Having good test execution practices is essential for you and your team to follow and conduct your testing activities effectively. Test execution is the stage where all your preparation and planning turn into actionable results. It’s where quality truly meets delivery. But simply running test cases isn’t enough; the value lies in how you execute them.
In Jira, tools like AgileTest can help this process in managing test cases, executions, and defects. This article explores what makes a good test execution and the best practices you can apply to improve your execution process.
1. What makes a good test execution?
A good test execution is more than just running test cases; it's about managing the time, coverage, and effectiveness. A good test execution should have:
- A Detailed Timeline: You should plan in advance how many test executions you want to conduct in a sprint or milestone. This helps you ensure that you can run all of your test cases and executions without being rush due to the time limits
- A Link between Test Cases/ Steps and Requirements/Defects: You need to establish and maintain traceability between your test cases and steps and their corresponding requirements and defects. After completing all test runs, you can trace each test case back to its related requirement and linked defect to verify coverage and investigate any issues.
- A Prioritization of Important Test Cases: You ought to focus on some important test cases that need to be executed several times, rather than running all test cases every execution. This approach allows you to verify and stabilize essential functionalities first, increasing the likelihood of catching and resolving critical defects early for better product quality.
2. Best Practices to Ensure A Good Test Execution
Let’s see how you can enhance your test execution process with AgileTest in the following best practices.
Define A Specific Timeline
After generating your test cases with detailed steps, the next step is to add them to a Test Plan and prepare all relevant Test Executions. You don’t need to define every exact test case or execution at the very beginning. Instead, you can start by estimating how many sessions you’ll need and assign a few test cases to each. You can always refine and adjust the plan as testing progresses.
To ensure that you execute all the necessary test cases, you should categorize them under requirements, features, or purposes, then have at least one execution for these test cases within the same group. For example, to add all test cases of a requirement into one test execution in AgileTest, you can click the Test Plan section → Choose Test Execution → Hit the Add Test Executions button → Apply Covering filter to select those test cases that you have categorized under requirements. This ensures that you have at least one execution filled up with relevant test cases for each requirement.
Within the Test Plan section, you’ll see the project timeline (with defined start and end dates) alongside the Execution Status. This overview provides a clear snapshot of your testing progress—showing how many executions have been completed, which are in progress, and how much time remains. Having this visibility helps you stay in control of your testing activities, allowing you to plan proactively and manage your test sessions more effectively over time.
Organize Test Cases with Traceability
Whenever you execute your tests, it’s important to document your findings and results thoroughly. Within each test case, you can record the status of every individual test step. This level of detail allows you and your team to pinpoint exactly which step failed, rather than only seeing that the overall test case encountered an issue. In AgileTest, there is a mechanism to calculate the test case status based on the test steps' status. For example, if all your test steps pass, you will receive a pass result for the whole test . Meanwhile, if any steps fail, the whole test case is considered failed. You just have to add status to the test step, and the system will update the test case status for you.
Also, you should make sure that you have at least one requirement linked to a test case. This would reflect the coverage of your execution, which indicates whether the test cases have covered enough of your defined requirements.
In case any of your test steps fail due to a bug, you need to create or add an existing defect to the specific steps. With this action, you and your team can trace the failures with their root causes to reproduce, analyze, and fix the issues. The defects can be visible in the Jira issues view, so that your non-technical members can also be aware of ongoing bugs. They can easily see which bugs have been found, the context in which they occurred, and the progress toward resolution.
Rerun Failed Test Cases
After you have executed every test case at least once, you can create a follow-up execution to focus on some important test cases. They can be those with the highest impact on the overall system or those with high failure frequency. In case you want to create a new test execution to reverify the recent failed test cases, you can go to the Test Plan section → Create Test Execution → Switch to Status tab → Choose Fail and add all listed test cases to your execution.
You can keep rerunning these important test cases again and again until it can fully match your completion criteria. Each rerun provides valuable feedback, confirming whether the fixes are effective and ensuring no regressions are introduced in related areas
Each test execution is a chance to learn and get better. Review your results, identify what worked and what didn’t, and adjust your approach for the next cycle. Staying consistent in how you plan, execute, and follow up helps your team build confidence, reduce issues, and deliver higher-quality releases every time.
Final thoughts
Effective test execution isn’t just about completing test runs—it’s about ensuring traceability, structure, and continuous improvement. With AgileTest, you can manage every aspect of your testing process directly in Jira, from planning and executing to tracking results and defects. The given test execution practices have indicated that by defining clear timelines, maintaining traceability, and rerunning failed test cases, you create a reliable testing process that leads to more stable releases and higher product quality.
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