Teams often start with an all-in-one Jira project, where you manage requirements, development, and testing together. This setup works well for small teams because it’s simple, collaborative, and keeps everything in one place.
As projects grow, however, the all-in-one model can become hard to manage. This use case explores what issues arise when large teams apply an all-in-one Jira project and suggests how teams can apply a more effective project organization to overcome the issues.
1. Problems with All-In-One Project Approach
Cluttering tasks
When developers and testers share the same Jira project, everything ends up in one place. You may find a chaotic mix of stories, bugs, and test cases across places, including the backlog and the project board. Developers scroll through long lists of testing items they don’t need, while testers have to filter through development tasks just to find their own work e.g., test cases, test executions, and even test plans. To stay organized, teams often tag every issue manually or rely on naming conventions (Dev/Test) and Epic labels to separate responsibilities. Over time, this manual sorting not only slows everyone down but also increases the risk of mistakes, like misplaced issues, duplicated work, or missed updates. What starts as a simple shared space gradually turns into an extra coordination effort that distracts the team’s attention from actual testing and development.
Conflicting workflows
When developers and testers work in the same Jira project, their workflows often overlap in confusing ways. The product owner and developers use backlogs to plan upcoming features, adding user stories, bugs, and epics that define what to build. Testers, meanwhile, may need to create test cases or test executions in that same backlog to plan their testing cycles. However, because all these issue types share one view, testers can easily lose track of which items belong to development and which belong to testing. A tester might open the backlog to create a new test execution, only to find it buried between dozens of stories and bugs from the dev team.
2. Two-Project Organization Approach is the Key
When team sizes grow, developers and testers need different workflows. At this point, it makes sense to separate development and testing into two projects — one focused on building features, and the other on validating them.
Project for developers
The development project is where developers plan, implement, and track their work. It typically includes user stories, epics, and bugs. Epics outline major features that need to be completed in multiple sprints, giving a high-level view of what’s being built. User stories break those epics into smaller, actionable tasks that describe specific user needs, guiding developers on what to build and giving testers clear references for validation. Bugs capture defects or unexpected behaviors found during testing or in production, ensuring issues are tracked, prioritized, and resolved before release.
Project for testers
The testing project, on the other hand, is for the QA team. It includes test cases, test plans, and test executions, allowing testers to organize, run, and report on testing activities without cluttering the development workflow. Test cases define the steps and conditions needed to verify that a feature works as expected, usually linked to a user story or requirement (in another project) to ensure full coverage. Then, Test plans organize these cases under a shared goal, outlining what will be tested, when, and by whom. Test executions capture the actual test runs and results, showing which tests passed, failed, or need re-testing.
3. How to Achieve Two-Project Management with AgileTest
Separating development and testing into two projects helps teams stay organized, but it can also make tracking progress across both sides more difficult. To keep everything connected, AgileTest helps teams trace back to the work items, giving a broad view of what your team has built, tested, and is ready to release.
With AgileTest, you can configure the settings for requirements and defects mapping. By default, Stories and Tasks are mapped to Requirements, while Bug Issue Type is mapped to Defects.
Requirements Mapping
Once configured, testers can open the related Jira requirement from within AgileTest. Instead of switching tabs, testers can click directly on the issue ID to redirect to the Jira tickets.
Then, you and your team can also link the requirements from one project to another to achieve a two-project approach. You can go to your Test cases → Requirements → Add your existing requirements or create a new one. You can choose different types of work items for requirements, including tasks, subtasks, stories, and epics, depending on your previous Requirement mapping setup.
This means testers are directly linked to the requirements (Stories/Tasks) in Jira, which is where developers are already working. Therefore, testers and developers can have different workflows and tasks for one app on the two projects, but testers will receive updates during changes in the developers' tasks or stories.
Defects Mapping
Similarly, once you have configured Defect Mapping in AgileTest, your development team can easily track and manage bugs directly within their Jira environment. When a test case fails in AgileTest Test Execution, testers can log a new defect or add an existing one. If you create a new defect, it will also appear in the Jira issue view. In addition, the defects will also be linked with the corresponding test case and requirement.
This feature helps developers quickly prioritize and address defects based on testing feedback. Developers can efficiently review the specific test cases and requirements related to the defect, ensuring your team can resolve the issues within the correct context.
By separating development and testing into distinct Jira projects, teams can reduce irrelevant work items, improve workflow clarity, and stay focused on their core responsibilities. AgileTest ensures traceability between the two projects, so both developers and testers can work in parallel without losing sight of dependencies. This approach minimizes confusion, prevents task overlap, and keeps teams aligned, even as the project scales.
Final thoughts
As teams scale, managing testing isn’t just about tracking cases; it’s about keeping development and QA aligned. An all-in-one Jira project works early on for small teams, but larger teams need clearer workflows to stay efficient. Splitting projects helps organize work, yet it can also create gaps in visibility. By focusing on clear traceability and shared visibility, teams can bridge that gap, ensuring that you can build and validate every feature with confidence.
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