaluated at the Test Execution, at Test Plan or even at user story level.
Courage to be receptive to feedback from other team members is also a value of Scrum; Xray promotes this by enabling users to leave comments on any testing entity.
Courage also means "to be willing to change, if needed". " Therefore, users can:
- explicitly abort a Test Run with a specific custom status, to make it more visible
- signal some Test Execution using a specific workflow status while leaving comments on it
- make any testing artifact read-only or writable, using the Jira way of managing permissions
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To make sure you're working on the right thing and that it is properly tested, so you can deploy confidently, you may use the Overall Coverage Report to give you real-time insights of real status of the user stories or other items being worked out/tested. You can group your covered items (e.g. stories, epics, bugs, etc) by Priority, by component of the system or by any other field; this gives you
Commitment
People personally commit to achieving the goals of the Scrum Team.
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Test Plans, Test Executions can be assigned to a sprint, so you can track in your active sprint Board. As they're issues, they can be assigned to a certain user, who will be responsible for managing the life cycle of each one of them.
Individual Test Runs, which are part of Test Executions, can also be assigned to specific users. Thus, these two levels of assignment (at Test Execution and at Test Run level) provide finer control over the work that needs to be performed.
While working in the context of a Test Plan or of a Test Execution, users can track their progress and thus are able to evaluate the "progress of their commitment".
