About Agile

Whenever talking about Agile, first we have to look at the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, so that we can understand how its values and principles can be embraced with Xray. 

There are many ways to look at Agile, though.

Overall, Agile's purpose is to "Achieve (product) Greatness" - How?

By...

• Having greater Efficiency
  • through Common Understanding
  • continuous Collaboration
  • automating repetitive tasks
• Delivering Value
• Continuously Improving
• Embracing Change
• Working as a Team

How Xray enables Agility in 5 points

1.  Complete and immediate visibility

• With Xray, you can see what is happening on your existent Agile (Scrum/Kanban) Boards or on your stories; no need to ask

• Real time testing/coverage feedback on the issues you’re working on (e.g. Stories, Epics, Tests) providing clear insights on quality. Users can quickly analyze test results, evaluate how a Story is on different versions, besides the actual one. To have even deeper understanding on how their feature is performing on different "contexts" (e.g. browsers, mobile devices), users may analyse their test results and coverage on different Test Environments

• Overall, project-level coverage overview, which includes real-time testing feedback. Xray gives the ability to analyze the stories from multiple perspectives, so you can see how the stories that are relevant to you are, from a QA standpoint

• Xray understands the "hierarchical" relation between Epic<=>Story. In fact, it's just one of the possible scenarios for handling parent and "sub-requirements." That means that Tests covering a given Story will implicitly cover the related Epic. Thus, from the Epic screen, you can track its coverage, including the latest Test results based on the coverage of related Story issues

2. One place where all your team members work, no matter the role they have with total transparency

• No need to go to different tools to have access to all the information; and no need to synchronize information or users

• Testers can clarify PBIs (product backlog items), assess risks and provide better estimates

• Testers can be part of PRs and tester’s automated code can also be reviewed
• Developers, PO, Scrum master can also provide inputs to testing activities

• Blend programming & testing together by having developers and testers working together in the same development related activities, as equals

3. Foster collaboration and communication between team members and also with customers

• Testers communicate directly in the issues being worked on (e.g. stories, bugs, tests)

• Work together with customers and other team members using BDD and Gherkin based frameworks (e.g. Cucumber)

4. Increase focus and efficiency

• Share real-time information with your team using Jira dashboards; if you need PDF, Excel or Word based reports, then automate their creation, storage and sharing using Xporter
• Avoid wasting or loosing time on unnecessary activities/assets; use automation (and automated tests) as much as possible
• Easily bring automated test results independently of the automation frameworks (e.g. JUnit, TestNG, Robot, Cucumber, etc), coding languages and CI tool your teams are using. It's as easy as submitting the results; Xray will do the rest

5. Adaptable

You can adapt Xray to the process your team finds most useful and make them more Agile. Use your team's feedback to embrace changes.

• Add fields, customize screens, take advantage of the many benefits provided by Jira for issues also for testing related entities
• Use all or a subset of the entities provided by Xray
• Use one or more Test Plans per sprint to track independently the progress of different subset of Tests; you can also have Test Execution on a per sprint level, to manage their work as any other task
• Use Sub-Test Executions, if you want to track your test execution work as sub-tasks of your stories similarly to other development related tasks 
• If you want to have greater control over your testing life cycle, you may use workflows and review all your testing activities; you may also automate workflow transitions as soon as you start and finish the execution of your Tests