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Blog - Test Faster with Applause by Integrating Your Bug Tracking System

Test Faster with Applause by Integrating Your Bug Tracking System

Many of Applause’s customers are preoccupied with one element more than any other — speed. Fueling a CI/CD pipeline means testing quickly and often. The goal of CI is to provide rapid feedback, so that if a defect is introduced into the code base, it can be identified and corrected as soon as possible.

Applause works with some of the fastest-moving development teams out there, and one way it helps them increase velocity is with the Applause Jira Integration. The Applause Jira Integration enables organizations to receive bugs directly from the Applause Platform into their Jira bug tracking system, removing a logistical step in the process and giving them the ability to test faster, more efficiently and more often. There is also a bi-directional integration to increase value for organizations. (Applause integrates into other bug tracking systems too, but we’ll primarily discuss Jira in this article.)

By getting bugs back into their own bug tracking system quickly, organizations can assign them immediately to their engineers to address as needed. This all happens without sacrificing the quality of testing results from Applause’s global community of vetted QA testers.

In addition to exporting bugs to organizations’ Jira bug tracking systems, Applause has the ability for a two-way interaction with Jira, which gives teams enhanced reporting in the Applause Platform and a streamlined bug fix verification process — we’ll dig more into that below.

By getting bugs back into their own bug tracking system quickly, organizations can assign them immediately to their engineers to address as needed.

So if you’re not already integrating your bug tracking system with Applause, here’s why you might want to.

How does the Applause Jira Integration speed up your development process?

Exporting Issues from Applause

Many teams rely on bug tracking systems, such as Jira, to manage their day-to-day tasks, and they represent a major efficiency gain when teams implement them correctly. To benefit from these efficiencies, teams must accurately and quickly create and update issues — or ‘bugs,’ ‘defects’ or ‘tickets,’ as some organizations label them — with all the required data. Manually transferring these issues from the Applause Platform represents a challenge for organizations’ Engineering teams trying to work at scale.

This is where the Applause Jira Integration can help. The first use case for Applause Jira Integration is to export issues from the Applause Platform into a customer’s Jira bug tracking system. After the Applause team has vetted and triaged the bugs found by Applause’s testing community, the bugs are automatically exported from the Applause Platform into an organization’s Jira instance. This creates a new issue in the organization’s Jira, and its identifier is available in the Applause Platform for reference.

This saves teams from having to manually create and update the issues in their Jira, with all the data points, eliminating the delays and potential errors of such tedious work and empowering new efficiencies. When organizations integrate their bug tracking system in this way, it enables Applause to seamlessly work into their Agile processes.

Issue Handling and Fix Verification

An optional two-way integration takes the Applause Jira Integration a step further, and enables updates to be sent from an organization’s Jira instance into the Applause Platform on issue prioritization, target release and fix status. With the two-way integration, the organization ensures that its reporting in the Applause Platform is accurate, with the most up-to-date and relevant information.

With the two-way integration, the organization ensures that its reporting in the Applause Platform is accurate, with the most up-to-date and relevant information.

In addition, the Applause Jira Integration can streamline the bug fix verification process. Once an organization’s Engineering team addresses the code to fix the bugs that Applause found, the fixed bugs automatically go back into the Applause Platform. The same testers who found the bug — or others who meet the same criteria — can test again to verify that the bug has been fixed. We will explore the bug fix verification process in more detail in a future blog post.

In addition, enabling two-way integration leads to a more comprehensive Applause Quality Score™ rating, which uses data science algorithms to provide a data-driven snapshot of the strength of a particular build and can show how a build improves over time as it is improved and re-tested. With two-way integration, organizations are providing more data for their Applause Quality Score rating.

This is a ‘help us help you’ scenario — when organizations enable a two-way Jira integration and send more data to the Applause Platform, those organizations’ Applause Quality Score ratings become more comprehensive, accurate and relevant. When that happens, teams are able to make stronger data-driven release decisions.

Benefits of Applause Jira Integration

By using the Applause Jira Integration, you can work and test faster at scale, and increase development velocity. By gaining access to Applause’s global community of vetted QA testers, organizations already have the ability to perform testing at-scale, across the locations and devices that are critical to them. With Applause Jira Integration, a manual step is removed and teams can move faster.

Here are the benefits of integration:

  • Test faster and more efficiently, enabling you to maintain a CI/CD environment
  • Reduced chance of human error from manually moving bugs from Applause to Jira
  • Accurate reporting that drives your testing strategy
  • Automated verification process prior to pushing bug fixes to production

And remember — Engineering and QA teams can continue to work on their own interface, which are they familiar with. They are not required to use the Applause Platform or any other new user interface.

