The Bonfire Team has just released Bonfire 2.6 and it has a killer feature that will particularly excite teams testing native applications. If you are testing a Windows, Mac or Linux desktop application try the following and let us know if it solves your native application testing needs:

1) Get the image

Mac, Windows and Linux have keyboard shortcuts that allow you to capture a screenshot of either the whole desktop or the active window. On Mac OS X use Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+4. Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) use Alt+Print Screen.

This will place the image on your clipboard.

Note: you could also use this for testing Flash based web applications.

2) Paste into Bonfire

Once you have the image of your native application on your clipboard you can switch back to Bonfire in your browser of choice – Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox – and use the ‘Paste Image’ option.

3) Annotate

Bonfire 2.6 also has another neat feature, you can now annotate any and all screenshots attached to an issue. Regardless of where the image came from – browser extension, adding an image from your desktop, or pasting the image as per above – you can then annotate the image.

4) Create the issue

Of course once you have annotated the image to point out the necessary information it is only one click to create the issue.

We believe this speeds the bug creation process for teams that focus their energy on testing native applications. Of course, we would love to get your thoughts on this workflow and learn how much time it saves you and your team, so please let us know in the comments below.

This was just one highlight of Bonfire 2.6, for the full details see the Bonfire 2.6 Release Notes.

Get Bonfire 2.6 Today!

Enjoy!
The Bonfire Team

Note: Bonfire 2.6 is coming to OnDemand customers in November.

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you’ll be as excited as we are about this weekend’s Atlassian OnDemand release – full of goodies for the navigationally-challenged and busy user!

Members of the OnDemand team have been toiling away lo these past weeks to bring you a re-designed navigation header that makes your OnDemand experience smoother, faster, and dead-simple. As soon as you log in, you’ll see the difference. Menu options across the top are bolder and easier to see (sufferers of temporary fridge-induced blindness, I’m lookin’ at you).

Over on the left you’ll find the name of the application you’re currently using. Click, and buh-blam! it turns into a menu. It may look like an ordinary drop-down, but it’s actually a quantum wormhole developed by the nerds of Atlassian Labs, deep in their underground lair. Debunking both chaos theory and the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, this menu lets you transition instantly from JIRA issues to Confluence pages to Bamboo results to Team Calendars and back again. Not only is that more flow than a yoga class, it’s a life preserver for those of us still working on our orienteering badge from Scouts.

Within each of the OnDemand apps, there are things we want do frequently: find the open JIRA issues for a project, peruse the activity stream in Confluence, scan all the builds for breakages, etc. In our on-going effort to battle carpal tunnel syndrome, we’ve reduced those actions to just two mouse clicks. (Apologies to the world’s orthopedists for imposing this threat to your livelihood.)

Click the project icon in the top-left corner of any screen and you’ll be presented with shortcut links.  Hop to important pages inside the app you’re using, or to the corresponding project in another app. Jump to the blog feed for your favorite Confluence space. Or be transported to a list of all the open JIRA issues assigned to you. Has the build you kicked off finished yet? The answer is a mere two clicks away! If only getting to that beer stand and back during the 2-minute warning was this easy.

Although this represents a leap forward in making OnDemand the most fluid and intuitive product it can be, we know our work isn’t done. So we’re looking forward to hearing from you. Drop a comment in Atlassian Answers, raise an issue on our public JIRA, or just shoot us an email to let us know what you think. There is also  a page available now with more details and screenshots:

Must… know… MORE!

Create Acceptance Tests During Planning

Testing is an integral part of the agile development process, so Bonfire Test Sessions are now ingrained in your GreenHopper experience. GreenHopper’s Plan and Work modes display test session details in the issue side-bar.

With GreenHopper 6 and Bonfire 2.4, you can record acceptance tests on the fly, during your sprint planning sessions.

Track Testing Progress

Test Sessions in the issue view side-bar incorporate agile testing into every aspect of development. From GreenHopper’s Work mode, click the Bonfire tab in any issue to get an overview of how testing is going without leaving your agile board.

New Bonfire search parameters let you set up your agile boards to see testing status for each sprint.

Incorporate Testing into your Development Workflow – Make sure all Testing is Complete before work is Done

Testing should be part of your agile development process, never an afterthought. Bonfire now includes a Complete Test Session condition and validator you can add to your workflow to ensure testing is complete before an issue is moved to done.

