This is a guest blog post from Karthik Selvakumar, client services engineer at Zephyr, about extending AtlasBoard – Atlassian’s open source wallboard app – to include test data from the Zephyr for Jira test case management add-on for Jira.

What is Atlasboard?

Atlasboard is a NodeJS app that allows you to create wallboards. Once you install Atlasboard, you can quickly generate a wallboard and set up dashboards, widgets, and jobs, and then run them. The basic AtlasBoard module gives you plenty of common wiring to your wallboard once created (socket.io binding, job scheduling, widget rendering, etc.) Creating a new wallboard takes just a few steps:

  1. Install Atlasboard:
    npm install -g atlasboard

    (you will need node 0.8 or above)

  2. Create your own wallboard:
    atlasboard new
  3. Import packages that the community has built already for you.

A package can contain dashboards, widgets, and jobs (the job is the server side component, the widget is the client side, and a dashboard is the glue between all them to create the actual wallboard).

For example, Zephyr used AtlasBoard to create testing dashboards that allow us and other project teams to get metrics and reports from Jira and Zephyr for Jira. We were pleased with the results, so we’re sharing our work as a new package for AtlasBoard called ZAPI Board

ZAPI Board, introduced by Zephyr in March, is an open source package installed as a sub-module for AtlasBoard – with widgets including execution activity, execution progress, and execution trends. The sub-module was built using NodeJS, Rickshaw, and JQuery.

What do you get with ZAPI Board?

With AtlasBoard and Zephyr ZAPI, you can create a test management board for your team.

Using ZAPI Board, the dashboards that you create can track test creation progress, execution progress, and much more. For example, you could show a chart of the test cases created or executed over the last four weeks. Dashboards can also track test execution trends, testing lifecycle burn down, overall testing activity, or the “baddest” bug in your testing defect tracking process. 

Furthermore, using the metrics APIs in ZAPI, we can gather additional data (check out the developer documentation here). Using the test data APIs, we can access test creation charts, use ZQL and saved filters to see execution activity across projects and change logs, and show test step execution per execution record. Using the metrics APIs, we get chart resources for test case creation data, test execution progress, test execution trends based on a time frame (daily, weekly), and test execution burn down for cycles.

How do you set this up for your team?

Once you have AtlasBoard up and running, it’s simple to add new packages to your AtlasBoard using git submodules – just refer to the instructions on the AtlasBoard site. The initial ZAPI board installation comes with pre-built sample widgets and jobs using ZAPI. Just refer to our docs to see how to configure them for your team. Get started at https://bitbucket.org/zfjdeveloper/zapiboard-package

You can learn more about Zephyr for Jira and ZAPI on the Atlassian Marketplace.

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Guest blog: Using AtlasBoard to create testing boards