Test Management Featured Article

Test management is among the most important considerations when coming up with new software. One important tracking product, JIRA, gives users the ability to track bugs and other issues. It also provides project management. In addition, Zephyr for JIRA provides more advanced economical test management in JIRA.

JIRA and Zephyr will help to ensure software is developed, built, tested and launched effectively. Such products are needed given that software should have no defects.

To see how the products can be used, consider the experience of Badcock Home Furnishings. W.S. Badcock Corporation, which has more than 300 stores in the United States and started in 1904 in Mulberry, Fla., has assigned IT staff to make sure software defects are quickly found and corrected. New updates on average were released for a dozen applications every two weeks. In their old approach, the company used Excel spreadsheets to track testing and test results, Brock Fleming, a business analyst at the company, explained.

But using spreadsheets posed challenges when it came to being in sync on quality assurance issues. Also, files were frequently misplaced and it was hard to find past information quickly.

With these limitations, Badcock looked at the option of using a more sophisticated test management system. One system it tested for free for 30 days was Zephyr for JIRA. It decided to use the product permanently.

“The combination of Zephyr for JIRA’s integration capabilities, easy-to-use interface and competitive pricing plan added up to an obvious solution,” Fleming told the company, according to a blog post.

Zephyr for JIRA let company employees more efficiently view progress on a software project, too. It was much easier to find older information and files were easily found, as well.

“[W]ith Zephyr, it allowed us to have all the stuff in one place,” Fleming said. “Now we have an archived version…[I]t makes searching for old test cases a lot easier. It makes duplicating test cases a lot easier, or coding it…It pretty much brought organization to an unorganized process.”

Among its many benefits is that allows users to create, edit and view tests. It also provides the ability to track quality metrics. Advanced searches are undertaken using ZQL. It is much more efficient that other options.

“That saves so much time, just being able to have everything in one place,” Fleming explained. “[Zephyr for JIRA] makes it a lot easier for us to know when things are ready, to find things, and to overall just organize things a lot better than we previously ever could have.”