Pretty Good!

Overall, I like SpiraTeam. There's a bunch of different ALM solutions out there. I prefer something easy of a lot of confusing functionality. SpiraTeam is somewhere in the middle. It has a good balance. I use it for keeping track of test cases, but don't use the requirements functionality. I wish we did use the Requirement functionality, but the developers I work with have a thing about NOT documenting what they are developing... In any case, I can produce the results of the test effort rather easily so the rest of the team can see where we are within the project. Some of the annoyances are the ability to produce a report and distribute to the rest of the team. With the templates that SpiraTeam provides, I would like something a lit bit different. The templates just don't provide the information that I need. I know there is a way to modify the templates, but never had time to devote to figure it out. Also, the way arranging tests in folders and then moving tests around in the folders has been difficult over the versions of SpiraTeam. I like how tests are arranged in that way. It helps keep everything organized in a good manner, but the implementation of it is not entirely perfect. test cases often get put in the wrong place and have to spend some time moving them around. My last annoyance is how test cases are copied and pasted. When pasting a test case, it places it on the top of the test case I copied, not underneath it. That bugs me more than anything. But when judging SpiraTeam as a whole, I do like the product, but it's those little interface annoyances that get in the way.

Pros

I like the concept of how test cases are arranged, within folders.

Cons

I don't like how the concept of the folders was implemented. Often times, when copying and pasting test cases, it gets placed in the wrong location. Have to spend extra time getting test cases and folders placed in the right location.

Are you in Wagile Hell?

With Spira Team we are building out our B2B and B2C solutions. We use the Planning Boards for SPrint Planning and daily stand up reference. WE use the Incidents page for tracking defects and Test Cases for Test Management. We also use Requirements for High Level Requirements, decomposing into Use Cases. We can bring in third parties as required to communicate their cards.

Pros

Where you are in the B2B market and have tech clients who remain Waterfall in their planning, yet you are more enlightened, this is a suitable tool. It does allow you to plan your dev trains according to iterations and project onto a scrum board. At the same time it allows you to map these cards to a set of requirements.

In addition, you can plan your test cases and track defects all in the one platform. Sure, you could go down the Atlassian route, Inflectra appears to be better value for money, especially when adding modules.

Cons

Insufficient integrations available with market defacto standard testing tools.

The training model is on a consulting model - not great for start ups and scale ups. Need more training videos dealing with the set up in situations of increasing complexity!

Was advised that Inflectra is responsive to customer feedback feature requests. Have not experienced this yet, despite regular feedback.

Because most teams spend so much time in the Planning Board, more investment is required to improve usability of this page. Its good, just not great yet.

It would be great to restrict visibility of external users to specific pages or to specific cards, instead we have to create separate projects for these groups, which is not always ideal when inserting external groups into internal team work.

Requirements and Test Management in one place

The primary goal of the software we were looking for was the management of requirements and testing along with a built-in traceability matrix and reports. SpiraTeam included these at a reasonable cost. We purchased the 4.2 version and have not upgraded to the latest. We like the feature that not only maps the requirement to test case(s) but also indicates how many of the associated test cases have passed/failed. The filtering on tables for Requirements, Test Cases and Incidents is very helpful. Also like the folder and subfolder concepts to easily group system features. We have not used the Test Sets feature. We've been able to generate requirements and test reports and make some modifications. I am not a developer so this was a bit challenging and was not able to figure out how to create a report for bugs not linked to test cases. SpiraTeam does have a report showing Test Cases with associated incidents of which I was able to expand to get additional incident information other than just the ID. They have a handful of other reports as well. We used several administrative features. Adding new users and projects is fairly easy and straight forward. We configured the Incident work steps (workflow) to meet our business workflow (e.g., added Works as Designed and Close (by Design)), added some custom fields and adjusted field properties (e.g., hide, require) per the workstep. We used the email notifications feature as well. We also synchronized with Jira but abandoned this. We could not get the components to map but mostly because after trying it, we found it much easier to manage defects in one system for our internal processes. Once a bug is synchronized and written to Jira, you can only update it from Jira, not SpiraTeam. It would be nice to have a feature that lets you know when a test case should be retested because the associated bugs are fixed. Customer Service is responsive and professional. Sometimes I found answers to my questions on their Knowledge Base. Overall good experience. Really helps to see that requirements are covered by test cases and gives the ability to manage test case (pass/fail) in one place without having to use spreadsheets!

Spira Feedback

Spira is a very good QA tool. It is very easy to use and very nice documents to follow. Very affordable price. Very good customer service. I am very happy using this tool and pleased with the customer service quick responses. However, here are some of the improvements and enhancement suggestions. 1. Is this compatible to use in all the browsers. Currently, if I am using chrome, when I try to edit the test case there is no way of saving. Save button is disabled. Update button is not displaying on the edited step. Today I started using IE to see if it will work better. Any ideas on that which browser it works well or is it properly tested to use in all browsers? 2. If working on a test script or projects using Spira, user accidently deletes the test case, is there a way that we can restore the data? Any history to bring back the deleted test case? If this is not there now, I request to add as a future enhancement to benefit. 3. Why do we need in Test cases also Execute button and in Test Sets also Execute button? It is very confusing. Usually it should be in Test Sets. 4. Axosoft and Spira test documents can be clearer to understand from a QA tester perspective. 5. I am still learning and trying to experiment the full features. Thanks.

Great product for managing software testing at a great price.

SpiraTeam has been a great tool for meeting our Software Quality Testing goals. We use Planning to track our business requirements and trace them to our test cases. We use the Testing section to capture all our test cases and record our test runs. We have started to use the Rapise Test Automation Tool to integrate with SpiraTeam and run our test automation scripts. We use Tracking to document all our test failures and track incidents for our projects. The Dashboard and Reporting sections have been valuable in communicating test progress and results to our project teams. We have been very pleased with the tools use and performance.

