You're on a busy, dirty highway in winter. It's dark and it starts to rain just a little. Your grimy windshield turns into a kaleidoscope and you turn on the washer. The pump motor whirrs and... nothing comes out of the jets.

Your wipers don't know and don't care. They dutifully carry out their automatic filth-smearing regime as you steer blindly towards the verge, frantically trying to remember what the road looked like when you last saw it.

Sound familiar? Then read on to find out how our lightweight and versatile Testy extension for Structure can help you keep your washer bottle full and your car on the road.

Testy and the Art of Winter Vehicle Maintenance

Weekly preventative maintenance is an essential part of winter road safety. It's easier to top up your washer bottle once a week when your car is stationary than when it's hurtling along a winding coastal highway.

We could use JIRA to keep track of our weekly maintenance tasks and make sure they get done, but with considerable overhead; we'd need to create a new task for every single maintenance issue, every single week.

That might not sound too bad, but what if you're maintaining a fleet of 100 corporate cars, each of which has a 20-point weekly maintenance checklist? My calculations indicate that's a lot of new JIRA issues every week.

Pictured: pretty much the opposite of good visibility

We could streamline our weekly issue creation by putting maintenance tasks into a template structure and cloning it together with its issues, but that's still a lot of work and results in 100 new structures every week.

Or we could just make one permanent structure of maintenance tasks and use Testy to turn it into an endlessly reusable checklist.

With Testy, you can create a single structure of JIRA issues (a checklist) and check them off any number of times by adding a new Testy column for each maintenance session with a minimum of clicks and keystrokes.

Full washer tanks for all under Testy

Setting results is simple - just select from the dropdown list of Testy statuses. If you set a status at group (container) level, that status will be propagated down through the hierarchy, useful if you've just completed a whole group of checks with the same outcome.

Status display is aggregated up through the hierarchy, with a choice of two ways to display results at group level - either a breakdown of the number of issues with each status, or the most critical status in the group.

You can also turn off the tiny pictures of the user who set the result

Testy statuses don't affect the JIRA workflow, so you can have any number of test runs associated with an issue. A simple naming convention will help you to find past checklists quickly using the suggestion box.

Using Testy to maintain really cool cars is preferable, but not mandatory

Need to send a maintenance report to someone who doesn't use JIRA? Add the required test runs to your structure and export it to Excel.

Now drop everything you're doing and go take Testy for a test run to see how much fun it is, or find out how it's used for real-life JIRA Agile testing.

Please don't make a negative association the next time your washer bottle runs dry and you remember reading about Testy.