SpiraTeam Reviews

A system with virtues and aspects to improve

Comments: The most necessary changes that Inflectra SpiraTeam can develop in new improvements are the following: the grids can be very restrictive and do not offer the possibilities of quickly ordering the launches, in the requirements module it is where they must make more changes to increase the speed and for last I would like to see in a new version a better way to create custom reports.

Pros:

Inflectra SpiraTeam is a product that works satisfactorily with multiple browsers such as Chome, Opera and Firefox without presenting compatibility problems, it is very easy to manage and maintain and another positive aspect is the robust integration with AxoSoft OnTime. My recommendation is to work day by day with Inflectra SpiraTeam and request technical assistance if necessary. Also, I recommend asking Inflectra to add more features in a new release. SpiraTeam has a lot to improve, but it is on the right track.

Cons:

There are many improvements that the Inflectra SpiraTeam team can implement in a new update, for example, the grids, custom reports and the requirements module. SpiraTeam should implement and add more custom reporting options, improve testing functionality, and increase the speed of the requirement module.

SpiraTeam - The HP ALM/HPQC Killer

Comments: My philosophy is that the tool should fit the project, not the other way round, so I use SpiraTeam as and when the project requires. All my tests begin life as Excel checklists. If we have specific requirements then I will make use of the Requirements and map them to Test Scripts to get full traceability from a requirements, through testing, through defect management to reporting of test coverage. We write and maintain our own legacy systems, so most of our projects only have high level requirements, hence there is little point using the full suite of SpiraTeam, as it is overkill for such small projects. For most projects, SpiraTeam is used as more of a project place holder at a very high level to track project details and capture any requirements documentation. It is inefficient to write test scripts in Excel for small projects and import them in to SpiraTeam and execute them from SpiraTeam, as this is a needless duplication of effort. I've implemented Exploratory Testing, so test scripts are high level one-liners, reading more like a checklist than a typical Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 style of test scripts. Familiarity with our own in-house software renders the need to write detailed step by step tests redundant. When new legislation is passed that we must comply with, I use SpiraTeam for Test Management to dot the I's and cross the T's, making use of requirements capture, test scripting, requirements mappings, test execution, defect management and Reporting.

Pros:

Easier and more user-friendly to use than HP ALM/QC, whilst offering a similar level of comprehensive features, for a lot less outlay than HP's ALM/QC, IBM, CompuWare etc. SpiraTeam is flexible enough to be used differently for each project. For example, SpiraTeam can be used as a document repository for one project, just a test script and test execution tool for another, and as a full blown project life cycle tool encompassing requirements, tests, defects, management and reporting functions. The support provided by Inflectra is head and shoulders above the competition, showing the big boys how it should be done. Responses are prompt and with plenty of examples relevant to your industry sector to help get you going. Don't be surprised if [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] himself replies to your support request. It seems that the company's sales team are well versed in using the software tools that they sell. For us, it is the support that wins out over any rivals. Pricing is clear and upfront, unlike some of the smoke and mirrors sales tactics used by other vendors who shall remain nameless but here are some hints ... Has Problems, It Breaks More and Don't Expect to Last Long.

Cons:

Upgrading from 5.4 to 6.0 fails. In the past upgrading other vendor tools has been a deal breaker when it failed. A tool should be able to upgrade itself without throwing any SQL errors or similar. Administrators and DBA's should not need to run any specific scripts or commands, the tool should do this automatically and without error. We are unable to take advantage of new features offered in 6.0 and beyond. Integration of any test tool with a business is not easy because the tool forces you to work its way rather than the tool supporting existing processes. I needed to write a VB script to translate/transpose my test scripts into the correct format for importing into SpiraTeam, as a consequence of the tool forcing the tester to work how the tool works.

SpiraTeam Review

Comments: Overall, the product is a great value. There are definitely things that can be improved though.
* Make reporting easier to use and more flexible. One of our number 1 complaints from Managers that use the system including myself is that we can't easily get data out of the system.
* Make it easier to create custom reports.
* The testing functionality is still cumbersome. We have seen our testing times increase fairly significantly since we started using the product. While some of that was expected, the tool is slow and not very efficient in some cases. For example instead of allowing multiple modules to be added at one time, the testers have to search for each one separately.
* The requirements module is slow.
* Performance of the product overall could be improved.
* Grids are restrictive. I have gotten lots of feedback with people wanting the ability to do things like double sort the grids or multiselecting certain fields like release.
* The customer service is fantastic but the reason I didn't give it an outstanding score is because I wish we had more say with enhancements. I wish we could pay you for an enhancement that was really important to us or for you to create a report for us.