Pros

All the functionality needed for our Software Quality Testing goals at a great price.

Cons

Reporting could be easier to manage and sorting columns by "not" would be valuable - ex. Status = "not" Accepted for Requirements.

SpiraTeam gives visibility to the work getting done!

My company purchase this and said "here, figure out how to use this for your project". It took be a couple of hours to put all the pieces together. It is rather intuitive and user friendly. I was able to guide the team into how we intend to use the tool to develop our software product. It was easy to get the team engaged in using SpiraTeam.

Pros

I like that we can see the work move across the Planning (Kanban) Board so it gives great visibility to the entire team of the work that is being done. It is great for agile approach to software development. It provides great integration from Requirement to Development to Testing to Completed.

Cons

The toughest part of using this new tool was to determine at what level to put the requirements into the system. As we were transitioning to agile at the same time we determined to put features into the tool as requirements and write user stories for each feature. It worked well. My team experienced some clunkiness, but I believe it was the way we had the tool configured as opposed to the tool itself. We changed the permissions on a couple of roles (BA, Developer) and it worked much better. We also changed some of the default workflows to make it work better.

SpiraTeam, great potentials, good feature set and excellent support team

I believe the fact that I bringing with me the SpiraTeam to the third company I am working for, speaks for itself. In my current company, I was able to replace Jenkins and TestRail with the SpiraTeam. Eliminating an extra tool is always great news for the companies, thank you SpiraTeam!

Pros

Great variety of plugins

Cons

Limitations for some integrations, Jenkins will be a good example for that.

We are using Spirateam / Spiratest for test case management and for managing our testing workforce.

We are using Spirateam / Spiratest for test case management and for managing our testing workforce. Also we are using it to track test case execution. -> This is where I can recommend the tool to others Whatever question we had was answered by Inflectra customer service in a timely and competent way. As a software company ourselves I was very much impressed. -> This is a major reason to go and invest into Inflectra software. The money spent is worth every cent. We cannot use the integrated ticketing tool and unfortunately were not able to integrate with our Jira ticketing solution the way we planned. The promoted Jira interface was a major reason to select Spiratest and we were very disappointed that it does not really work. However this feature is promised for a later release 2009. -> We are hoping that Jira integration will be improved and integrated into the admin interface by the Spira development team as promised end of 2008.

Pros

- world class customer service
- product is still improved and enhanced
- cost/feature ratio is ok
- helps us to improve software development process
- we are using the Excel importer often also to create new testcases. This is really fast.
- direct access to the MSSQL databaes allows custom report generation

Cons

- Jira integration is not really working
- Jira integration is only done with cryptic configuration files and not using the web-admin interface.
- doesn't work well with Firefox browsers
- doesn't work under Linux
- test case creation using the web-gui is kind of time consuming
- reporting could be more configurable directly in Spiratest

Its an awesome prodect from Inflectra for overall project management . Customer support is excellent

Pros

Nice features,integration with most of the automation tools,ease of navigation,easy to understand UI,tracking of tasks,version control,access as per roles,easy tracking of all artifacts and easy to understand the mappings with them.

Cons

Reporting can be much better.Sometimes some formats throw error while reporting,mostly detailed incident reports fail while attaching images other than jpeg formats.

SpiraTeam an easy implementation and Great Customer Support

As a QA Manager I've worked with many defect tracking systems and ALM tools including TFS and HP QC\ALM. SpiraTeam is quick to implement and easy to work with. The key is mapping out your hierarchy and workflows for the project or all your projects if you're creating a template. This makes creating future projects a snap. The ease and flexibility of creating a custom Issue workflow was also key to a quick implementation. SpiraTeam has good basic functionality covering the different SDLC artifacts Issues, Requirements, Test Management, Releases, etc... There may be some features higher tiered ALM tools may have, but if they're not must haves for your team then SpiraTeam is the way to go. I've worked with the Inflectra Support team on easy and very complex issues. They've been very responsive on their communication and followups. They're always a joy to work with.

Pros

Easy and Quick Implementation
Ease of use througout
Pricing
Good overall functionality across the board for all SDLC Artifacts, not just Defect Tracking
Integration to third party software
Great Customer Support
Importing of artifacts is easy

Cons

Limited flexibility of controlling location of the fields on each screen
Reports are a bit cumbersome
Making Global Changes that would impact multiple projects in progress
Linking Artifacts across projects for cross functionality

High Functionality, Low Price & Responsive Support - It's a Winner!

Highly recommended. Cannot be beaten for functionality and support at the price point. And I've looked at many, with over 10 years experience with the big boys !!! Throw away those Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. At this price you can afford this top class software. You'll wonder why you made do with anything less!! And there is a free 30 day trial. That's how we got hooked.

Pros

Functionality, Price and Support. What more do you need in a Test Management Tool? And it has integration with other tools and test automation.
SpiraTeam was trialled over three major projects and was enthusiastically accepted by both the IT group and the Business Areas doing UAT with absolutely minimal training. SpiraTeam provides a high level of functionality at an extremely affordable price point. I was extremely pleased with the responsiveness of Inflectra to every issue and suggestion I raised.
When you're sitting in a meeting with SpiraTeam users discussing incident reports from one of the trial projects, and the Director turns to you and says..."give me the quote...we need SpiraTeam" you know the product is doing the job for both test process improvement and management reporting. A winner for all !!

Cons

Oracle support (but it is on the way).
Greater email support ( such as broadcast notification to all SpiraTeam users)- but that is on the way too.