Working with Sessions

Bonfire introduces the concept of a Test Session to JIRA.

Test sessions allow you to plan and track the manual testing performed. Each test session can belong to a single issue (be it a requirement, a story, or a task), or a single project. During a session, the manual testing activity that you do, including the bugs you raise, the time you spent, are all tracked against this session.

Creating Sessions

Sessions are created in the JIRA web interface, and not via the Bonfire browser extension. To create a session belonging to an issue, click the "More Actions" drop down in the view issue page, and then fill in a session name. A session's name is flexible, and can be anything you like (e.g. "Test browser compatibility with Internet Explorer", or "Find security vulnerabilities").

Sessions can also be created in the "Test Sessions" tab in the view project page. Leave the "Related Issue" blank if this test session does not belong to a specific issue.

Working in a session

Any test session have three states - Created, In Progress, and Completed. To set a test session in progress, click on "Start" when viewing a session. For each user, only one session can be active at one time. The active session is always displayed in the orange bar along the top of JIRA web interface.

In the Bonfire browser extension, under the "Sessions" tab, you can also see all the test sessions that are available to you, as well as starting, and pausing on test sessions. The Bonfire browser extension will always display the active test session.

Assigning Sessions

Sessions can be assigned to other team members to be worked on.

Only users who have the "Assignable User" permission on the project which this session belongs will be able to have the session assigned to them.

The assignee of the session can start progress on the session, pause the session, capture issues and notes within that session, and complete the session.

Taking Notes in Session

At some stage during testing, you may like to take notes about what you are testing. It may be a reminder to come back and test something else "Reminder to test for XSS", or it may be an open question that you cannot resolve immediately "What's this supposed to do?". Session notes allow you to quickly note down important things you would like to come back to quickly, without interrupting your current context. Session notes are recorded under the "Sessions" tab in the Bonfire browser extension, when a session is active.

Every single note is tracked in chronological order in the session activity, so it's easy to come back and look over notes taken during a test session.

Completing Sessions

At the end of the testing, you can complete a test session in the JIRA web interface clicking on the "Complete" link. At this stage, you can finalize the testing and summarize the testing, including picking the issues raised during the test session to link to the original issue, or logging the time worked during testing.