“I was surprised by the flexibility and adaptability of Jira. I was all the more pleased that Xray adheres to the same principles as Jira, which only underlines the flawless integration of test management into Jira.“
-Manager of the bank’s IT process management
About the Bank
Our customer is a Central European Bank that is a leader in innovation. Last year alone, they became the best digital bank among 300 registered banks from around the world. To this very day, they have received 130 awards from 30 authorities. In the past, this Bank was the first in the country to offer products and services like credit cards and internet banking, which are taken for granted today.
In order to stay competitive and maintain a dominant position in the market, the Bank decided to undergo an agile digital transformation and keep innovating. They implemented various agile methodologies, frameworks, and tools like Jira and Xray, in order to efficiently test and deliver products, services, and solutions.
The first step in their digital transformation was to replace their legacy testing tool and find a solution to integrate testing and development within one ecosystem.
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Replacing a legacy tool for QA that no longer cuts it
The previous tool that testers in the bank used was HP ALM / Quality Center (HP QC). With HP QC there was no collaboration between testers and developers, as they were each using separate tools for their work.
Due to high license prices for HP QC, there was no investment into upgrading or other forms of innovations. Internally at the Bank, HP QC was no longer supported. As a result, they needed to replace HP QC with a modern, flexible, and cost-effective tool.
One of the main requirements that the IT management team had was to centralize processes, ideally into a single multifunctional tool.
The Solution
Jira as an integrated solution for the entire software development lifecycle
The Bank chose Jira Software as their main solution for their entire software development lifecycle including job registration, solution development management, product and service development, planning, deployment management, information technology service management (ITSM), and many other processes including test management. They chose server licenses that allow on-premise hosting and offer the possibility of greater customization, and in the future, they plan to move to Data Center Licenses.
They chose Jira due to the speed of deployment and flexibility. Furthermore, they wanted a tool for testing that would easily integrate with Jira as they wanted to unify their testing and development teams and increase the quality of solutions through effective testing and QA.
Xray Test Management for integration between testing and development
The Bank chose Xray Test Management App from all other candidates after a thorough selection in order to comprehensively cover the needs of Test Management, from the definition of tests to execution and reporting.
Xray excels with a friendly user interface, great flexibility, adaptability, and a number of integrations with test frameworks. Users were impressed by Xray’s functionality such as test team management, test, test plan management, test results, and built-in reports.
To help with the tool selection and implementation the customer chose EEA, an Atlassian partner, with extensive experience in migrations. EEA provided the necessary know-how and acted as an intermediary between the customer and Xray when it came to answering various technical, procedural, or practical questions.
Deploying Xray was seamless. The pilot phase began with workshops where EEA s.r.o. as an external partner of the Bank, introduced Xray to selected key users from a group of testers. They also collected feedback which later served as a basis for configuring Xray.
Xray was initially deployed in a non-production environment, where key users had the opportunity to safely examine the features of Xray and evaluate the solution. This step was an invaluable aid in getting to know Xray and how it worked, which resulted in making sure that the direction they chose was correct.
The Migration
They launched an Xray pilot in a production environment for two agile teams. After about a month of running, more teams gradually started to be added. To this day, there are 15 teams using Xray, and more follow.
The company expanded awareness of Xray users to other teams. They created Q&A meetings, internal documentation, and (video) manuals prepared by interested key users of the group of testers, along with links to extensive and detailed Xray documentation.
“I was afraid of the necessary change of ‘mindset’ when switching from HP QC to Xray because we had been using HP QC for many years. However, being able to test features in a non-production environment and have clear and extensive official Xray documentation, along with advice from an external partner, dispelled all my doubts.“
– Senior IT tester at the Bank
The next step was to migrate the existing test scenarios from HP QC. The built-in Xray import wizard was invaluable in the import from HP QC (compatible version of HP QC for import is HP ALM / QC v12.5x). However, with proper preparation of csv files – exports from HP QC, it is not a problem to import test scenarios into Jira using the Xray Test Case Importer even from an older version of HP QC – which was used in this particular case.
All in all, the Bank transferred approximately 58,000 test scenarios, totaling around 200,000 steps. From Jira and Xray’s point of view, such a large number of tests and steps had no noticeable negative impact on the application’s performance.
Overall, it took 3 to 4 months of pilot training, production deployment, preparation of internal education materials, and migration of the test scenarios themselves to complete the migration.
The benefits
Shortly after the deployment, the benefits of using Jira and Xray began to show:
1. Native integration between Xray and Jira
One of the most significant benefits of adapting Xray with Jira is their mutual integration, which allows you to closely link test management with the development or management and deployment planning. Testing artifacts like tests, test executions, test runs, etc. are managed as issues in exactly the same way as all other Jira issue types like bugs and stories. You can easily link tests to requirements and stories and everyone including developers can contribute to testing.
2. Entering defects in one tool
Testers were thrilled by the ability to create a defect directly during the tests without having to leave Xray. Automatic linking of created defects with related requirements, test and test execution helps to make the whole process transparent.
3. Simplification of time worked records
Users appreciated that they didn’t have to click on another system to report time worked. They simply report time for a given Jira issue, which can include creating test scenarios, testing itself, preparing test plans, and so on.
4. Possibility of parallel work on several projects
A surprising advantage, which was seen immediately after the deployment of Xray, was that now testers could work on several projects at the same time by opening several windows at the same time, which was not possible before using HP QC.
5. Simplification of management audits
The choice of Xray for test management was also positively perceived by auditors with management. Performing audits and compliance reporting is much easier if the data is in one place. Now the bank ensures full compliance and easy auditing with the persistence of historical data and tracking.
6. Cost and time saving
The bank experienced substantial financial savings due to the fact that the purchase price of licenses per user is more advantageous compared to HP QC. A significant advantage is the speed of deployment which also saves time during training, as it is enough to train users in one tool, as Xray is a part of Jira.
Overall, as a result of these benefits and the integration of Xray and Jira, virtually everyone involved in the SDLC works together to ensure the highest quality solutions.
A successful digital transformation leads this Bank into the future
Financial institutions have to respond quickly and effectively to changing market conditions, sudden changes in customer needs, and the rise of new technologies in order to keep their leading position.
Over time, the Bank re-organized the way it worked across the entire IT department. They adopted Xray and Jira, to streamline the work of self-sufficient agile teams, shorten delivery times, and increase the quality of solutions.
In addition to the steps, processes outside the IT-sphere – facilities or asset management, construction records, and many others – also reach Jira.
Xray and Jira thus became a centralized system for managing and registering work across the entire organization.
Samuel Titka