Test as a Team

Collaboration between testers and developers is critical to ensure a quality software release, and Bonfire helps you involve the team with agile testing. Shared Test Sessions are the central forum in JIRA to track activity while testing a particular story or requirement. Invite your team into a session so everyone can participate and stay up to date on what’s happening.

Templates in Bonfire’s browser extensions are the best way to create JIRA issues. Specify a template for your test session, hiding fields that aren’t important, so everyone knows just what to capture. Environment details (OS, browser, versions, etc) are recorded automatically. Templates are great for:

• Developers: control the issues that are sent your way, reducing the need to go back for more information
• Testers: simplify the issue creation form for people outside the team
• Everyone else: a quick and easy way to communicate directly with the development team

Get Bonfire 2.4

Bonfire 2.4 is available for download today!

Get Bonfire 2.4

JIRA OnDemand customers have already been upgraded.

Gather around: it’s time to hand out graham crackers and chocolate to everyone on your team – get ready to create killer s’mores issues with Bonfire 2.4!

Attach Anything & Everything

Don’t leave your browser tab to grab a screenshot and create a new JIRA issue! Simply open the Bonfire browser extension to do anything you need with issue attachments:

• Snap, annotate and attach multiple screenshots while creating a JIRA issue
• Attach non-screenshot files
• Add attachments to existing JIRA issues
• Rename any screenshot or attachment before it’s sent to JIRA
• Drag-and-drop any file directly into the sidebar to add it as an attachment

Attachment improvements are some of the top customer-requested features, so upgrade to Bonfire 2.4 and take advantage of the things you’ve been asking for!

Report on Test Session Status

Bonfire Test Sessions are the central place in a JIRA project to track activity while testing a particular story or requirement. Create separate test sessions for each type of testing.

To understand how testing is going, Test Sessions now have a roll-up field that shows you the aggregated status of all sessions for a single issue. This field is also searchable, making it easy to filter search results and display reports for the test activity still open for a particular sprint.

The new Test Session status field makes it easy to find issues that still need to be tested, so encourage your team by adding a gadget to your dashboard displaying issues with testing still incomplete for the current sprint.

Faster Look & Feel

For JIRA 5.1, we challenged ourselves to make editing even faster, so we introduced inline edits for single field changes to make working with issues quick and easy for everyone.

Not be outdone, the Bonfire team has introduced two new features that will make testing even faster in Bonfire 2.4:

• Test Sessions offer inline editing to reduce context switches and page reloads
• Clicking the info icon for any Test Session displays a quick preview of all details and notes
• The new operations drop-drown menu lets you pause, complete and assign Test Sessions without leaving a JIRA issue

Create the Perfect Issue Template

Templates in Bonfire’s browser extension make it quick and easy to create JIRA issues. Templates are a great way to control details of the issues that others create for you: show just the fields you’d like them to fill out, hiding anything that might distract or cause confusion. With Bonfire 2.4, you can add custom fields from third party plugins as well!

You can now specify a template for any Test Session, so the whole team is on the same page about what information to capture. Environment details are recorded automatically, so the team can focus on providing important information without filling out extra fields.

Get Bonfire 2.4

Create s’more issues! Everyone creating JIRA issues will find something to love in Bonfire 2.4.

Get Bonfire 2.4

Bonfire 2.4 is available for download today. If you’re using JIRA OnDemand, you’ve already been upgraded to Bonfire 2.4!

With the Bonfire 2.2 release we are proud to introduce some great features that everyone who creates issues in JIRA will love.

Only Show Selected Fields in Templates

Create a Bonfire template that only includes the fields you really care about.

Only want to see the Summary and Component fields? Hide all of the other fields in the template and only show those two fields.

Contextual Browser Information

Bonfire users commonly include dynamic variables to capture the URL and browser information at the time of issue creation. Bonfire now captures all of this information by default so you no longer need to specify dynamic variables in the the Environment field when creating an issue or in a template.

Third-Party Custom Fields

We now support third-party custom fields, yay! For instance, if you use Tempo for time tracking and customer billing you can now create an issue through Bonfire and capture the correct Tempo Customer Account.

Specify Template for Test Session

Test teams love using templates to speed the creation of issues during test sessions. You only want to capture the information required to reproduce a bug – anything else is noise.

