Test Management Blog

In this post I'm going to break down one of the fundamental concepts in Jira: projects. You're going to find out why we need projects and see how issues relate to those projects. What is a Jira Project? Think of a Jira project as a container – a bit like a digital filing cabinet for your work items. Every piece of work you track in Jira needs to live somewhere, and that somewhere is a project. There's two key points to understand about how issues relate to projects: Each project can hold one or more “issues" (or records that track units of work if you prefer that terminology) Every issue belongs to one project It's important to understand that an...

What is a JIRA Issue? Understanding JIRA “Issues” is key to managing projects in Jira. For legacy reasons, in Jira, records are known as “Issues”. When JIRA started out as a defect bug and issue tracking software tool, a record was known as an issue. However, use of Jira well beyond defect and bug tracking, has grown. You'll find it easier to think of an issue in JIRA as a record used to track a unit of work. Every record in JIRA is a record of information that we're using to track a particular piece and type of work. You could think of an issue as a “digital card” that holds all the details about a piece of work that...

Are you looking to enhance your project management skills with Jira? Whether you're using Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Jira Work Management, or any other version of Jira, understanding the fundamental building blocks is crucial. In the following series of videos we take you through six of the fundamental building blocks to Jira. What You’ll Learn Our course is structured around six core concepts that form the foundation of Jira: Issues: Discover what constitutes an issue and explore the various issue properties. Projects: Learn how to use projects as containers for different aspects of your work, organizing multiple issues efficiently. Workflow and Status: Understand how to configure status values for your issues and set up transitions to model your organization’s...

In this guide, we delve deep into the Burndown chart. An essential tool in JIRA for tracking “estimated work remaining” versus “work completed”. This chart helps you asses whether your team is on track to meet sprint goals. Primarily, Burndown charts apply to Scrum boards, although you can configure a Kanban project to include a Scrum board along with a Burndown chart (will explore this oddity at the end). We've broken this guide down into the following sections: – An Introduction to Burndown Charts – Configuration: items that influence how your chart displays data Status Categories Board Configuration Field Context Project Types – The Different Tracking Methods Story Points Original Time Estimate Estimated Time Remaining Issue Count Introduction to Burndown...

In any test automation project you're going to run into errors. They might be errors in your programming. They might also be errors raised as your scripts try to interact with the application you're testing. Either way when an error occurs during the execution of your automation code it's considered an 'exception'. That is, your code can't continue to be executed as you intended; *an exception to the rules you've defined in your code has to be handled.* In this article we look at how C# deals with Exceptions and we look at the different types of exceptions you're likely to encounter with Selenium in C#. Contents C# Exception Handling The C# CLR Exception Object Exception Handling in C# Throwing...

In Jira we have the concept of Sprints and Versions. We've already covered Using Jira JQL to Search for Issues in a Sprint. In this post we look at JQL statements and functions you can use to search based on Versions. A Version in Jira is a milestone in your project. Think of it as a 'name' that points to a snapshot of something you want to release. Usually we'll have two version fields 1. Affects Version – the version of the app/product where we found the issue 2. Fix Version – the version of the app/product where we included the fix for the issue You may need to configure your issue layout to show both of these fields. If...

Let's take a look at using date fields and operators with Jira's query language. There are a few 'gotchas' to watch out for when using date values. Having said that there are also some really useful functions that will help you identify exactly what you need from your date based JQL queries Now the most straight forward example is something along the lines of project = "DX" and createdDate > 2023-7-03 Important to take into account that “greater than” is taken as the start of day 23-08-03. Jira JQL with Dates So really this query really means project = "DX" and createdDate >= 2023-07-03 For clarity and to avoid confusion sometimes it's better to work with times as well. Adds...

Usually everything you do in Jira is orientated around a sprint. Your current sprint. Or perhaps even a past sprint or a future sprint. In which case you're going to come up against scenarios where you need a neat list of issues related to a sprint. In this post we look at three Jira JQL functions that you can use to help you search for issues in a particular sprint. If you're looking to find a list of issues that are related in some way to a particular sprint then we need to delve into a few JQL functions. Fundamentally an issue can be in Future Sprints, Open Sprints and Closed Sprints. The Backlog view will show us the Open...

In this post we show you how to use Jira's advanced JQL language to search for related issues. Often in Jira you'll want to search and find issues that are related to another issue. Perhaps you have Child issues or Linked issues for a particular issue you're working on. You just need to list, in the search results, all these related issues. In Jira there are two ways to relate issues to each other… Two Ways to Relate Issues 1. parent / child – created with the 'Add a child issue' feature2. linked issues – created with the 'Link Issue' feature In our example above we have an Epic (issue key SCR-26) that has both child issues AND linked issues....

JQL, Jira Query Language. This is a quick intro to the power users approach to searching for issues in Jira. In this post we'll introduce you to the JQL basics and then in the next posts we'll start seeing just how powerful JQL is by looking at some specific use cases. To start using the JQL search feature in Jira you can just search for text here… Then you can switch to JQL mode by clicking on this link.. If you haven't used JQL before this will expose you to your first JQL statement that looks something like this. Where the format or syntax all boils down to three parts: You can think of the three parts as field: where...