Inflectra SpiraTest Reviews

Currently, I work as an SDET only and I don’t write or run tests. However, I use SpiraTeam existing tests so I can decide how to automate them. I use Spira RemoteLaunch to schedule a test server, which in turn schedules various test clients which run Ranorex.

In the future, we intend to use SpiraTest to store a script which will be passed on to the test server. This will run the tests and return the pass/fail result. We will generate the test script using a web page server.

In my previous job, I used SpiraTest to design and document tests. I would have a technician run manual tests using SpiraTest. I used Spira RemoteLaunch to run Ranorex automated tests and store test results. I would use SpiraTest to produce reports to generate a Test Plan, and also to produce a test result based on both manual and automated tests.

My team uses SpiraTeam to document tests and test results.

1. Sometimes I need to restart Spira RemoteLaunch because it goes into a bad state and is not listening for new tests.
2. Spira RemoteLaunch does not have the capability to run simultaneous tests in more than one server.
3. Spira RemoteLaunch does not have the capability of communicating with an ongoing test (e.g., send it commands). So it’s not possible to have a one-to-one relationship between manual test steps and automated tests.
4. The preset test reports are very limited, thus I had to XSL to modify tests. This is quite involved. My biggest suggestion for improving SpiraTest/SpiraTeam is to provide an editor to produce test report templates that are more flexible. For example, one should be able to specify variables (e.g., unit-under-test name, IP address, or web site reached).

I have used SpiraTeam and Spira RemoteLaunch for about one year. Previously, I used SpiraTest for about two to three years.

Yes, I just noted that sometimes RemoteLaunch goes into a bad state and I need to restart it. I have noticed this in the past that sometimes the RemoteLaunch does not schedule things properly. It’s been a long time, so I cannot provide details about this at the moment.

Yes, I noticed in my previous job, as one generates many test reports, database access becomes very slow to the point of being unusable.

I have not requested technical support on this job. Previously, before purchasing SpiraTest, the support was superb. However, after purchasing the product, I noticed that sometimes I had to wait for days to get a response. The regular support people were not as knowledgeable as the sales support.

In my previous job, I introduced SpiraTeam after looking at different test management products. At the time, there were not using any. I chose SpiraTeam because it was one of the few products that supported Ranorex, which is the test tool that the company was using.

I don’t remember much, but I don’t believe that the setup was difficult.

From my recollection, SpiraTest was reasonably priced so that was not a big factor in convincing people about getting it. The bigger issue was whether it was the right product for us.

I looked at public domain tools and found one that I liked (don’t remember the name), but the problem was that it did not explicitly support Ranorex. I looked at other tools, but they were too expensive.

1. Use a fast web server with lots of memory.
2. Limit the amount of log messages for the test report.
3. Try to pick test clients in the same subnet as the test server. This will reduce scheduling and communications issues.

The most important area in SpiraTest is the customizable reports; being able to create test reports that make sense to shareholders, testers, and developers. The ability to lay out detailed test reports made life simpler, as a test manager.

Thanks to SpiraTest, we were able to not only set up detailed and consistent tests, but the scheduling and assigning of tests to test team members gave us a leg up in staying on top of our current projects and gave us the guidelines for test planning.

Customizing test reports seems to be something one must have (or gain) expertise in.

I used SpiraTest for almost two years.

No stability issues.

At the time I worked with SpiraTest, there was no integration with Gemini (bug tracking and ticketing).

Anywhere Inflectra lacks, the tech support more than picks up the slack. All of my requests were handled in a timely and efficient manner. Technical support is very rarely associated with customer happiness, but I was very impressed with Inflectra’s technical support team.

SpiraTest was the only solution we used at my company. I did, however, have to provide a proof of concept where I tried various solutions. While there were many options, I found that for what SpiraTest could do and the price, it didn’t seem to be that hard of a decision. Most solutions that did what SpiraTest could do, cost significantly more, while solutions that were of comparable price or lower, didn’t have nearly the robustness offered by SpiraTest.

As someone with a fair tech background, I found the initial setup very easy. The installation guide hit it right on the head.

Understand what your team needs prior to purchasing. The Inflectra sales team was very helpful in finding out what fit our organization.

I evaluated Zephyr, QTP, and a few others I can’t recall at the moment.

Do it!! You won’t be sorry. This is a great product for creating test cases and test suites, with great traceability and reporting.

Integration with the JUnit test cases is the most valuable feature. I am able to integrate my automation of JUnit cases with the SpiraTest very easily, i.e., by just adding a few parameters in my source code.

You may find the detailed information for the integration from the link below:

https://www.inflectra.com/Documents/SpiraTest-Team%20Automated%20Testing%20Integration%20Guide.pdf

It has helped a lot for the testing side for our applications. The test scripts are written in SpiraTest, which define the step-by-step information with the detailed information about the version of the application, so as to conduct the functional as well as automated tests. The same scripts are run for every new release.

