Zephyr helps teams to legendary testing
Enterprise software teams vary greatly with geographically dispersed teams using different methodologies and tools. Despite these variances, testing departments must ensure consistent quality. Using Zephyr’s test management products, enterprises of all sizes can manage their testing departments more effectively, accelerate test cycles, reduce costs, and provide project teams with real-time visibility into every aspect of the quality cycle.
Zephyr is among the 2014 SD Times 100 for its accomplishments and innovative contributions to the Mobile Testing, Quality Assurance, and Security category for the third consecutive year.
Ensure consistently high quality
While many software development teams are practicing some version of agile, the testing function has remained more traditional, having clear input/output criteria as software moves through the product life cycle.
“The release team is caught between the agile and traditional methods, trying to figure out how to create the right kinds of processes for embracing this new way of developing software,” said Samir Shah, CEO of Zephyr. “Our products help project teams manage the transformation and give them the flexibility to grow and change as their processes evolve overtime.”
Zephyr’s robust and lightweight products are methodology-agnostic, allowing project teams within the same organization to standardize on a single platform and share knowledge and assets across the enterprise. “From teams that are just getting started with test management to teams in need of replacing a legacy suite or an underperforming tool, Zephyr customers realize immediate benefits from our products,” said Shah.
Manage testing complexity
The growing complexity of today’s modern applications, combined with increased competitive pressures and increasing costs of software failure and downtime, have catapulted the need for testing to new heights. While the pressure to deliver high-quality software continues to mount, shrinking development and deployment schedules, geographically distributed teams, outsourcing, and high turnover rates for skilled employees make software testing challenging.
Faced with the reality of having to do more with less, many organizations are adopting real-time test management to help centralize, organize, prioritize, and document their testing efforts.
“One of the things that I implemented pretty early on in the adoption of Zephyr was to redefine how our development teams detail all their tickets, especially user stories in JIRA,” said Mike Waldron, Manager of Software QA for Starz, a leading global media and entertainment company. “We’d schedule a planning session, giving QA the opportunity to ask questions. QA would go off, create our test cases, and then within a very short time circle back with development so that they would understand what QA was thinking and the approach QA would take to validate a specific release or feature set. This allows the Dev team to integrate these paths into their development efforts while they are writing the code, resulting in fewer defects.”
Zephyr’s latest releases
Available as an on-premise or SaaS solution, Zephyr Enterprise Edition 4.6 includes several new productivity capabilities and usability enhancements including sprint and release cloning, custom field searches, and time tracking on a per-test-case basis. The release also provides enhanced access to testing data via Zephyr’s proprietary ZQL query language, which is very similar to Atlassian’s JQL, making advanced searching more powerful and flexible.
“You can have 1 to 2 million assets in your organization,” said Shah. “ZQL allows you to find the nugget of information you want in all of that data.”
Zephyr for JIRA 2.2, the top-grossing testing add-on in the Atlassian marketplace, provides several productivity enhancements, including an Execution Navigator that enables the rapid searching and execution of tests. The Execution Navigator features several performance-enhancing capabilities including bulk status updates and copy/move tests between test cycles. In addition, Zephyr for JIRA includes ZAPI, the new Zephyr API that sits on top of Zephyr for JIRA which provides read-write testing related data via REST APIs.
“Our customers are using ZAPI to integrate various tools with JIRA such as automation, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and business analytics,” said Shah.
Where Zephyr is headed
Zephyr is now Atlassian verified so it is one of the few vendors providing comprehensive support, delivering the highest quality products, and ensuring that its product releases are in lockstep with every
relevant Atlassian release. Toward that end, the company recently announced forthcoming products that are being built on the Atlassian Connect platform; an on-demand version of Zephyr for JIRA will be available later this year. Zephyr Blueprints for Confluence, coming soon, will bring real-time testing information from Zephyr Enterprise Edition and Zephyr for JIRA into Confluence so detailed analysis of testing-related activities can be tracked in a Wiki format.
“We work closely with our customers to provide industry leading test management products,” said Shah. “Our commitments to our customer’s success have made our products the fastest growing test management solutions on the planet. In just two years we’ve added 2,000 customers.”
Zephyr now has more than 3,000 customers with two million users spanning across 75 countries.
Learn more at www.getzephyr.com.
