Organizing your tests is a crucial part of your daily testing activities. Your project may have hundreds or thousands of tests so you must organize them efficiently, so you can find relevant tests quickly.

Actually, you can organize your tests in many ways, namely using labels, components, priority,etc. But organizing tests this way may not be sufficient nor scale accordingly with your needs.

Xray provides two different ways for organizing effectively Tests:

1. using Test Sets issues (this was the only available option before v3.0);
2. using the Test Repository (since v3.0); 
   
   

Xray has a specific issue type for grouping tests: the Test Set. This is a simple way to create different groups of Tests; they're simple flat lists of Tests. You may have as many Test Sets as you wish and a Test may be included in multiple Test Sets. Test Sets are great if you want to have full control over certain groups of Tests, so you can easily pick them whenever you want (e.g. for creating Test Plans or Test Executions). Test Sets can also be used as a dynamic way to cover requirements.

In the other hand, the Test Repository provides a tree like way organization at project level, where users can hierarchically organize Tests within folders and sub-folders. This folder like concept is common in some tools and resembles user's own files/documention organization in their computer's operating system. More info on usage can be found in Working with the Test Repository.

Thus, the first thing you have to decide is to whether use Test Sets or the Test Repository, or even both. For this, we recommend to look at some pros and cons concerning the adoption of Test Sets vs the Test Repository as detailed in Overview of the Test Repository. For some users, the question may be as simple as "Would our team prefer organizing tests in lists or an hierarchical approach instead?".

We also have some tips that might give you some guidance on the different approaches you may choose to adopt concerning tests organization.