Requirement/test case baseline functionality would be a great feature to add.

I have used this solution for two years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Technical support is very good. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

Personally, I haven't used any other solution before this one.

The initial setup was very much straightforward and we didn't face any issues with the integration.

It's worth investing in Inflectra for your internal system as it's very useful.

I have been using SpiraTest for a team of 10 users and am very much satisfied with its licensing and price (a free trial is a plus). The more I use SpiraTeam, the more I like it.

It is the best QA management tool, good for all types of industries.

It provides the ability to create, edit, and manage your project's requirements in an hierarchical requirement matrix, where the high-level business requirements can be decomposed into appropriate system requirements.

• Test case documentation and execution history providing full traceability.
• Ease of use.
• Role based access.
• Ability to customize functions, such as roles, form attributes etc.
• Plugins to various other systems.

Our organization has become more efficient in our everyday test case documentation and in the execution of both manual and automated testing.

This, in turn, raises the quality of both our work and products.

Currently, I am waiting for a major improvement when it comes to sharing all artifacts across projects, this is something the Inflectra team is working on.

Cross-browser stability, i.e. not everything works as is designed in each of the major browsers, i.e. IE, Edge, Chrome, and Firefox.

Six to seven years.

No.

Not in general, but a certain plugin for source code repository connection could be better.

10 out of 10. The Inflectra team is quick to respond and even helps with solutions when I've found it necessary to contact them.

No, we only had Excel or Word for test case documentation.

Straightforward, providing the pre-requisites were in place.

Can't beat it, in my opinion.

Yes, but sadly, I can't remember them all. My main reasons for selecting SpiraTeam were as follows:

• Value for money.
• Ease of use.
• No client side installation necessary which some of the other solutions required.
• Faith in the vendor to listen to me and our needs as a customer. I experienced exceptional customer service and have continued to do so.

I would advise anyone to try it first and make sure it fulfills their requirements for this type of system.

I like the way how we can manage our test cases to test sets.

A great benefit is that the information about what/when/who was done is anytime visible from every test case/set/run menu.

It improved our TC management and helped us with the auditing.

• Manual test case writing
• Test management and protocol of the results

I have used it for three months.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is very good.

SpiraTest had more opportunities for our company and has good pricing.

No initial setup was needed; we used Inflectra's cloud hosting option.

• SmartBear
• Tricentis
• Zephyr
• eggPlant
• HPE
• Ranorex
• Segron
• Katalon

This solution provided us with our first database solution for test case management. It also provided our first opportunity to easily link requirements to test cases, and test cases to test runs.

Moving to a test case management solution like this improved our traceability of test cases to requirements, and our record keeping in general. Results were no longer spreadsheets stored on a server somewhere; they were much more readily available for review.

The bug tracking portion of this software, while ok, could use some improvement. Also, I think this software could benefit from better reporting options - which may now exist in newer versions.

We used it for about one year.

We found that, after a while, that after we entered hundreds of test cases into the system, operations like deleting a test case, or a test run, began to take over an hour to complete.

Our IT department took care of the installation, so I cannot comment on that. However, getting started with entering in tests, and creating hierarchies for structures was easy to do.

After installation, I basically took over getting our test cases entered, our upcoming requirements entered, and so on. The most important thing to know here is that this is a very time consuming process. Not necessarily due to the software, but due to the unavoidable fact that hand entry can take a long time. The software does support importing from certain formats, however if they don't line up with the way you were doing your documents beforehand, it won't be useful. Give your team sufficient time to enter in items as it will save time in the future, and will be well worth the commitment.

For the price, this is a very simple solution, with limited functionality, that will definitely improve any department still using spreadsheets as their documentation. Once implemented, and transferred over, much, much time will be saved in test case execution, and reporting.

The primary features that we most often use is the Release tracking, Test Case repository, and Defect tracking. The integration of all three of these features into the Dashboard reporting makes the job of a QA manager much easier to evaluate the status of a release.

Prior to using SpiraTeam the status of a release was based on a list of defects and the "gut feeling" of the QA tester. Now we are able to quantify our testing progress, level of quality we are seeing come out of App Dev, and if we are on target with the release date.

After a release is live on Production and we receive feedback from clients it gives us the ability to identify where we need improve our testing and add details to test cases.

Areas of improvement are all minor things to streamline the process of setting up a release. For example it would be nice if adding a new test case to an release iteration would also add that test case to the parent release.

7years

When completing an upgrade the SQL backup and restore process can be very time consuming. However we have 8 years worth of data and a defect repository of over 100K. So that is likely associated with the amount of data we are dealing with.

In the past there had been issues with more than one user editing the same object at the same time. However in recent years we have not experience that issue.

