SpiraTeam Software

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.

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.

Being able to demonstrate application lifecycle management in one application regardless of the framework of choice!

Pros

Recently, I used some of its custom reporting functionality and was amazed at the easy interface and the out-of-the-box functionality. Very good.

Cons

At this point, I can't think of anything as they have a good roadmap, webinars, and user groups that support most of the immediate questions I have had.

overview about load and work

Pros

solution complexity is good for managers and overview, graphs is good and transparent to users, notification is understandable

Cons

not so much user friendly mainly for simple users, navigation is not simple, default dashboard is complicated and too much data contains

Pros

Initial configuration of the system was pretty easy, and while there are many options to set up, everything is nicely presented and simple to follow.

Cons

Creating and editing workflows (like for defect mgmt) sometimes feels like more effort than it should be, and I think the interface for doing so could be improved.

A very good tool for my QA skill set

Pros

Integration of all tools, open interfaces, online access from anywhere => to showcase example business cases to my customers, ease of use,

Cons

It would be good to have the possibility to create own reports, that can be used as official QA-Reports... every customer has his own QA-Reporting requirements
(...but maybe I haven't found it yet...)

Pros

Feature set for the price compared to competing products. Flexible licensing. Very good support from the company.

Cons

Very occasionally can be slow, for no apparent reason. Validation against AD can be difficult to setup.

- Great overview over the project progress
- Easy administration effort

Pros

- easy administration
- traceability over the whole development process
- good test integration
- integrated dokument versioning
- good and fast support

Cons

- external test tool integration arn´t freeware anymore
- text editor for inputs arn´t so good like in other tools

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.

Advice to Others

Keep up the good work!

I am an engineering contractor performing both SW development and SW qa work. I have convinced my last 3 employers to use Spirateam to help with project management and automation testing.

Pros

1) great value for the money
2) flexibility
3) can help track all aspects of a project

Cons

I am still on version 4, so it may be that some of these are handled by v5

1) not tied in well enough with build systems
2) no test scheduling support supplied for linux systems
3) no simple way to tell which automated hosts are currently being used for automated testing. Should be some GUI screen that provides a single look at whats being scheduled and to what host.

Advice to Others

Great tool for the money !!

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.

Advice to Others

The Even performance was greatly improved over the years, but sometimes slowness in rendering some pages is painful.

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!

We've been using the product for a couple of years and it has been great so far. Support has been very responsive and helpful whenever we needed them.

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 is a flexible lifecycle management tool. In addition to using it for software development, we've found the incident tracker to be highly customizable for hardware defect resolution tracking. This is an extremely cost-effective tool for creating standardized workflows and improving the documentation trail of your products.

Pros

Incident tracker flexibility is phenomenal.

Cons

Inability to search the contents of uploaded documents that contain text from the search bar to get back to your artifacts.

Advice to Others

Keep making it better. It's already a great tool.

I was used SpiraTeam in some projects. Our work with the application was right, but our experience with it, is like a fixed application with a strongest modulation of the project process. The UI, is not very friendly with a complex form to work on it.
Is true, that you can add any document, requirement, task or other in each moment, but you cannot change the flow of the project. In action it is maddening because you has not clarity of the steps to do with the different parts of the project.
But, if you have a big project with many people that need to interact (for example, you need to follow the status of the tasks and the test cases by developer) it is your project application.

Pros

The application can modify to adapt the workflow to your needs (based on a complex workflow). The document management is very good. You can change a part of UI (colors, logos, etc.). You can do a personal dashboard with your heat points. This could help you to focus your most important points.

Cons

In my personal opinion, the application needs a guidance or a screen that can show the flow process to make more easy the entry of the project elements.

Advice to Others

I only use this application in traditional project management, not with an agile methodology

Very intuitive and easy to use application with custom role based access that suites any organisation.
We have run the in-house version for over four years now and nothing much to complain about and when we've had a problem the support has been fantastic.
We don't use the application to its fullest potential but extensively for test management and reporting.

Pros

Ease of use, no client installations, supports the main browser flora, a multitude of plugins for integration with other systems. Configuration flexibility. Plenty of features to grow in to. Fantastic support team and a vendor that listens to the user base addapting and improving the application at every new release. Very reasonable licensing and support fees.

Cons

I can only think of one drawback that is MS platform dependancy for the server installation and db.

We have been using SpiraTeam within our organization for quite a few years. SpiraTeam is very easy to use, and is a great way to help track, maintain and troubleshoot an entire project, from the planning stages, to implementation, to enhancement requests and software bug and defect resolution. I would recommend SpiraTeam to any organization looking for a straightforward, easy to use tool.

Pros

Pros:

Easy to use
Versatile
Tracks multiple project points

Cons

Cons:

Cannot easily move artifacts from one project to another.

Pros:
Great integration story with variety of third party tools.
Strong customization capabilities
Availability of all key components

Cons:
Reports don't have enough graphical representations.
Limited and not very intuitive customization of the reports.
Some painful flows in the integration with very popular tool on the market: Jira.

We have just started to work with SpiraTeam. What I can tell so far, support is excellent.