[tommymanstrom]

My experience is mixed, non safety-critical industries (but some regulated):

1. Requirements first written in Excel, later imported to Jama and later imported to HP QC/ALM for manual tests

Pros: Test reports in HP QC helped protected against an IT solution which was not on par with what needed and requested

Cons: Tests where not helping the delivery - only used as a "defence", requirements got stale, overall cumbersome to keep two IT systems (Jama, HP QC) up to date

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2. Jira for implementation stories, with some manual regression tests in TestRail and automated regression tests with no links besides Jira issue ID in commit Polarion was used by hardware and firmware teams but not software teams.

Pros: Having a structured test suite in TestRail aided my work on doing release testing, more lightweight than #1

Cons: Lots of old tests never got removed/updated, no links to requirements in Jira/Polarion for all tests (thereby losing traceability)

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3. Jira with Zephyr test management plugin for manual tests, automated tests with no links besides Jira issue ID in commit

Pros: Relative lightweight process, since plugin to Jira was used

Cons: Test cases in Zephyr was not updated enough by previous team members

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4. Enterprise tester for requirements/test plans, Katalon for e2e tests by separate QA team With automatic tests with Jira issue ID in commit (no links to Enterprise tester) inside team

Pros: Again, rather lightweight when it comes to automated regression tests inside team

Cons: Process not optimal, Enterprise tester only for documentation but no actual testing

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Today, there are good practices which helps building quality in - DevOps, GitOps, automatic tests (on several levels), statistical code analysis, metrics from productions... Try to leverage those to help guide what tests needs to be written.

Many times requirements/user stories are incomplete, no longer valid or simply wrong. Or a PO may lack some written communication skills.

Overall, I want to focus on delivering value (mainly through working software) rather than documenting too much so I prefer a lightweight process - issue ID on commit with the automated tests. Bonus points if you use eg markers/tags/whatever in test framework like JUnit/pytest to group and link to eg Jira issue ID.