The test coordinator can now specify the template that everyone participating in the test session should use. Participants in the test session will have this template selected for them automatically when they join the test session.

Bonfire 2.2 is a great leap forward for everyone in the team – from testers and developers to product owners, technical writers and managers.

Get Bonfire 2.2 Today!

Link to Issue Nav Duplicates Project Clause

Klingon in Error Message

Swimlane Not Shown, AKA “The Mickey Mouse”

Issue Key Wraps

The Mona Lisa

What Bonfire’d Art have you seen during your bug triage sessions? What has turned up during a test session? Let me know, and include a screenshot if you are happy for me to use it to provide inspiration to other Bonfire Artists out there.

Now, go get Bonfire 2.1 and start making some art!

Get Bonfire 2.1 Today.

Atlassian Bonfire 2.1, available today, makes everyone a professional when it comes to reporting bugs. Further, the test sessions and traceability in Bonfire 2.1 allow you to monitor the quality of your product over time. Now, let’s take a look at these features in detail.

Annotate Screenshots Like a Pro

Bonfire 2.1 has a completely redesigned and rewritten annotation tool – we call it Charcoal… get it? The new annotation tool kicks ass, making it quick and painless for anyone to annotate a screenshot with the detail required to enable an engineer to reproduce a bug. Annotations are amazing because you can now:

• Move, resize and delete annotations
• Add colour, and lots of it
• Blur with perfection
• Have wonderful text

No point in reading about it though, take a look for yourself:

Multiple Related Issues in a Test Session

It is important to ensure that the team has tested the high risk issues on the backlog. Even if the team doesn’t have time to QA every story in the sprint they can at least create a test session which links to multiple issues that are considered high risk. You are now focusing the limited QA time on a test session for the high risk issues.

Of course linking a test session to multiple issues means you’ll also want to raise bugs as sub-tasks under one of these parent issues. You can do that too.

Testing Visibility

Everyone in an Agile team is responsible for quality, not simply the QA Engineers. Bonfire provides visibility into the manual testing that the team performs (see Atlassian Bamboo for automated testing). The Test Session captures all the relevant information including activity, participants, raised issues and time spent: In Bonfire 2.1 a team can quickly jump from the test session screen to the Issue Navigator to triage the issues raised in the session. We made this easier so that you can get those bugs on the backlog, and get them addressed ASAP.

Testing Effectiveness

When everyone in the team participates in the testing we expect to have a very high quality product. To make sure that is the case we can report on the bugs raised during a release, and how they were raised. For instance, we may want to know how many bugs were raised prior to release and how many were raised by our customers once the product was released.

In the left hand pie chart below we have “Raised During Test Session” and on the right hand pie chart we have “Raised During is Empty”. We are using a new JQL clause “Raised During” for this report.

We can see that there were more escaped bugs in 1.1 (44 bugs) compared with those we caught during a 1.1 test session (22 bugs).  The real power comes when we start adding this to our Dashboard to track the quality of each release: There is a ton of awesome functionality in Bonfire 2.1 to make your testing team more Agile, and more efficient.

See What’s New

Thankfully, using Bonfire ensures no details is missed and new issues show up in the right places for you and your team.

Pre-Populate What’s Important

Bonfire templates populate fields with the correct issue types, labels, components or other details you need. Set up templates for the issues you or your team create most often, and you’ll never have to input repetitive data again.

Click to view full size

Save Time, Eliminate Risk

Create a Bonfire template in less time than it takes to create a single issue.  Once setup, Bonfire templates cut your issue creation time down significantly, saving you valuable minutes or even hours of time saved every week.

Templates also reduce the human error factor to zero: a typo in a label or a missed field selection might mean an important issue doesn’t get on the right persons radar, but Bonfire templates eliminate that risk.

Share Templates with Everyone

Beyond bug reports, team leads and managers triage lots of general tasks in order to plan and assign work. If people from across the organization are sending work your way, they may not have the deep knowledge the process your team has setup for current projects – nor do they have time to keep up! Save people on other teams time and effort by sharing templates for the issues they create for you, and more importantly ensure no details are missed. Issues will auto-magically show up in the right place, filtered just the way you want them, and you won’t need to ‘clean up’ things that other people assign to your team.