Pretty Good!

Comments: 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?

Comments: 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.

Have used SpiraTeam for several years and find the product features getting very rich.

Comments: 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.

SpiraTeam and Inflectra great alround value

Comments: 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.

Top Marks

Comments: I've looked at several applications in this segment and this comes out tops so far no doubt about it. If you've never had an ALM before or even a test management tool then you just can't lose. I'm expecting an ROI in man hours the first year of ownership not to mention the lift it will give to our working process along with job satisfaction for all our users.

Pros:

Total value for money, a customer service second to none, this is a vendor with the customer in focus. The application is very intuitive and meets all our current needs with plenty of room for growing.

Cons:

None so far

Manage the full project lifecycle, testing is just a part

Comments: We have been using SpiraTeam for well over 4 years now and have over 600 registered users with over 100 using the system at any one time. SpiraTeam allows us to manage multiple development projects detailing requirements, writing and executing test cases and mapping the two together. SpiraTeam provides a great defect tracking tool and is used internally and by clients alike.

Pros:

Customisable workflows, SpiraTeam uses colour in the interface well to highlight high priority items. SpiraTeam supports multiple plugins and we have integrated with Jenkins. Good support with same day response normal.

Cons:

Occasionally buggy after new releases. Agile task management tools need refining.

Just starting

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

I don't know what you mean

Comments: Gather project mgmt design specs to your program and you will have a killer app---with integration between project management, bug tracking, and QA.

Pros:

Integration with bug tracking and testing.

Cons:

It was slow. Clunky interface. You seriously need to consult an agile expert, and implement better project management capability. Need person based detail, assign two engineers to one task, dashboard where you can choose multiple reports for multiple projects display, group tasks under user story/spec--heirarchy, input hours worked per day (auto accumulation instead of manual), and hours left to do estimate, needs better reporting for project managers, drag and drop tasks to iterations, drag and drop work order (your priority field is REALLY criticality---priority is work order. Progress bar should update automatically with hours worked over hours estimated.

Excellent package, it helped improve our internal processes

Comments: We migrated from OnTime to SpiraTeam and couldn't be happier. For us, the power of SpiraTeam is the way it ties everything together. It also clear visibility of things like: This release includes these features and addresses these defects, and these test cases were executed. it is clear what is being included in each release, and it improves communication between our project managers and the developers. We have three testers, and they use the testing features of SpiraTeam both in concert with an automated tool (TestComplete) and for manual testing. We recently hired a junior tester to do manual testing, guided by the test scripts created in SpiraTeam by our lead tester.
Our developers have been asking for a Kanban board, which is not currently available. It is coming, accounting to Inflectra's support. Speaking of support, we've been happy with the results the few times we have needed to call. These days it is relatively unusual to call a company and have your call answered by a real live person, a person who has a detailed understanding of the product, and who has a full command of the English language.
We are hosting the application ourselves. Setup was easy, and the performance is excellent. We looked at a lot of products in this space, from open source to very expensive. SpiraTeam was the best choice for us, and we've never regretted the purchase.

Easy to use ALM tool at an affordable price

Comments: We’ve been using SpiraTeam for test management for almost a year and already implemented 2 projects with it. User experience is great, since SpiraTeam is a lightweight tool and we hadn’t had any experience with such a tool before adopting SpiraTeam. The most value it adds to our test management process and to the company in general is that all test cases and test results are stored in a single repository, both manual and automated, and it is very easy to organize and find test cases or retrieve test results using filters. We find particularly useful the options for test case re-use (linked test cases), separating test cases from test data (parameters), using test sets as containers for test cases, and using custom fields. We are eager to also adopt the other modules, especially incident management and requirements management, to benefit from the traceability between all the different artifacts we manage. And yes, it is very important that all of this comes at an affordable price with really exclusive customer support - we purchased the Enterprise Edition and have no problems whatsoever with the number of concurrent users. We expect future releases of SpiraTeam to include customizable workflows for the other artifacts, not only for incidents, as well as enhanced search.

