This is a guest blog post from Zephyr, makers of Zephyr for Jira.

The value of test management software in agile development

Today’s software developers and quality assurance teams face far different challenges than their predecessors. Balancing the need for speedy development cycles with the desire to keep costs down has led software developers to place more focus on their communication capabilities and foster collaboration among remote teams.

Agile development was supposed to better address these challenges: constant communication among teams at every step of the production cycle and the flexibility to cope with changes as they arise. Getting the most out of these endeavors requires sophisticated test management to cultivate agility while assuring the quality of the final product.

Agile development teams must quickly account for changes in the production cycle without delaying the release schedule. Clients or product owners may change their minds on features–sometimes timetables can even be accelerated. Developers need to be notified of any condition changes as soon as they occur to properly account for them. Thus, test management software with real-time capabilities allows team members to make or receive updates as they occur, meaning all components of the production cycle stay on track.

Agile Testing CGUCase Study: CGU

End-to-end application lifecycle solutions ensure tight integration among teams and roles in the development process. For instance, CGU, an insurance provider under the Insurance Australia Group Limited umbrella, found the organization’s software development operations had become more complex. They wanted to synchronize effort across teams, increase development spend, and stabilizing the entire process to better predict release schedules.

CGU needed a test management solution that integrated seamlessly with Jira and would foster collaboration among the various components of the enterprise. They ultimately decided on the Zephyr for Jira add-on. They determined that the JIRA-Zephyr package was the best option available on the market and would meet the vast majority of their development needs.

“The ability to trace the work we do, reuse test cases for regression testing and clone entire cycles saves valuable resource time,” says Adelle Grigor, Manager of Atlassian Technology Enablement Competency for CGU. “From a holistic point of view, if something needs to be changed by another business department, we can easily see if those changes would apply to another project team, and include those changes in future release. It is also easy to share tests with other project teams because some test cases can be used for different products we develop.”

Since deploying Zephyr for Jira, CGU teams have been able to migrate from external systems and reduce the required time-intensive manual operations, bolstering productivity and simplifying operations by consolidating in Jira. In agile development, communication and collaboration are essential. Deploying a sophisticated test management solution as part of your development lifecycle can improve both communication and collaboration, enhancing the performance of developers and QA teams and improving the quality of product releases.

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Guest blog: test management for agile teams