Why hierarchical structures do not work for testing in Jira Software

Most of you have probably heard of the software category "Process Mining".

I think back in 2018 was the first time I stumbled upon this term. I did a bit of research and landed on the website of Celonis, the german unicorn and current market leader in this category.

What I specifically recall about this event was the first time I saw the "Process Explorer", one of the core parts of their platform back then.

I saw the process graph and thought: "EVERY corporate needs to have this!".

Same old stuff in testing

Now I've been an active part of some major IT projects for roughly the past decade and if my memories don't abandon me, the approach to testing in these projects has basically always been the same.

There are a couple of aspects one could talk about but I want to focus on the basic setup on which writing testcases and everything else is based on.

What I guess would be a desriable scenario for every stakeholder, is to have one single point of truth showing all the involved components and processes, as depicted by this photo of some operational underground headquarter:

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Every person looking at this screen can see:

• What stations exist
• What connections exist
• If the connections are failure-free (green)
• If problems exist (red)
• Where the underground system ends

In my opinion, there is a very similar need in software projects when it comes to testing:

• What (software) components exist
• How are they connected
• Which service calls between components work
• Which ones have issues
• What is the scope of the project in terms of involved components

Taking a different approach

Unfortunately for everyone working on software projects in bigger corporates, these needs are only poorly covered by the current tooling out there. So we decided to re-imagine testmanagement in the ecosystem of Jira Software by putting the business process view at the core of our application.

We are convinced that founding everything on the actuall business process landscape of a company comes with a lot of benefits, e. g. certainty for testers who are writing testcases or testmanagers who are steering the entire testing effort of a project.

If done right and aided with a little bit of luck other people will one day take a look at our application and say: "EVERY software project needs to have this".

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For more information, take a look at our website or leave us a message.

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