Getting Started With Zephyr — Test Management Plugin For JIRA — Devstringx Technologies

7 min readOct 31, 2019

Zephyr is a native application that resides in JIRA and brings test management capabilities to any JIRA project. With the addition of Zephyr for JIRA, tests can be created and viewed in any JIRA project, linked to other issues, executed immediately or as part of a test cycle and detailed test metrics can be tracked.

How to Install

Prerequisites:

Zephyr only works with JIRA 5.x/6.x Server or above and Data Center versions. It should not be installed on JIRA 4.x.
You need to be a JIRA Administrator in order to installZephyr for Jira. Please make sure you have the latest version of the Universal Plugin Manager installed, 2.2.4 or above. (Older versions of the Universal Plugin Manager may have issues with installation/license keys.

To Install:

As a JIRA Admin, navigate to the Administration page and click on “Add-ons” in the top menu bar.
Now click on the “Find new add-ons” menu item and enter “Zephyr for JIRA” in the Search box on the left.
In the search result, select “Zephyr for JIRA — Test Management inside JIRA” and click on the “Buy Now” or “Free Trial” buttons. Click on one of them will take you to https://my.atlassian.com where you can either enter your user id/password or create a new account. This will give you a free 30-day evaluation version or you can buy licenses for Zephyr for JIRA
The software will now be installed and the License key will be automatically added to activate it.

Features:

Create, view, edit, clone and execute tests
Link to stories, tasks, requirements, etc.
Plan test execution cycles
New Agile integration with Test Boards
Link defects, Epic links and stories.
Project-Centric navigation
Execution Navigator with basic/advanced search and pre-defined/saved filters
Two-way end-to-end traceability reports
Configure, track quality metrics share the dashboard
Zephyr Query Language (ZQL) for advanced searching
Integrate test automation and CI tools with ZAPI

When Zypher is added in your JIRA then a new field Zephyr will start appearing at your JIRA dashboard

Now you can start creating and adding Test cases in Zephyr for JIRA.

To Create Test Cases in Zephyr:

Step 1) Navigate to Zephyr and click on it and then go to Create Test

Step 2) Enter all the details

Once you enter all details and click on the ‘create’ button, it will create a Test case ticket. For example TC-001

Once the test cases are created, you can see details like :

Test Case Ticket number
You can Edit, Add comment, Assign, change status, Execute Test case, Add to test cycle
Issue type, priority, component, Tag affect version, labels, environment, etc.
Shows details about the status, resolution, and fix version
Description, Test Step, test data, expected result.
Shows detail about the assignee and reporter

NOTE: You can customize details according to your requirements.

You can also import your already written Test cases to JIRA. We have a couple of different options to import them into JIRA.

1) Using the JIRA Importers Plugin

We will have to convert our files to a CSV format and use this plugin to import your tests into JIRA. We can not import detailed test steps by using JIRA Importers Plugin so generally, we do not use this method to import.

To look into the detail of JIRA Importers Plugin, go to the link- https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver073/importing-data-from-csv-861253680.html

2) Using the Zephyr for JIRA Tests Importer Utility

This utility allows the importing of tests directly from Excel spreadsheets, including detailed test steps.

Prerequisites to use Zephyr Importer Utility:

The import utility is a Java executable jar file. This means that you need to have a copy of Java installed on your computer.

Downloading the utility

To download the latest version go to the following link and look for the zfj-importer-utility-x.y.jar link:

https://bitbucket.org/zfjdeveloper/zfj-importer/downloads/

At the time of writing this article, the latest version is zfj-importer-utility-0.36.jar. Please note that you may get a warning that says that the type of file can harm your computer as you start the download. This is just to indicate that the jar is an executable type of file.

Launching

To start the utility either simply double click on the jar file or run the following command from the command prompt: java -jar zfj-importer-utility-0.36.jar

The utility will start and the main screen will be displayed:

To run the import we must give the appropriate parameters to the importer.

Url — Url of your JIRA

Cloud — Check this option if you are using JIRA on cloud

Username and Password — The username and password of the user

If you select Cloud two further parameters are displayed, Access Key and Secret Key. These are related to the Zephyr API and are specific to your installation of Zephyr. You can find them by logging into your JIRA Cloud instance, browse to Zephyr > Automation > API Keys.

Clicking on “API Keys”, the Zephyr API Key view will be displayed which contains an Access Key and a Secret Key unique to your JIRA user. Also on this view, there are three options in the top right-hand corner:

Copy to the clipboard which copies both Keys to your system clipboard
Delete which removes the current generated Key Pair
Regenerate which regenerates the Key pair. Note that once the Keys are regenerated the previous Keys can no longer be used with the Importer Utility.

Use the Copy to Clipboard option to save this Key pair to your system clipboard. You will require it before starting the import process in the Importer Utility.

NOTE :

This Key pair does not expire so users can use their unique Key pair every time they use the Importer Utility.
Copying to the clipboard copies both Access Key and Secret Key in below format. Paste it to a notepad. Copy each key individually and paste it in its appropriate box in the importer.

Preparing import data

We are now technically set up and nearly ready to import our test cases but first, we need to prepare our data.

The utility supports Excel and XML as input formats.

Firstly, we need to create one or more Excel spreadsheets containing the test cases and test steps that we wish to import. At a minimum each file must contain the following information:

Additionally, the following JIRA properties can be optionally set on the Test Case issues created during the import.

Note:

Always make sure to make the first 5 columns (i.e. columns A, B, C, D and E) contain the Name, Step, Result, Test data and External ID in that order. These are the mandatory data required for the import and having these be the first columns makes specifying this mapping easy to remember and configure in the utility.

Excel Sheet:

Row 1 is a header row and will be ignored by the importer
Rows 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 represent the first test case, with an external ID of “Test-case-1”.
Rows 8, 9, 10 and 11 represent the second test case, “Test-case-2”.

IMPORTING:

Firstly, download your Google sheet as Ms Excel file
Enter the URL for your JIRA Server or Cloud instance. If importing to Zephyr for JIRA Cloud, make sure the Cloud checkbox is checked. Enter your JIRA username and password. Zephyr for JIRA Server version users proceeds to Step 3.
For Zephyr for JIRA Cloud users only: The “ZFJ URL” field is a read-only field and is pre-entered. Enter your API Access and Secret keys.
Click Connect.
Select the project and issue type desired (supported: Test, Bug, Improvement, Task, New Feature)
Select a Discriminator and enter Starting Row value

The Discriminator field is used by the Importer Utility to determine the end of one test case and the beginning of the next test case. It allows one of four options for selection:

By Sheet: use this when a test case is listed per excel sheet
By Empty Row: use this when an empty row separates consecutive test cases
By ID change: use this when a unique test ID exists for each test case to be imported
By Test Case Name change: use this when each test case has a unique test case name

JIRA Field and Excel Column mapping

Map your Excel spreadsheet columns to your Zephyr for JIRA fields. Use the column letters instead of any headers you might have to reference the data. For example: if the test case name is in Column A of the excel sheet, enter “A” against the JIRA field “Name”

Pick import file or pick import folder

Select the Excel file which you want to import by choosing either Pick Import File or Pick Import Folder.

Start Import

Click Start Import. The results of the import will appear in the log window at the bottom of the utility. Also, any errors that occur will be displayed here.