“The way I do work is to lead by a good example, and that’s why I’m trying to set up Xray as an example for test management and reporting.”
Sharon Lundgren, Manager IT Quality at IU
About the CompanyIU (International University) is the largest university in Germany. One of Europe's most cutting-edge educational institutions, IU has over 15,000 practice partners, over 1,000 lecturers, and about 550 professors.
Since this University has over 100,000 students, finding an ideal test management solution was essential to improve the efficiency of their enrollment system.
IU also envisioned positioning themselves as EdTech leaders, this meant improving their test management and quality practices.
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The Challenge
Sharon Lundgren leads quality assurance, and her team manages 7 applications. One of their goals is to cover the full customer journey through testing.
When Sharon Lundgren first stepped into her role, there was no test management tool, and she needed to find a way to facilitate testing.
“There was no test management tool, and what I was asked to do was try to find a way to facilitate end-to-end tests, and quite early I could see that we first needed a tool to manage our testing.”
Sharon Lundgren, Manager IT Quality at IU International University
The top challenges IU experienced before Xray were:
- Lacking a test management tool with Jira integration
- Poor support for regression, end-to-end, and manual testing
- Limited reporting capabilities that suited Agile
- Limited communication between teams
- Lack of transparent reports for developers, POs, and stakeholders
With approximately 100,000 students and about 550 professors, the amount of data traveling from their CRM system to different applications was astronomical. On top of that, this data needed to be tested, and the results needed to be reported.
IU needed a test management tool that would meet their testing needs for regression, end-to-end, and manual testing while allowing them to deliver personalized reports to their developers, product owners (POs), and stakeholders.
The Solution
“(...) it must be in Jira. It must be a test management tool with the possibility of all stakeholders getting deeper into the content and the reporting.”
Sharon Lundgren, Manager IT Quality at IU International University
IU chose Scandio, a certified Xray partner and Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, to help them set up a test management tool that met their needs.
IU chose Xray as their test management tool for its native integration with Jira. This way, developers, product owners, and stakeholders could have more information about test data without leaving Jira.
Xray's reporting capabilities were more suitable for Agile and allowed them to fine-tune their reports in order to comply with requirements.
IU’s main criteria for the new test management tool were:
- Better integration with the Jira workflow
- Support for regression, end-to-end, and manual testing
- Test coverage and better reporting capabilities
Scandio assisted the IU Quality Improvement Team in making the best use of Xray for testing, including demonstrating Xray's top features and the best practices for teams to use the app.
In addition, Angela Gleissl (IT Consultant at Scandio and Xray Certified Expert) works closely with the IU Quality Improvement Team to create Jira workflows that will make testing as straightforward and understandable as possible. Today, repeated activities such as transferring failing test executions into bug tickets are just automated processes.
Finally, the Quality Improvement Team uses multiple dashboards to provide visibility into test coverage and outcomes. Communicating test findings to the development teams, POs, and stakeholders became simpler thanks to this combination of workflows, automation, and dashboards.
Results
After starting to use Xray in July of 2021, IU’s Quality Improvement Team achieved better integration with the Jira workflow, increased their efficiency in test automation, and gained full test coverage and traceability. The results speak for themselves with:
- 1230 test cases and growing
- 710 test executions and growing
- 828 bug tickets and improvements
For this prestigious University, with over 100,000 students, gaining full optimization and increasing their test cases and test executions, while detecting more bugs and solving them, increased their efficiency, saved them time, and allowed them to deliver better testing results.
1. Better integration with the Jira workflow
Due to Xray’s Jira-native issue types, testers and developers can follow a story from the requirement to test and defect. Plus, with just a few clicks, the IU's Quality Improvement Team may quickly determine which bugs were discovered during a sprint, where, and when they were resolved.
2. Support for regression, end-to-end, and manual testing
IU's Quality Improvement Team manages 7 applications, and teams regularly create new ones and run various tests on them. The team also creates regression, manual, and end-to-end tests. The goal was to execute automated tests while considering test environments and parameters.
Xray helped with automation to minimize repetitive tasks, such as copying unsuccessful test executions into bug tickets. IU’s Quality Improvement Team saved time and effort, improving the team’s efficiency.
3. Test coverage and better reporting capabilities
Using Xray, IU accesses testing gaps and gains visibility over the Quality Improvement and other teams' testing coverage. They can have test cases directly tied to their requirements, giving them total traceability and coverage.
The IU testing team receives well-documented traceability of its requirements, including what is tested, when, and on which environments and parameters. They also receive the test results, and if bugs are discovered, they analyze them and evaluate whether they were solved.
Xray improves efficiency with automation, full test coverage, and traceability
With over 100,000 students and 550 professors using IU’s system daily, performing test management efficiently is crucial.
Xray increased IU’s test management capabilities and ensured continuous enhancement of the Quality Improvement Team’s communication with other departments along with well-documented traceability of its tests so they can deliver transparent reports to developers, POs, and stakeholders.
Now IU’s team is no longer restricted to the education industry and moves to the tech industry, building its “backbone” around it. With IU’s team stepping into the EdTech industry, with Xray and expertise from Scandio, all IU’s users can benefit from an improved and well-tested system.
With Xray, IU's Quality Improvement Team develops its test management process into a unified and centralized system that connects other teams with improved productivity, efficiency, and communication.
Always keeping quality advocacy in mind.
