How to keep your backlog clean with the newly added Test case issue type?

March 17, 2020

Sebastian Brudzinski

Many test management apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, including QAlity – Test Management for Jira, introduce new issue types to the ones that are already defined on your Jira instance.

Many test management apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, including QAlity – Test Management for Jira and QAlity Plus – Test Management for Jira introduce new issue types to the ones that are already defined on your Jira instance. The new “QAlity Test” issue type helps easily recognize tickets related to the test case, link them, filter by them, and more. Unfortunately, they also have the potential to clutter your backlog or agile board. This short article explains how to configure the board, so that unnecessary issue types are no longer shown. Please note that this guide will work with issue types added by other apps as well, not only with QAlity.

By default, our backlog displays all tickets that are not scheduled for any sprint and are not resolved. This means the Test case issue type will be displayed.

In order to change this behavior, a project admin can modify the filter (JQL) used to determine which issues should show up in the backlog. This can be accessed via the board settings.

In the board settings, you will be able to see the filter used for this specific board. A default filter displays all issues from the project.

Clicking “Edit Filter Query” brings you to the Jira issue search. Here you can adjust the filter as needed. In our case, we want to display all issue types but “QAlity Test”.

filter-qality-test

Once you are happy with the filter, it’s time to save it. If you were the one to create the project, you will be able to simply click “Save” and you are all set.

If however, you did not create the project yourself, you will not be able to directly edit the same filter and therefore you will only see an option to “Save as”. Click it and provide the new filter name. Go back to the board settings, and under “Saved filter” find the filter that you have just saved by its name.

Did it work?

Time to go back to our backlog and verify everything works as expected. We should still see all the tickets that we have previously seen with an exception for the “QAlity Test” issues.