Accelerate Test Design with Xray and YEST - Xray Blog

Test design is at the heart of effective testing, a crucial process that can make or break your software quality. Why invest time and resources in managing, executing, maintaining, and automating test cases if they don't directly address business needs or mitigate production risks?

Test design involves the process of planning, creating, and organizing test cases based on specific requirements, whatever their form is, to ensure comprehensive coverage and the effectiveness of software testing. Suppose you're already managing requirements with Jira, under User Stories. In that case, Xray equips you with a powerful tool in Jira to manage your test cases, execution, and lifecycle. But how can you transform and facilitate the process of transforming your requirements into intelligent test cases to improve your testing speed?

About the integration

The Xray-YEST integration helps users design smart test cases 40% faster and synchronize them seamlessly into Xray. With this integration, teams can optimize manual testing and accelerate test automation, uniting the entire product team for a collaborative and virtuous workflow around the testing lifecycle. Let’s see how:

1. Design an optimized number of the smartest test cases that reflect total control over test coverage; 
2. Increase collaboration with all product team members by leveraging graphical test representations in YEST and centralizing your tests in Xray;
3. Increase test production velocity by 40% for manual and automated testing;
4. Leverage reporting capabilities with Xray’s detailed test coverage and traceability reports, complemented by visual test result analysis with YEST for Jira. Get full visibility over requirement coverage thanks to traceability links maintained by the Xray-YEST integration;
5. Streamline test automation through a stronger contribution of manual testers to the automation effort.

The challenge

Test design is a critical activity that influences the entire test process and brings different challenges, such as: 

• Quality of inputs: How to deal with the varying quality, completeness, and stability of the requirements and handle the need for matching test data? 
• Apply good practices across the teams: How to master functional complexity, apply good practices and cutting-edge design techniques, and ensure a standardized organization of your test assets in Xray? 
• Increase velocity: How to start earlier, cope with time constraints, and match the ever-increasing speed of iterative, incremental development? 
• Efficient collaboration: How to engage with other stakeholders, Project Managers, Business Analysts, Product Owners, Test Automation Engineers, and Dvelopers around the testing topics? 
• Achieve optimal test coverage: how to stop testing in the dark, regain control over test coverage, reliably manage requirement traceability in Xray, optimize the number of test cases, and identify regression tests to automate?

The solution

The Xray-YEST integration delivers smart test cases, ensuring that your requirements are thoroughly and efficiently covered with the fewest possible tests, and closely aligned with real-world business scenarios.

The integration between Xray and YEST provides:

• Creation, maintenance and synchronization of YEST’s graphical test workflows into Jira (with the app “YEST for Jira”);
• Display and synchronization of the Jira User Stories into the YEST desktop application;
• Publication and update of test cases from YEST desktop to Xray, with traceability links between test cases and User Stories;
• Analysis of test execution results through visualization of the graphical test workflows in the YEST for the Jira app.

How it works

Beginning with requirements analysis, Business Analysts or Test Analysts use the YEST for the Jira app to represent use cases, fostering collaboration across the team visually. This graphical approach, accessible to all in Jira, provides a business view during sprints and supports a top-down method for guaranteeing functional complexity.

With automatic test generation, YEST ensures optimized test scenarios that provide complete coverage, which are published directly into Xray. Users can fine-tune and update test cases, maintaining both consistency and structure. YEST's ability to easily adapt to changes encourages early test design, aligning with developers’ pace to create smart test cases effortlessly.

Testers can manually execute test cases within Xray and analyze the results using YEST for Jira, alongside Xray's powerful reporting capabilities. Whether executed manually or automatically through Xray integration, your test cases provide results that are accessible in Xray. 

YEST for Jira enhances result analysis through graphical workflows and decision tables, helping to pinpoint areas in your application where tests frequently encounter issues. Check out this video for a visual demonstration of the integration in action.

Download datasheet 

Conclusion

Integrating a test design solution with Xray enhances testing activities. With the Xray-YEST integration, teams can benefit from collaborative visual workflows, automated test generation, and easier adaptation to changes, all of which help deliver high-quality software. Explore the success story of Allianz France and learn how they achieved a fast-paced Agile development lifecycle with Xray and YEST.