“We decided to migrate from Server to Cloud because we were spending a lot of time on server maintenance and updates, and we also wanted to reduce our operational costs and scale at our own pace.”
Vadim Sadovskiy – Head of Quality Assurance and Scrum Master at Securrency
About Securrency
Securrency is a technology products company that delivers a complete suite of security and compliance tools. Their complex suite of financial technology needs to have top performance and security. Currently, Securrency has 50 developers working across their multiple software products and this software requires thorough testing. They have a dedicated QA team that does manual and automated testing.
After comparing several other options in the Atlassian Marketplace, including Zephyr and TM4J, Securrency chose Xray for their test management because of Xray’s tight integration with Jira and the ability to have their testers and developers collaborate using the same tool.
“We use Xray for our test management because of the native integration with Jira and the ability to have developers and testers collaborate under one toolset. The team works in an agile way and developers actively contribute towards quality and write test cases based on the requirements.”
Vadim Sadovskiy – Head of Quality Assurance and Scrum Master at Securrency
The Challenge
Securrency initially used Jira and Xray for Server. They decided that if they migrated their operations to the Cloud, they would be able to:
- Reduce operation efforts
- Save money on licensing costs
- Scale at their own pace
- Reduce efforts on server maintenance and upgrades
With this, they were presented with a challenge. Migrating all of their Jira and Xray data and up to 7,000 test cases from Xray Server to Cloud.
The Migration
Step 1: Migrating Jira data
Securrency began their migration by first migrating their Jira server data to cloud. They worked closely with Atlassian support to help with the migration.
Following the advice of the Atlassian support team, they performed several test migrations. The final migration plan looked like this:
- Export data from the Jira Server
- Export the user and group membership from the Jira Server database
- Import the users and groups to the Cloud
- Import the server data backup to the Cloud
- Enable user provisioning and SSO on Atlassian access
Jira doesn’t natively support importing Xray test cases yet and the Xray team had to come up with a solution.
Step 2: Migrating Xray data
They imported Xray Test cases to Cloud using built-in Jira Import features. They exported 7,000 test cases but they lost ticket ID’s and reports, and labels.
Securrency reached out to Xray Support Team, they were presented with a new migration option. Using migration scripts created by Xray, Securrency successfully migrated all of their missing data from Xray Server to Cloud.
These scripts are written in Python and are using the Xray REST and GraphQL APIs to fetch the Xray information from Xray Server/DC, and then import this information into Xray Cloud. These scripts are publicly available and free to access from GitHub.
“After we figured out how to use the migration scripts, everything was pretty smooth. We migrated the test cases using Jira Importer and our mission was to bring back the test repository, test results and test – after we ran the scripts everything was fine.”
Dmytro Pivnev – DevOps Engineer at Securrency
The Results
The whole migration from Xray Server to Cloud took just about 2 days or 16 hours using the new migration scripts from Xray. All in all, they successfully migrated 7,000 test cases.
The benefits Securrency experienced from the migration include:
- Scale and grow on their own pace and save on licensing costs thanks to pay per user strategy
- The cloud platform is more secure, stable and reliable than a self-hosted solution
- Better collaboration between teams because of Xray cloud’s agile board enhancements, where all team members can see the progress of testing
- No more operational efforts (e.g. complying with security policies, upgrading and supporting VM, etc.)
- Switch to Cloud before Server end-of-life
QA and testing workflow
Overall, the team works in an agile way, embedding quality and testing throughout the entire software development life cycle.
They use Xray to organize test cases, test scenarios, plans, and executions. The QA Manual team creates scenarios and covers stories with test cases. Then the QA Automation team and performance team automate the stories and review test run results also using dashboards in Jira with Xray gadgets. Finally, management and the DevOps team look into the results and coverage in the dashboards for an overall understanding of product quality.
Development teams create their own automation scripts and write unit tests. They focus on testing the code itself from the first stages of development, ensuring that they are already meeting the requirements. The automation team then runs their own python scripts that are integrated with Xray.
“We try to automate everything we can. Currently, 70% of our tests are automated and we are working to increase this number. We are trying to test the code itself from the development. Then we try to deploy the whole infrastructure and test it from the user perspective and that’s what the QA team is doing.”
Sergey Marchenko – Chief Information Officer at Securrency
A successful migration from server to cloud lets Securrency scale at their own pace
It’s been several months since Securrency migrated from Jira and Xray Server to Cloud, and with time, they’ll be able to see even more cost and effort savings.
With less overhead on Server maintenance and upgrades, they have more time for initiatives that add immediate value, like increasing their automation efforts. As their complex organization and software continues growing, they can rest assured knowing that Xray cloud is a secure and compliant tool that optimizes their time and effort.
Xray Cloud has undergone Atlassian’s Self Assessment Program that helps us pinpoint vulnerabilities and identify improvements. This helps the Xray team maintain the highest standards of security and compliance for the app and its users.
With this peace of mind, Securrency is now fully focused on their growth, optimizing their full potential and efforts on where it matters most – delivering the highest quality software.
Looking to migrate from server to cloud?
Atlassian provides the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant to help Jira users assess and migrate from an on-premise Jira instance (server or data center) to Jira Cloud.
Our team has worked with Atlassian to make Xray available within the official Migration Assistant tool and we hope Atlassian will launch this expanded version of the Migration Assistant in the next month.
To make sure you’re able to enter Atlassian’s EAP for app migrations join here.