Technical support

Comments: For the value of money it is worth to use ,but those who look at this as an alternative for QC the comfort of use is surely going to loose.

Pros:

Remarkable technical support, for this I would really like to appreciate the Inflectra Support team especially to Adam who understood my issues and fixed it.

Cons:

1. Very sad to know that an appropriate load testing certification is not yet done or not published yet. 2. Single database for all the projects for big firm like us who keeps huge date will be concern , suggestion is to keep seperate db for each project.

Highly cost effective solution for test management

Comments: Great and simple tool, a cost effective solution.

Pros:

1) Features available 2) Cost per feature 3) Integration with TestComplete & NUnit 4) Great Sales person; Adam helping end user better understanding of functionality, providing workaround and more importantly promptness in response.

Cons:

1) Inflexibility in reports, though this could be overcome by customized xml reports, this customization could have been made simpler. 2) Dashboard is functional but not appealing 3) Testing tasks other than testcase execution could not be created 4) OS Env could not be mentioned for a test planning & execution

Great Lifecycle Management Tool

Comments: 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.

SpiraTeam Review

Comments: Basis our current usage, we have found Spira to be a good SDLC tool till the testing stage. This has helped us tracking/recording and monitoring our test cases and test results. The workflow in which we are able to track the requirement from the initial requirement gathering stage to the release stage, including testing very effectively. It has also helped in keeping a tab on the release calender and hence effective Project Management. There is scope of improvement in the overall upload functionality, specially post appending our data. Creation of new workflow, still remains a challenge, which hopefully spira team is working towards addressing.
It would be helpful, if we complete SDLC cycle, including post release management workflows as well.

My contacts with Inflectra can only be reviewed at 5-star at the moment

Comments: 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...)

Customer Service/Product Review

Comments: I would recommend the product based on ease of use, customer support and moderate pricing model.

Pros:

Customer support was excellent. The product features are clear and easy to use. The system is highly customizable using a hierarchical structure. The application produces high quality reports as well.

Cons:

I would like to see some features that leverage graphics a bit more. Also the ability to link assets between projects and a more robust (and customizable) use case module will add some value (although I understand these are underway.

Flexibility

Comments: Good support. Flexibility excellent. We are supporting some clients in their implementation.

Pros:

You are able to configure almost anything. This allowed us to generate reports and screens appropriate to two clients.

Cons:

Some names of fields seem contrived and not everything is in the expected place. But these will be transient problems.

SpiraTeam is great. You get much more than you pay for. I would definitely recommend this software

Comments: SpiraTeam is great. You get much more than you pay for. I would definitely recommend this software to others.

Pros:

You're customer service is wonderful. Everytime I have presented a question I receive a very quick email back from Adam. Other than our own customer service I have never received such good service from a software vendor.

Cons:

With the new 2.2 upgrade I have lost the ability to tab when creating a new test script. This is causing me to take twice as long to enter my steps.

Our QA team is committed to using this product for our needs. We would love to see it grow.

Comments: Our QA team is committed to using this product for our needs. We would love to see it grow and become more robust.

Pros:

Good features. Stable. The best aspect about this tool is that Inflectra is commited to making it better. Customer service is great. Frequest releases. Bugs are fixed fast. Customer support is super fast and super helpful.

Cons:

The UI has room to improve, feature-wise, but nothing bad about the product overall.

Vendor Selection / Scoring

Comments: Like what I saw today but would like to trial it out to get some hands on experience.

Pros:

Today was the first time we had a overview of the tool. Based on the initial meeting, it seems to be a tool that covers most of our requirements and seems fairly easy to use.

Cons:

Need to know more about the integration with Microsoft Project Server and the upcoming release on requirements and test in March of 2012.

We are mostly using this package as documentation for our testing processes.

Comments: We are mostly using this package as documentation for our testing processes.
We can keep track by release as to what has been tested. Very satisfied with product.

Pros:

Support for the product has been fantastic! Whe have gone thu 2 upgrades and had questions. The support personnel ( Adam ) was extremely helpful and we were able to complete the upgrades.

Cons:

None at present.

Very good keep up the great work you guys are doing.

Comments: Very good keep up the great work you guys are doing including development team, customer support(Adam stand out in his response) very positive team.

Pros:

You are have a good customer support which really speaks a volume about your commitment toward product.

Cons:

If i find one let you know.