Do you use Jira or some other tools for tracking QA Metrics?

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I’m a QA Manager, and lately I’ve been thinking about whether we’re under-leveraging Jira when it comes to tracking QA health and efficiency.

Right now, we use Jira for managing test cases and tracking bugs but I’m trying to go deeper. I want to track things like Defect leakage (bugs found post-release), Defect density per feature or sprint, Time to detect and resolve issues along with other QA metrics.

But honestly, I’m not sure of the best way to do this in Jira.

Would love to hear how other QA leads/managers are doing this

  • Are you using custom dashboards or integrating with other tools ?
  • Are there plugins you rely on?
  • Are you exporting and tracking in spreadsheets?

Really curious how you are approaching this and how has your experience been ?

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Hi Dinesh,

I believe Jira is such a vast tool to utilize, and it actually can be one place for all. I personally prefer and also our team’s structure sits well with it. We dont use any plugins or extension. We use Jira’s built in ability to create dashboards and its gadgets.

I have created a ‘Quality State Dashboard‘ using Jira dashboard ability and its built in gadgets i-e: open/resolve time, bugs leakage in production (client raised) or internally raised issues in Test or staging environment to emphasizing the ‘shift-left‘ approach actually works and resulting in less bugs pivoting in production. How can we leverage it in Jira without spending further ££.

I have defined certain ‘Quality KPIs‘ that suited for our product, you can select what you think are important.

  • Using labelling against the tickets i-e: internally - (test/staging) - external (client raised or bugs in production
  • How many features have been automated yet and how many are manual (you can put label as well)
  • Create filters using those issues by labelling (it will filter out)
  • Utilize those filters in different jira gadgets ie: issues created / resolved , issues in test/stg issues in production
  • sort the dashboard by last 12 months.

It gives you clear picture linearly

  • How much bugs had pivoted into production
  • How many bugs were actually raised in testing phase

You can of course: monitor/ update or edit - generate report quarterly on how things are with Quality State of the product by just using Jira and I am sure lots of time gets saved by just switching through different tools. Hope it helps! :slight_smile:

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Great question @kdinesh125 ,

Actually, I have been recently pondering it.

We use Jira for test case management using plugins like Xray, as well as for bug tracking. But with real QA metrics like defect leakage, time to resolve, or coverage vs risk, it has been a bit of a hit and miss.

Nowadays, we really mix things up with:

Custom Jira dashboards with filters + JQL for sprint-level defect trends.

Xray reports for test execution metrics (kind of limited and would usually require some level of customization).

Spreadsheets, still very manual, particularly to track leakage or effort vs. bugs per module.

We are experimenting with Power BI + Jira API for deeper insights—still in its infancy.

Honestly, I do believe tools like Jira can do much more; yet, it has to be set up properly, i.e., ideal custom fields, consistent tagging, workflows. From my experience, if the team is not disciplined, the data will never represent reality.

I am also inquiring about eazyBI and QMetry plugins and wondering if anyone had good experiences with them?

Would love to hear about big-scale solutions others use.

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I’ve started exploring EasyBI as we have it. I’ve only got limited permissions but it has definitely helped me get some more interesting charts than what I managed with Jira. By using a little bit of logic I could group issues specifically about customer value and those that I viewed as quality defects then show how much we’re having to spend on each. This let me highlight that our quality issues were impacting velocity.

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We use Qmetry along with jira , i have found that it makes ur jira to load the page very slow… is there anything specific u want to know

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In my experience, Jira feels pretty restrictive once you try to use it as more than what it was intended for. It’s not a true test management tool, so tracking deeper QA seems to feel clunky.

Plugins help a bit, but they’re still limited by Jira’s structure and slow. I do find that standalone/dedicated test management tools are far more suitable and give you better reporting, better traceability, and clearer dashbaords without the workarounds. So we keep Jira for bugs, but rely on a standalone tool for test reporting.