Is it a good idea to have separate projects for issues found by developers and testing in Zephyr

[Raisa]

I am planning to write my test cases in Zephyr for Jira, however the dev team already uses jira as an issue management software and since test is a type of issue so i would need suggestions if it is a good idea to have separate projects for issues and testing so that they don't get mixed up?

I have seen in Zephyr, you can link your issues across the projects.

[G3 · Accepted solution]

Raisa,

We had that initial question as well... whether to create Z4J test issues in existing projects, or to use an entirely separate project for all the test cases.

Along with Swapna's response I'll add some quick input.

We definitely decided to create the Z4J issues in the separate existing project spaces instead of one entirely new 'testing' project. This allows for:

• More authentic project management by keeping specific project work (dev and testing) related to specific projects
• Less burdensome Atlassian/JIRA administration to control user permissions and capabilities across all projects (we use 'Crowd' for user/group policies and admin)
• Visibility of testing efforts to individual development teams (working in the projects)
• Better issue linking behavior (of bugs/defects/improvements - in test cases, individual executions, and at the separate test steps)
• The crucial benefit of efficient reporting outputs as JIRA functionally intended
  • Using simple filters to generate rapid search results
  • Take advantage of JIRA dashboards containing useful reporting gadgets
  • Providing relevant reports to leadership/customers
• ... and more.

Finally, here's a more philosophical perspective. Testers and developers work side-by-side at my shop. We are focused on inviting all personnel back to the same problem-solving table (along with customers during sprint planning meetings) to serve each other and unify efforts toward a collaborative product/outcome as a team (or family, even). A strong reason we chose Z4J for manual testing was to put almost all testing activities in the same space as development activities... as a measure to break down the 'silo' (or barrier/challenge) that traditionally separates testing from development.

So, another way of looking at it... to separate out testing in it's own separate project also reinforces the disconnected stigma associated between testers and developers.

This, for us, would defeat the purpose of using JIRA as a transparent and collaborative project management tool.

Regards.

- Gray -

[Swapna Kumar Vemula _Zephyr_]

Hello Raisa,

Its been a good idea to have separate projects for Issues and Tests but it is not a best practise as the Issues(Bugs) have been raised for the tests(Test Executions) that are failed for the same project which will create confusion between the duplicate projects even though they are linked.

So, It is better to create the test cases within the same project which are separated by Issuetype and also can be differentiated by Test Cycles which you can perform the executions independently.

If the Team size is small or the test cases are less compared to the issues then creating different project will be helpful.

Also Zephyr provides a separate Test tab on the Navigation bar which will contains all the opreations that can be performed on tests explicitly.

Thank You.

Swapna Kumar Vemula.