The Company
Telefónica manages a wide range of IT initiatives, varying significantly in size, complexity, and maturity. These projects often involve multiple internal teams and external partners, with testing activities spread across different stages and levels of the software development lifecycle.
Quality assurance at Telefónica is not handled by a single centralized QA department. Instead, testing is a shared responsibility across teams. While integration testing is more centralized, application-level testing is distributed, making visibility, coordination, and reporting essential to maintaining software quality across the organization.
As Telefónica continued to evolve its IT landscape and undertake large-scale transformation initiatives, the need for clearer insight into testing progress and outcomes became increasingly critical.
The Challenge
Before adopting Xray, Telefónica relied on IBM Rational tools to manage testing processes. Over time, this approach revealed significant limitations, particularly as projects multiplied and testing responsibilities remained distributed across teams.
Test cases were stored in separate repositories, and reporting was largely manual, relying on Excel. This made it difficult to understand testing progress, assess coverage, or track defects efficiently across projects. Teams lacked a real-time view of testing status, which slowed decision-making and increased the effort required to answer basic status questions.
At the same time, Jira was not yet in use. Requirements, test management, and defect tracking were handled in disconnected tools, leading to fragmented processes and limited transparency between teams involved in analysis, development, and testing.
Managing test cases and defects across multiple projects required substantial manual effort, making it difficult to maintain a clear and consistent overview of quality. Telefónica’s objective was clear: improve software quality by centralizing test management, increasing transparency, and supporting better collaboration.
The Solution
Telefónica’s move to Jira was driven by the need to manage and measure requirements in a single, shared environment. Selecting a test management solution that integrated seamlessly with Jira was therefore a key requirement.
Xray was selected to support this transition. By embedding test management directly into Jira, Telefónica consolidated requirements, tests, and defects in one place, creating a single source of truth accessible to all stakeholders.
This Jira-native setup provided a structured yet flexible framework that teams could adapt to their existing processes, while significantly improving visibility and consistency across projects.
Today, Xray is used across Telefónica to document and manage testing activities for anything tested within IT, including both software and hardware-related initiatives. It supports testing across different levels and types, from smaller projects to large strategic programs.
The platform acts as a central repository for testing artifacts, allowing teams to manage test executions and create defects directly from test activities. While test automation has increased over time, Xray is currently used primarily to support manual testing and reporting, providing clear documentation and traceability.
Xray also plays a key role in a major ongoing IT transformation initiative, where complete testing flows are documented end to end, offering clear visibility into coverage, progress, and results throughout the lifecycle of the program.
Reporting and Visibility
One of the most significant improvements has been visibility into testing status at every level of the organization.
“One very important thing for testing, that Xray had, is the ability to provide information on testing status at any level. It should be easy to use and easy for testers to integrate.”
Manager Common Service Assurance & Quality, Telefónica
With Xray, teams can track coverage across different test levels and provide real-time updates on testing progress. This has reduced the need for ad hoc status requests, as information is readily available to all stakeholders.
Test reports are integrated into Confluence, combining data from Jira, Confluence, and Xray with real-time updates. For more advanced reporting needs, eazyBI is used to create custom reports tailored to different audiences.
Collaboration and Process Improvements
Since adopting Xray, collaboration between testers, developers, and business analysts has improved significantly. Teams now share a common framework for documenting and tracking testing activities, making communication clearer and more consistent.
Documentation of testing activities, including in production environments, has become easier and more standardized. Xray’s flexibility allows teams to adapt testing artifacts and processes to their specific needs while maintaining overall consistency.
Even though there's a legacy of waterfall-based projects, Xray has helped bring greater control and visibility within that structure. As noted by the teams, moving toward more agile ways of working will require broader process changes beyond tooling alone.
Onboarding and Adoption
Initial onboarding required some learning, particularly around test artifacts and best practices. However, Jira integration helped make adoption smoother, and internal training sessions supported teams as they began using Xray across different projects.
Over time, teams became more confident and autonomous in adapting Xray to their testing needs.
“It was easier from a configuration point of view. In the beginning, we didn’t know how to use it, but over time it became much clearer.”
Manager Common Service Assurance & Quality, Telefónica
The Results
By implementing Xray, Telefónica achieved the following improvements:
- Centralized test management within Jira (from 5 tools to 1)
Another significant advantage was the centralization of test management in Jira: This enabled us to reduce the number of tools used from five to just one. As a result, the tool landscape became much simpler and all testing activities could be managed more efficiently.
- Improved transparency and reporting across projects (0% 🡪 80 % dynamic reports)
- Clearer visibility into test coverage and execution status
- Better collaboration between departments involved in delivery
- Reduced reliance on manual reporting and spreadsheets 🡪 80% Ersparnis
Today, Xray plays a central role in supporting Telefónica’s testing activities across projects, teams, and large-scale transformation initiatives. By centralizing test management and improving visibility, Telefónica has strengthened its ability to monitor quality and coordinate testing in a complex, distributed environment.
