Boost Your Agile Testing Efficiency in Jira with Yest and Xray

In agile development, efficient testing and collaboration are key. Although methodologies and ceremonies guide the process, choosing the best tools is crucial for success.

The Yest–Xray integration provides a comprehensive solution to accelerate quality software delivery, placing collaboration at the heart of the project. Here’s how these tools work together to maintain test relevance, reduce rework, and improve velocity.

Yest, developed by Smartesting, is a visual test design tool. Yest helps QA teams create relevant test cases, increasing test production speed by 40%. It supports manual and automated testing and integrates seamlessly with Xray. It also integrates with various test automation tools, including RobotFramework, Java Selenium, Cucumber, Eggplant, Tosca, UFT, Ranorex, and Cypress.

Yest uses graphical workflows that reinforce team collaboration. This approach clearly outlines objectives and ensures that user needs are efficiently communicated to all project stakeholders. Furthermore, the “Yest for Jira” app, available for free on the Atlassian Marketplace, allows all Jira users to view and edit workflows.

Additionally, Yest provides IDE accelerators and automatic impact analysis to help maintain test cases in a fast-paced Agile environment. Its keyword-based approach allows manual testers to contribute to test automation, making it an ideal solution for Agile and DevOps teams.

Xray is a full-featured app and a complete Test Management tool for Jira. It supports the entire testing life cycle: test planning, test design, test execution, and test reporting. Xray does this by using special Jira issue types, so users can use all Jira benefits that they are used to.

Xray introduces Native Quality Management, a new, holistic approach that naturally embeds the quality management process into the development workflow. With Native Quality Management, all QA tools, tests, and processes are infused into your development environment. So Quality and Development teams speak the same language, stay on the same page, and release consistently quality software — together.

Thousands of organizations worldwide trust Xray to infuse quality seamlessly into development.

One of the primary challenges teams face is dealing with ambiguous or changing requirements. Misinterpretations can lead to scope creep, defects, and additional rework, causing project delays and negatively affecting team morale.

Challenges: User stories, often presented as text, may lack clarity or context, increasing the risk of misinterpretation and ambiguity.  

Solution: Yest for Jira allows Product Owners and Business Analysts to define business workflows to illustrate various user scenarios and journeys within Jira. By linking these workflows to Jira tickets, teams gain a holistic view of functionalities. Additionally, visual workflows can be created or shared during “3 Amigos” meetings to align on requirements, establishing a shared visual language that supports a shift-left approach.

As development accelerates, agile teams must rapidly adapt to changes. Which can be challenging when managing complex systems with limited time and resources.  

Challenges: Testers need to prepare specification changes, ensuring readiness for production while balancing complexity and speed.  

Solution: Test scenarios are automatically generated from workflows, ensuring comprehensive yet optimized coverage to simplify test maintenance and execution. Yest’s features, such as impact analysis, refactoring, controlled change propagation and auto-completion, help testers adapt quickly to evolving requirements. This significantly reduces the cost of updating affected tests. Additionally, Yest simplifies data set preparation for both manual and automated tests, ensuring consistent execution across all scenarios. Yest enables test script generation through a keyword-based approach for teams seeking test automation. It also allows easy publication to preferred automation tools. These generated scenarios are transferred to Xray for execution, providing full visibility into the testing process within Jira. When requirements are updated, Yest automatically synchronizes Xray tests and traceability links, ensuring up-to-date coverage and alignment.

Test execution and reporting are crucial phases in the testing lifecycle, allowing teams to effectively evaluate software performance and quality. This phase transforms designed test cases into actionable insights, ensuring that issues are identified and addressed promptly.  

Challenges: When executing tests, teams often struggle with maintaining consistency between manual and automated tests, with managing defect reporting efficiently, and with analyzing results to facilitate rapid decision-making. Furthermore, integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines can become complex without the right tools and processes.  

Solution: With X-ray, teams benefit from a seamless Jira-native experience, gaining real-time insights into test coverage and status directly within Jira’s agile boards. This integration allows teams to monitor testing progress and adjust project scope more efficiently.

Tests can be run either manually or automatically, with results reported back to Xray. With Xray’s support for CI/CD tools, automated tests from Yest can be integrated into deployment pipelines, ensuring rapid and consistent testing for every release—an essential feature for agile and DevOps teams. 

Xray’s detailed reports link test cases to requirements and defects, offering clear insights into areas requiring fixes and fostering better collaboration between QA and development teams. Additionally, Yest for Jira enables teams to visualize test execution results through graphical workflows and decision tables, allowing them to gain a global perspective and identify areas for software improvement.

The Yest-Xray integration’s key benefits are:

Combining Yest’s visual test design with Xray’s robust test management creates an efficient testing solution for agile teams working in Jira. This integration enables teams to improve test quality and coverage, adapt to changing requirements, and continuously deliver high-quality software in a collaborative environment. For agile project teams aiming to streamline quality assurance within Jira, Yest and Xray provide the necessary tools for success.