In this post, we recap a recent webinar hosted by Jama Software on the topic of integrating TestRail and Jama Connect

Watch the full webinar to learn more about Optimizing Your QA Process by Integrating TestRail and Jama Connect.

Integrating TestRail and Jama Connect

Excerpt from webinar below:

Jeremy Johnson: I’m going to start by going through the agenda of topics that we have lined up for you today. Most of you are likely already familiar with Jama Connect’s ability to manage requirements, test and risk as part of your overall product development life cycle. So we’re going to start this discussion specifically around our perspective on integrations. We’ll have Zoe come in and talk about Tasktop Hub for Jama Connect and tell you a little bit about Tasktop as a company. Then we’ll move into test management challenges that we see when we discuss product development with our customers and prospective customers. And we’ll also touch on the benefits of integrating TestRail and Jama Connect. Zoe will then dive a little bit deeper into the integration flow and some of the benefits and show a live demo, connecting TestRail and Jama Connect. And then we’ll recap some key takeaways and get into some questions and answers at the end of the session.

So like I mentioned I’d like to start here with Jama software’s perspective on integrations. And the first point to touch on here is really the best practice around product development is to view integrations as a means to achieve live traceability across the systems development life cycle. Many if not most of you are familiar with the V model, you see a representation here. And you may not be with live traceability. So it’s really a component where different pieces of data that impact the product development life cycle need to evolve, need to be very dynamic throughout the process. Things like verification and validation need to happen much earlier in the process.

So maintaining this live traceability between all of these different product development components, different assets that might be involved, different products that might be involved is critical to optimizing your product development life cycle and processes. The real key here of course is that with this notion of live traceability in place, issues are reduced, and those that do arise are found earlier in the process. You can see here based on data from industry sources, these issues, finding these issues earlier in the can save 16 to as much as 110 times the cost of not finding them until later in the process.

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Now I think everybody at this stage of evolution understands and agrees that this is the best practice. But really the challenge has been implementing this in the real world. So why is it that companies tend to struggle? And the reality is that most companies or probably nearly all companies don’t have an end-to-end system development process that covers all of these components. They tend to be broken up into silos, different toolsets, maybe even desktop tools and spreadsheets. Some of those things come into play. And all of those variability, all of that variability in the tool chain leads to potential issues. These areas with Xs on this representation of the V model. Those are potential areas where the traceability might be broken, and that results in significant manual effort, emails, meetings, all of those kinds of things, maybe a little bit of luck involved in trying to prevent delays and defects and rework and cost overruns that can come if those data points, that traceability is broken.

And Jama Software and Jama Connect as a product can certainly resolve some of these components in its inherent capability of tying risk and test information with requirements. But many companies have come to really accept this situation as unchangeable. If we don’t have a single platform to do all of this, then we inherently need to manage these things in silos and accept maybe desktop tools and spreadsheets or on some level part of the process. Then those are things that you’re simply not going to be able to control and manage. But a really a key to bringing this all together to achieving this live traceability is to sync these existing software tools, these best of breed tools.

Even in desktop tools and spreadsheets and things with requirements. So Jama Software is one of the companies that is really truly making this possible. So if we look at live traceability and an example of the connected data, the connected components within Jama Connect, you can see how easy it is to define elements, the relationships across tools, maybe even spreadsheets in this example. This happens to be from our medical device solution, but we have similar but tailored solutions for aerospace and defense automotive and semiconductor for industry industrial manufacturing, various different industries. These components are continually synced with best of breed tools. They’re applying their own specific engineering disciplines, and importantly linking that back to requirements and other vital components of the product development life cycle within Jama Connect.

So again you can see some of those connections in this diagram, very common for things like JIRA and Azure DevOps and downstream issue identification, task management, some of those things on the execution side. Zoe is going to touch a little bit on how JIRA comes into play in this scenario. We have test rail of course that Zoe will be talking about on the verification, the testing side. So those will come into play as we get deeper into this discussion. And one of the key ways that we help customers achieve this live traceability is with our strategic partnership with Tasktop. So to introduce you to Tasktop and some of their capabilities, I’ll now pass it over to Zoe.

Zoe Vickers: Thanks, Jeremy. I really appreciate it. Hi everyone. So what I just want to talk about as a whole is Tasktop has actually been a strategic partner of Jama’s for many years. And what this partnership really allows all of you Jama customers to do is you have the ability to integrate Jama with over 60 plus tools in the more agile DevOps testing ecosystem. The reason Jama decided to partner with us at Tasktop is because what we offer is an out of the box point and click configuration for setting up these integrations. What I mean by this is not a heavy services engagement. It is not something that each time you add a new project, you add new fields, you add new requirement types in JIRA that you might want to integrate with. Different tools like TestRail or JIRA. You don’t have to reach back out to Jama or Tasktop.

You are able to actually scale your integrations on your own. So that way you can build an enterprise wide solution within your own teams. One of the things that I want to show on the next slide is really the ability of what are all of the different connectors that Tasktop has. So I mentioned that we do allow you to integrate with over 60 different tools. Again, we actually have something called our integration test factory where internally at Tasktop we run over 500,000 tests a day, against every supported version of software that we have.

