Testing is often the task in your project that is often left behind, or becomes the recipient of a shortened timeline based on scope creep, time crunch, or whatever the reason. With more organizations relying on the Atlassian Tool Suite (specifically Jira and Confluence) as their core enterprise tool suite, the importance of testing new configurations, add-ons, and custom scripts developed in a widely-used tool suite is more important than ever before. Answering the questions “What broke?” and “What works?” is essential to understanding the impact and risk your new functionality or requirement implementation poses. This blog is not a catch-all, end-all, be-all for your testing woes, but we want you to start thinking through some strategies and best practices when it comes to testing and maintaining your Atlassian Tool Suite.
How much testing?
This is generally defined in your governance model, but we recommend setting up a defined and succinct list of functionality you are looking to testing any time major functionality is developed. For instance, if you have a custom script running for only one project, test the core functionality and workflows already configured for that project, along with testing core features inherent with major projects in your instance.
When should you test?
Test early, test often. Following the implementation of any major configuration, add-on / app, or custom script in your development environment, have a list of core functionality you are testing, major projects you will review, and also a running list of any bugs. To state the obvious – make sure you resolve the bugs before pushing the script into production.
Some Of Our Recommendations
These recommendations may seem straightforward, conspicuous, and previously alluded to in the paragraphs above, but they’re still very relevant:
- Have a plan: understand and dedicate the role of tester to a team member (hint: not the developer), when testing will be performed, frequency, and scope of testing. Understand what functional tests you want to perform, and load testing strategies.
- Development Environment: Don’t have one? Get one. If you’re on Server or Data Center Atlassian generally allows you to use the same licenses across your development and production environments. Have Cloud? Contact a Partner (like us) and we’ll help you.
- Test early, test often: Going back to having a plan. Test early, test often, and automate. Review your scripts on a monthly or quarterly basis to ensure scripts detailing core functionality remain relevant.
- Use Configuration Manager: easily migrate project configurations between your development and production environment using the Configuration Manager for Jira add-on (for server and data center).
- Automation: Automate your load testing and functional testing scripts. Use tools such as Selenium, Gatling, and others to automate your testing scripts and pull out testing reports.
Interested in improving performance on your Jira or Confluence instance? Talk to us today! https://www.ascendintegrated.com/contact/