Teams and projects naturally evolve and issue creation requirements change. As the owner of a shared template, make any changes you like, and the template will update for everyone using it! Other people won’t need to worry about finding ‘the new process’ your team has in place, and you won’t need to send out a memo about the new way to fill out TPS reports.

Try Bonfire 2

Bonfire is a must-have for anyone who creates JIRA issues. Upgrade to Bonfire 2 to take advantage of the great new features. If you haven’t tried Bonfire yet, start a free 30-day trial today!

Simply look for Bonfire in your JIRA Plugin Manager or click the button below.

Consistent Communication

The best way to keep velocity high and projects moving forward is to minimize the back-and-forth discussion clarifying issues. When working with people outside your team or organization, this is even more important, due to the geography, time zones, and different tools that get in the way.

A typical bug creation process might involve barriers like:

• Several required fields with specific descriptions
• Long forms to scroll through
• Training and/or meetings to introduce the creation process
• Follow up meetings to clarify changes or new additions

All these are workarounds to help testers capture the right information in the right place at the right time.

Bonfire’s templates help you overcome or eliminate all these barriers by automatically populating fields and values, ensuring consistent issue creation for everyone using JIRA.

Articulating a problem well and refining issue creation skills are a focus for noobs and veteran testers alike. Bonfire lets you standardize and structure this process for remote testers. Templates are easy to create and even easier to share, and the best part is that you don’t need to put any documents or training in place to make the sure the issues coming in have the right information.

Continuous Improvement

A bug which would have completed in 1 hour round time in a non-distributed environment could end up taking days when communicating across oceans! A remote or offshore team may not have the context a developer has when creating bugs, so these templates give them the framework to capture the right information. When you change a Bonfire template, the change is pushed out for everyone, and you don’t need to facilitate any sort of update.

Shared Test Sessions

Anyone working remotely isn’t around to hear the ‘water cooler’ chats and small tidbits of information shared throughout the day. You can communicate these to your distributed team members via instant message, or you might even go old-school and send an email.

But why take the trouble of switching context between your browser and chat client? And what about testers that work in another time zone, or for a different company?

Bonfire 2 gives you shared test sessions, so everyone can collaborate around testing a particular feature or story in a central forum. Anyone participating in the session or reviewing it later can see all the session activity, and most importantly, follow the session notes. You can take notes for a session directly from the browser extension, no context-switching needed, and session notes aggregate in a stream along with all the other activity happening, so everyone involved is on the same page, even if their water cooler is across an ocean.

Dynamic Details

What if you need to capture information that might be different every time, such as the web page URL or specific OS & browser details? Using Javascript, Bonfire lets you insert variables – dynamic pieces of information – into your templates.

Variables are designed to eliminate more of the back-and-forth, because when working with teams on the other side of the globe, a single unanswered question could add hours or days to a bug fix.

Share a template with variables, and the other people using that template will capture all the right context and dynamic details – without needing to learn Javascript or set up the template, and without you having to tell them which dynamic information is important to the issue.

Get Bonfire 2 Today

Bonfire 2 is chock full of new stuff, so get a free 30-day trial for JIRA download or OnDemand to make issue creation easier, faster and more efficient for everyone using JIRA!

Add stories to an in-progress sprint

Drag and drop the issue in Plan mode onto the active sprint and it will show up in your current sprint.

See issue Attachments in the Detail View

Following on from the Quick Filters is another great feature for Product Owners – the ability to see Attachments for an issue in the Detail View. You can now quickly pull up mockups or bug screenshots when in a backlog grooming or estimation session.

Enable Quick Filters on the Plan mode

Product Owners will be happy to hear that it is now easier to filter the backlog to find the stories they are looking for. For instance, use the Quick Filters to show only a particular product feature set, or bugs raised by your support engineers.

Finally, Kanban teams will be happy to hear they now have the ability to set a sub-query for the Work mode. This enables one board to contain all of the of issues which have been completed without having to show them all in the Work mode. These issues – usually previously resolved issues – will still be available in the Report mode for tracking progress. A great example for a Kanban team is adding JQL to filter issues which were resolved more than a week ago and only show them in the Report mode, and not the Work mode:

Install GreenHopper 5.9.1 today

Note: OnDemand customers will be upgraded to GreenHopper 5.9.1 over the next few weeks.