So again what we’re able to help, you do know we’ve helped many, many Jama customers do over the years is integrate drama with the fullest of tools on the right hand side. If you’re taking a quick look through that, they are out for the ties. Again, some of the most common ones that we are seeing specifically with Jama customers is we’re working with Azure DevOps, we’re working with JIRA, we’re working with TestRail, we’re working with Spark CA. And really the idea here is to bring in as much traceability across your different tool chains. So that way as you go back to some of those different traceability diagrams that Jeremy was talking about, you can see where all your [inaudible 00:12:05] teams are doing their work, and you actually have the visibility into the up-to-date status at any moment in time.

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One of the big things that we talk about with Tasktop is why do you actually need an integration solution? There are some brilliant developers out there who can build a integration solution in-house. And a lot of times those integrations work beautifully, but what I’ve had many customers over the last few years talk with me about is that it’s hard to scale. And then it becomes a little bit more of a problem for them when it comes to error handling or troubleshooting. What we like to talk about at Tasktop is really to say first off integration solutions are needed, whether it’s through mergers or acquisitions or just growing teams as you go from large, medium, or small businesses. You have a lot of duplicate data entry that might be happening in a variety of tools.

Whether you’re communicating between your requirements tools, your agile teams, to your ITSM teams logging tickets. What task that’s going to help you do is actually eliminate a lot of that overhead and duplicate data entry, which then is going to help allow you to actually speed up your or delivery times and it’s also going to improve the communication between the teams, because they are able to collaborate across different tools without actually having to exit those applications. So one of the things that we’ll be able to even talk about today with Tasktop is you’re no longer going to have to walk across the office or send an email or extra Slack message. You can continue to comment back and forth in Jama, within TestRail, within JIRA. So that way your teams truly do have the end-to-end visibility of who’s working on what without having to log out of their tools of choice.

The main way that Tasktop actually does this is through something called model-based integration. So one of the big things that we like to talk about at Tasktop is there a value in just a simple point to point integration? Yes. This webinar today is talking specifically about Jama to TestRail. But we also need to be aware that none of you are going to operate in just the vacuum of those two tools. You probably have an entire ecosystem. 10, 15, 20 tools that your different teams are using. Tasktop is built to be an integration solution so you can scale across your entire organization. How we do this is that we are not actually a plugin to Jama or a plugin to TestRail. We are an independent third party solution that can be both on-prem or cloud hosted and how we actually offer this integration is through something we call model-based integration.

What a model is going to do is it is going to act as that universal translator to convert and normalize data between systems. What I mean by that is in that image on the right hand side you’re actually able to see for example I have a variety of different tools, this is an example customer we’ve worked with has. And specifically if we look at Jama they are doing a lot of their defect logging there. And as that relates back to their different requirements. So what I’m able to do is I’m able to take not only Jama, but also the specific work item that they’re working on. So there are different maybe bug or defect types with all the schema that makes up that specific item and map it into my specific model. From there, instead of just going over to TestRail, I could integrate that specific information with JIRA, with Azure DevOps, with a problem from ServiceNow.

And I’m also able to then take something like TestRail and map that into the model. So at any point in time when you want to add an additional tool or an additional work item, you want to actually bring integration and synchronization with your teams. You easily can map it to the model and reuse any half of any other integration to easily map it to. So an example of how this actually works is on this next slide imagine that you have your two different tools. So we have Jama test case on the left and we have a TestRail test case on the right. Then you have the model in the center. So think of your model as nothing more than a bucket of fields. Before you hopped on the webinar today, you probably decided, “Hey, I am interested in integration.” That means that probably on some little scratch piece of paper or an Excel document you have noticed and said, “Hey, I want to get information from this tool to this tool.”

The information I care about is something like a status or a priority or the assignee of this item. All that information goes into the model. Think of the model as Tasktop. From there I can easily map from Jama to the model, and you can see that we can have a one to one relationship between fields or a one to many. Then I can also map TestRail to the model. And as I do that, as we keep clicking through, you’re going to see these different boxes pop up, which shows a Jama collection and a TestRail collection. What that means is first off we look at the black lines. Tasktop is able to help route the data anywhere it needs to go to the correct fields, to the correct values via the model. From there, once we go into Tasktop later we’ll talk about how the architecture Tasktop works. Where in the previous side when I had shown you can map any tool to any other one half of an integration.

We see here that half of your integration is going to be called a Jama collection. That means we’re mapping from Jama to the model. And the other half of the integration is going to be from TestRail to the model and that’s your test rail collection. The reason this matters to you is that the second question I get from a lot of customers is, “Well, do we have to have all these fields equal? Does the schema in both tools need to match?” And the answer is no. You guys can start your integration with baby steps. You’re going to very easily be able to say, “This is this state of my Jama, this is the state of my TestRail. Let’s just start flowing information.” Then from there you can determine to scale.

Watch the full webinar to learn more about Optimizing Your QA Process by Integrating TestRail and Jama Connect.