Understand what is the most relevant information to you

Your first step is to decide what is the most relevant information to you.

  • What are your main concerns as a QA manager?
  • What metrics and data do you need to obtain from your testing process? 
  • What information is relevant and needs to be easily available? 


Get inspired by an example approach


James Bach, the leading expert in software testing, recommends an approach to assess quality and guide you on what you should be looking at: 

  • What & how you tested? - Questions you can ask yourself are “what are we testing and what are we ignoring?” In order to get these answers, you need to understand coverage deeply and rely on coverage reporting. Explore the module about "Understanding coverage" to know more about it. 
  • What you have found? - What are the specific problems or the interesting absence of problems that we have found? Dig deep and try to answer why certain problems are coming up. Then try to answer, what are your findings telling you. 
  • How does what you do relate to business risk? - Finally, take it one step further and explore how what you’re doing relates to the big picture goals. What is the purpose of the project, what clear objectives do you need to meet? What are customers and stakeholders expecting? Answering these questions will help you think about what kind of metrics are important to pay attention to in order to reach those goals.



Explore reporting possibilities with Xray 


Xray provides you several options to create reports: 

  • using standard JQL queries: Xray essentially uses Jira issues, so you can always use standard JQL and also an extensive list of JQL functions specific to Xray to obtain relevant data.
  • specific panels of Tests/Test Sets/Test Plans/Test Executions available at the project tab (overviews)
  • using the Built-in reports
  • building dashboards using Gadgets
  • using Document Generator
  • other apps integration, like EazyBI


Understanding what you can do, can help you understand how to get the most of Xray Reports.


Besides exploring this module, we recommend you to go through the "General Reporting" module of the Tester course where you can find more basic reports to explore.



Next, in this module: 

  • most important reports - like traceability report, historical requirement coverage report and overall requirement report
  • review other reports that were explained during the "General Reporting" from the Tester course
  • review specific panels for tests, test plans, test executions) that were presented during the the "General Reporting" from the Tester course
  • overview of how to create reports using Xray specific gadgets
  • introduction to how to use the jql specific functions & custom fields
  • introduction on how you can use Document Generator