We have not.

The customer service is the very best I have ever experienced. Most customer service teams are not actually skilled at the use of the product I am calling about, most are simply reading from a script and directing me to a web site or a promise of some one higher level will contact me. With SpiraTeam I have always got VERY knowledgeable support that take ownership of the call and give you a solution. If that means setting up a screen share meeting right on the spot or writing a SQL script for your specific problem you can be sure they will get your problem resolved.

I would say the customer service is the technical support. They don't start you off with a customer service rep that cannot help you and passes you off to a technical support rep. The customer support team is the technical support. I LOVE this level of support.

We were using an IBM Rational product to document test cases and record automation. The expense of that product was very high and we started looking around. When we found SpiraTeam we could not believe how much easier it was to use, and the cost savings were amazing when compared to all the larger software companies.

The initial setup was well documented and straightforward. I found it much more simple than any of the other products we reviewed. It does take time to get all the data and setup into the system, but that is needed to make all the back-end connections that this application will use to make day to day functionality much more simple after it is fully implemented.

I personally did the install and implementation. No outside help was needed.

Save yourself the time and just start out with the full SpiraTeam Enterprise package. Nice to not have to worry about how many users you have and limiting access to such a great tool.

We did evaluate several. That was 8 years ago so I could not say which ones.

• Test traceability - drill down from requirements to tests and incident
• Custom report functionality
• JIRA integration and the option to integrate it with many other test tools e.g. scheduler for running SOAPUI/Ranorex/scripts
• Good technical support

At first we used MS Excel for setting up test scenario’s and managing the test progress. As the test team kept growing, it turned out that Excel was not adequate anymore. Having undertaken a lot of research, SpiraTest came out the winner. With this tool, we were able to make our software testing life cycle more efficient as well as create more transparency.

A great feature in SpiraTest is that you can use an existing project as a template for setting up new projects (workflows, custom properties, and data sync are copied). However, when you need to apply a change to a workflow which is used in multiple projects, you need to modify the projects one by one. For this reason maintenance is sometimes quite time consuming.

I've been using it since September 2013.

So far we haven’t encountered any downtime or any major stability problems.

Inflectra support staff respond to raised tickets within one or two days. So encountered problems are taken care by them very quickly. Also, any suggested enhancements are taken into consideration by them for future release.

The initial installation was quite easy. For the setup you only need a web (IIS) and database server (SQL server 2008). However, it is advisable that you have full admin access to the database or at least have a database admin who can assist you when setting up the database in a cluster environment (shared SQL server). Especially when the database policy does not allow database users (like a SpiraTest database user) to have full admin rights.

The SpiraTest database user is required to be a full system admin user (DBO role is insufficient) for creating the necessary database objects. The user manual is quite extensive and a great help for doing the initial setup. Basically the initial setup is quite straightforward, but time consuming.

The implementation was done by an in-house test team.

• Testlink
• TestTrack
• TestRail
• Zephyr
• Tarantula

If you are looking for a decent test management tool with a good balance of cost and functionality, SpiraTest would be a very good option, especially when you have a limited budget.

Frankly, I cannot find anything at the back of my mind that I can term valuable. It's a solution we have and use. It is as valuable as having any structured test management tool.

SpiraTest was adopted as a low cost solution in lieu of HP's Quality Center 9.2 or its upgrades. In early 2012, we were frustrated with the product, unable to achieve our objectives, slow response, etc., but over time and further upgrades these have improved.

The product needs to have finesse if it has to be adopted wholeheartedly by the entire testing community. Some improvements that remain at the back of my mind are -

1. Excel plug-in should support user incorporated native excel formatting
2. Asynchronous JIRA to SpiraTest synchronization
3. UI could use a lot of work.

• The folder structure representation takes up lots of screen space
• Should allow wildcard searches for test cases
• Should allow wildcard searches for test case names in a test set
• Universal searches to cover test cases, requirements and release summaries
• When trying to add a test cases to requirements or vice-versa, there should be a better way other than searching from the entire hierarchy or at least provide a large enough screen to make to easy for user to search.

HP's Quality Center made way for SpiraTest as a low cost solution.

The installation was carried out by the client.

It isn't as easy to adopt. Will need some getting used to.

• Test Cases
• Test Incidents
• Reporting
• Fast to spin-up a new project and configure to new requirements

It's provided us with a multi-project test management tool.

V4 is available with improvements to the UI.

I've used it for three years.

No – able to bring on new projects rapidly.

It's okay.

It's okay.

Have used HP Quality Center – but this was clunky – too many clicks

There is a learning curve with understanding how to program SpiraTest, but once mastered it's easy.

We did it in-house.

Cost is very minimal – 20 concurrent users for the products lifetime.

It's a good product with an exceptionally low cost.