Jira as a Test Case Management Software

Preface

Introduction

Moodle team uses Atlassian Jira as a Bug Tracker system. With a bit of tweaking Jira can become a Test Case Management software. For Moodle 2.0, we improved our QA department. We've been through testing a range of test management software that we could integrate to Jira. We tried more deeply Test Link, an open source software. It gave a us a good understanding of the basic Test Case Management software functionalities. Finally we decide to setup Jira for QA testing purpose. The main reason is that people working on Moodle are well familiar with Jira interface, and it will be easy for them to learn how to create, run test case, or generate report.

Jira and Test Case Management

Jira as a Test Case Management is attractive since it:

1. Uses an existing and known tool
2. Provides an easy way to link bugs to test cases and results
3. Provides decent reporting of the state of testing
4. Supports multiple releases

Scope of this document

This document describes how to install and setup Jira as a Test Case Management software.

Installing Jira (Linux)

Download the enterprise edition zip file on the Jira website. Extract the the files. Run jira-enterprise/bin/startup.sh. You should be able to connect to http://localhost:8080

Setup the entire Jira QA environment

create a project "

it could be called "Moodle QA"

create a main task

create a new Issue type: "QA Cycle"

create as many subtask as test case

create a new Issue type: "Test case"

create new fields

"QA cycle" issue type should have these fields

• Summary:
• Description:
• Build Run Against: Moodle Version List

"Test case" issue type should have these fields:

• Steps: test case steps (it's like a normal description field)
• Component: should be same list as the one in Moodle project
• Assignee:
• Build Run Against: it should be an automatic copy of the parent task. Use the plugin parentfield [1]

Create three new status:

• Not Run (transition to Passed/Failed)
• Passed (transition to Not Run)
• Failed (transition to Not Run)
• Obsolete/Inactive (transition to Not Run)

Add Timecharts plugin

1. Download the Charting plugin http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/JIRA+Charting+Plugin
2. Download the Timechart plugin http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/Timecharts
3. Install the two file jar files into WEB-INF/lib
4. Run shutdown.sh and startup.sh

Add clone plugin

In order to clone the QA cycle and all test cases, we need to add the clone functionality to Jira. [2]

Running a QA test cycle

Write Test Case

Create a task: Test Case

This will be created probably only once. It has to been written when you decide that your project get a new functionality. The description contains

Create a subtask: Test Case Execution

This will be created everytime you need to run a new bunch of test case. There should be a unique subtask by Affected Version, so we can generate correct report. The description of the subtask describes Steps and Expected Results. Note that these steps and expected results can be different in each substaks of a test case, if the affected versions should behave differently.

Run Test Case

Run a test

You should follow the steps from the subtask which is assigned to you.

Report a bug

If you encounter a bug, create a new issue and link the bug to this test case execution. Mark this test case execution as failed.

Read Report

Generate a report

When a QA report need to be created for the current state of a release, we search for all TestCase issues with the Affects Version field set to the required release. The resulting set of issues can then be sorted and counted by number passed, failed, not run etc. Producing historical reports can be done with the Timecharts plugin for Jira, which shows a graph of how the results in a report change over time.

Interpret the report

We created a new link type to connect test cases to the bugs that they created or are verifying. This is the biggest advantage that I see of using an issue tracker to track test cases and bugs together. TBD: we could also add a box to all bugs to indicate whether a Test Case is expected by someone for a bug.