The discipline of agile test management is a well-covered domain. If you would be just starting out today implementing a software QA process that is integrated with your other DevOps processes, you would find an ocean of professional guides and articles on how to get started.
jira
Jira has become the market-leading issue tracking tool for agile project management of all kinds with a robust marketplace of add-ons. In over 14,000 teams, QA leaders look to Zephyr for Jira for focused test management included in their Jira instances. Zephyr for Jira enables teams to plan tests faster, track quality metrics to make informed release decisions, and consolidate test automation results in a single place. With Jira and Zephyr, QA processes are efficient and easily communicated within Jira. Communication with executives however need to happen in a different manner.
Conclusions often need to be communicated to managers and decision-makers (even outside of your organization) who don’t necessarily have Jira access. Instead of logging in to systems, they also tend to prefer business-ready file formats like a PDF document.
This is where the integration between Zephyr for Jira and Better PDF Exporter for Jira has come very handy for hundreds of users over the past years - on Jira Server and Data Center.
Now we strengthen this collaboration further as we announce the integration of Zephyr for Jira Cloud and Better PDF Exporter for Jira Cloud. The new version of Better PDF Exporter brings the power of exporting your Zephyr tests to custom PDF documents or reports that fit your needs and company standard.
How to export Zephyr tests to PDF from Jira Cloud
The team at Midori has been hard at work to make it possible to export the Zephyr managed Jira custom fields into a nicely formatted PDF document, with the level of details of your choice: the test steps, test steps with step results or just individual test executions without step results.
A Zephyr test summary report meant for the management should refrain from carrying too many technical details. For this purpose, you need a document that helps business stakeholders understand the general testing progress, the outcomes of the testing, what the result means for the product or business and the resources it took to conduct the testing.
Detailed test logs, screen captures, and other diagnostic files broken down by test categories do not add value for a C-level test summary report.
Zephyr test report exported from Jira to PDF
As a general recommendation, your test summary report should contain these 5 points to focus on the business impact:
- Scope of testing
- Resources used for testing
- Number of test executions ran
- Defects uncovered during testing with status indication
- Conclusion
Optional. Requirements covered
Scope of testing
In Zephyr for Jira, tests are represented with Test type Jira issues. When exporting a test report to PDF, the summary of the issue often suffices as an explanation of the scope. If that’s not enough, more information about what is being tested can go into the description of the issue.
Resources used for testing
List out the resources that were used for conducting that particular test. Resources can mean different things in different use cases, like hardware infrastructure or special facility.
You can choose to include the logged time of colleagues, so it’s transparent how much manpower went into that task. Whether you track time with Jira’s built-in time tracking module or use a third-party app, you can use Better PDF Exporter to include the worklogs in the PDF output as well.
Number of test executions ran
For this type of report, set up Better PDF Exporter to export Zephyr test executions. This way you get a report that only includes the individual test executions with most essential information set: the software version tested, the name of the test cycle, the result, the possible defects uncovered, the tester’s name and date of the test execution.
This export configuration doesn’t include the individual test step results and delivers just the right amount of information a decision-maker needs from this report.
Defects uncovered during testing with status indication
Defects, when found during testing can be turned into Bug type issues in Jira right from the Zephyr interface. The report lists these defects next to the failed execution and also as a linked issue, clearly indicating why the execution failed.
In case a defect was fixed in the meantime, it’s crossed over in the report, so it’s easy to understand the ratio of open and closed defects at a glance.
Conclusion
C-level people love short summaries of complex things, hence the Executive Summary, for example. Leaving a comment after concluding with the test entitled “Conclusion” will give you an opportunity to convey the right message and control the tone to end the report.
The optional extra: requirements covered
Your test summary report can also contain what requirements were covered by the test. This level of detail might be too much, but it also could be an important progress indicator, that you want to communicate to your management. The Zephyr report template in Better PDF Exporter is flexible enough to give you the freedom to customize what type of issue links to display.
Software testing has so many approaches, methodologies, and tools, that it’s challenging to balance between not overwhelming your team and finding the right tools and processes that yield superior quality software. Communicating test results in business-ready reports is often an afterthought whereas it should be an active part of a culture of collaboration.
Up your Zephyr test result reporting game and start creating your custom PDF reports from Jira!
Pair the powers of Zephyr for Jira with Better PDF Exporter!