BDD with Zephyr for Jira and Cucumber for Jira

This tutorial explains how to leverage BDD in Jira Cloud with Cucumber for Jira and Zephyr for Jira.

Create a new project

Project creation

On the projects page, create a new Classic project.

Select the Scrum template (for example) and enter the name of the project then click on Create.

Project configuration

To use Zephyr for Jira and Cucumber for Jira you need to:

• Add the Test type to your project

• Enable BDD on the project settings.

Add the Test issue type to your project

To be able to use Zephyr, you need to add the Test type to this project.

Go to Project settings:

Select the Issue types menu:

Drag and drop the Test issue type to Issue Types for Current Scheme:

Don’t forget to save.

Enable BDD on the project

In Project Settings, select Cucumber for Jira to display the Cucumber for Jira settings, and enable both options.

The first toggle allows us to enable Cucumber for Jira in your project and the second toggle allows you to enable Zephyr BDD features.

That’s it! Your project is ready for BDD.

In the next section, you will add your first features in your project.

Feature design

In this section, we will see how to design your features and scenarios.

Go back to the project, and select Zephyr from the menu.

Feature issue creation

In the Zephyr menu, select Create a BDD Feature:

The Create issue box appears. By default, a Feature issue is a story with the BDD_Feature label.

Put the name of the feature in the Summary field, and the description of the feature in the Description field.

Click on the Create button

Once the feature issue is created, navigate to it.

On the issue page, the Test Details panel will allow you to create your scenarios.

To create a scenario, just enter a name in the field and click on the Create button.

This will create a scenario test issue.

You can add many scenarios or a background.

Scenario test page

To go the a scenario test page, just click on its key to navigate to it. The scenario test issue page allows adding the content in Gherkin format in the Test Details panel.

Add your tests in a test cycle

You can use scenario tests like other Zephyr tests. So you can create a test cycle and add them to it.

In the project menu, select Zephyr and Cycle Summary and click on the Create New Test Cycle button to create a new test cycle.

Add the name of the test cycle to create it. In this test cycle, click on the Add Tests button to add your tests.

Select the tests individually or by applying a filter and click add.

That’s it, your BDD scenarios are added to a test cycle. If you need, you can update the status of these scenarios directly in this interface:

Push your feature files in a Git repository

To share the features you designed in Jira with the developers of your team, you can download the feature files directly from the test cycle.

You will obtain a zip file containing all the feature files of this test cycle. Unzip this file and add, commit and push the features files your Git repository.

Create the living documentation

Click on the Living Documentation menu

Select your Git provider, your repository, the branch and click on Create the living documentation.

Once the living documentation is created you can navigate to the features of this living documentation. These features are automatically linked to their corresponding feature issue.

Once a feature issue is linked to a feature in the living documentation, you can see the living documentation data directly from the feature issue in the cucumber panel:

Automate your tests

Use Cucumber open to automate your scenarios. Find out more about automation here: https://cucumber.io/docs/guides/10-minute-tutorial/

Configure your Continuous Integration server

You can configure your continuous integration server so that it can push test results directly into the living documentation. Here are the steps: automate test results push.

Traceability matrix

To see traceability, this is critical because it allows to quickly dive into the traceability of your features through testing and defects. Here I can see Feature1 is being validated by two tests and has multiple failures along with multiple defects. This is a great report because it allows project managers or those involved in the project to quickly see what is the status of the testing activities for this particular feature