How to get started with Applause Jira Integration

If you’re already an Applause customer without Jira integration, talk to your Applause team and tell them you’d like to integrate. And if you are integrated but only for outbound integration, you can talk to your Applause team and expand your integration.

For organizations that don’t have Jira, Applause integrates with 10-plus other bug tracking systems, as well as generic integration channels through email and webhooks. The chances are high that Applause can integrate with your team — send your Applause team a message and we’ll get the integration process started.

In addition, consider leveraging the improved dashboard within the Applause Platform, including the recently rolled-out Applause Quality Score. These tools are designed to help you better understand your quality and make data-driven decisions on when your build is ready for release — you can think of your AQS as the software quality equivalent of a credit check.

And if you’re not already an Applause customer, consider this one of the reasons that “quality of results” and “speed” were ranked as the top two attributes that customers love about working with Applause. You can reach out here for more information on getting started with Applause, including integrating your bug tracking system.

Apps targeting young people

Naturally, banks and online brokers are also increasingly offering mobile solutions for stock trading. However, this new group of fintech startups has a different structure than traditional providers. As international apps with social media appeal, they are aimed at a particularly young target group of 25- to 35-year-olds who want not only access to stock trading but also a new kind of user experience. It has become clear that accessibility and user-friendliness are key selling points for these new investment apps. For example, according to Bitkom’s Digital Finance Report 2020, 40% of respondents expressed the expectation that “smartphone apps’ ease of use for stock and securities transactions will enable more people to benefit from companies’ performances.”

In a nutshell, the easy access via smartphones makes these “neobrokers” so appealing. Clear design, community integration, and ease of entry has turned UI/UX into an actual product.

Special opportunities – special risks?

Many apps have little to no limit on how small a trade can be, making it possible to buy fractional shares. As mentioned, they charge very low fees — or none at all — and are available outside of regular trading hours. The apps clearly aim to lower the entry threshold for stock trading, and sometimes lure new users with free shares. On the flip side, the apps offer no or minimal investing advice, unlike traditional brokers. Consequently, purchasers must do their own research outside of the app, using articles, forums and social media. This aspect has raised suspicions in the German market. In the survey undertaken for the Bitkom Digital Finance Report referenced above, 69% of respondents stated that “an advisor’s input is absolutely key to making good investment decisions.” As a result, the separation of professional advisory services and the gamification of trading stocks carries certain risks, especially for inexperienced users.

Too much power?

The potential dynamics unleashed by direct market access were demonstrated in an interesting case study in January. Small investors coordinated a purchase of GameStop stock via Reddit to prevent a decline in the company’s value, on which hedge funds had speculated. In fact, the Reddit community’s actions were so successful that U.S. authorities are now investigating the possibility of market manipulation. Outrage erupted, however, when Robinhood simply suspended trading in GameStop shares at the height of the buying frenzy.

Ultimately, the neobroker did have a good reason for halting trading. The security it had deposited with clearinghouse DTCC was insufficient to match increased trading volume. However, this episode illustrates that some luster has fallen from the new market power of small investors: Even trading apps do not eliminate the intermediary function; they only replace it, sometimes with even more opaque conditions than before.

The outlook is promising

And yet, neobrokers are attracting young investors by reinventing the process of investing and stock trading. With pleasing designs and customer experiences geared toward millennials, these apps will be able to gain many users in the next few years. At that point, they will have to show that they can keep up with the momentum that they created. Users expect apps, acting as financial service providers and managers of highly sensitive data, to be error-free at all times and in all places – and rightly so. User trust and compliance with financial rules will play a crucial role in determining whether neobrokers will remain competitive as market penetration continues.

However, the new investment apps’ penetration of the DACH market is still at an early stage. Established providers, especially banking apps, may leverage the trend by incorporating a more attractive UX and simplified investment features into their existing apps. For example, a whitepaper from the Sparkassen Innovation Hub on the topic of changing values recommends “opening up products to small investment amounts” as well as “using a clear, appealing interface (UI), playful elements for data entry and maintenance, [and] the use of status and progress indicators to guide users through processes” to attract a new group of potential investors.

One thing is certain: The phenomenal growth of investment and trading apps, especially in Germany, could be a precursor to interesting developments in the coming years.

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Dan Cagen
Dan Cagen
Former Product Marketing Manager
Published On: July 6, 2020
Reading Time: 6 min
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