Inflectra SpiraTest Reviews

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.

Fully featured test management tool:

• Enterprise license gives unlimited users
• Full artefact traceability is fantastic - requirements to test cases to execution to defects/reporting
• Customisability and product support

SpiraTest was initially implemented for our largest IT project at Amec Foster Wheeler (Implementation of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009/2012). Prior to SpiraTest, spreadsheets were being used to control test collateral. Bringing SpiraTest in, provided immediate benefits in the area of test visibility, reporting capabilities, audibility and overall clarity of the testing effort.

Whilst the tool was fantastic there were some areas which were not as user friendly as they could have been. The biggest complaint was the folder structure/functionality. We found that a number of our users struggled to create or move test scripts into the correct locations. This extended out to test sets and requirements. As most users are accustomed to Windows XP/7 environments, a similar method of managing the testing hierarchy would have been a much more preferable solution.

The best part of two and a half years.

One of the main issues encountered was around scalability. Initially there were between 30 to 50 accounts set up, however this quickly began to grow (as projects were being migrated in). We noticed a steady increase in the number of time-outs experienced by end users. Speaking with Inflectra support this was a known issue, and could be resolved by re-indexing the SpiraTest DB. We started off running the re-indexing scripts ad-hoc/as required. However, it got to the stage where the script would be required at least once a week. There was never really a clean solution to the issue.

The customer support was fantastic. Inflectra were always able to provide excellent guidance and resolution to most issues/technical questions asked - where they were unable to provide details at the time, a response would always be issued within a day. This is especially true when we were upgrading from 4.0 to 4.2 - we experienced some technical difficulties with tables being dropped but not recreated. Inflectra provided telephone assistance and we were able to set up a meeting the same day. A route cause was determined the same day and resolved the next day (nb: there were db locks created by other services that had not closed preventing the installation process creating the required db).

Spreadsheets were being used prior to SpiraTest.

The set up/installation was straightforward, but required assistance from the System Admins with regards to kit being available. We eventually moved to a virtualised environment - the transition was carried out by the system administration team and was also a smooth process (SpiraTest fully supports virtualisation).

We implemented the tool in- house. Tthe main advice is to ensure the appropriate backup & recovery process is well defined. We were able to slot SpiraTest backup in with the normal weekly backup cycle. This is extremely important for most tools and especially so for a test management tool.

This information would need to be provided by my manager at the time but to give an indication - prior to SpiraTest we were testing and reporting through spreadsheets. Reporting itself was taking between an hour and two hours per day for a designated resource. Extrapolated out, this immediately becomes a silly number of hours wasted putting a report together. Once the tool was implemented, and real-time reporting was possibly, we no longer needed to waste two hours of test resources to pull together the report. This is a simply case but given that the tool cost £7,000 only, the cost savings were huge.

The tool cost £7,000.

Before any implementation of a tool comes a requirement for said tool. The first step is to analyse your requirements and current process and understand the current pros/cons and the overall costs. If your processes are robust, and there are no alarming pitfalls, then there may not be a need to make any changes. However, if you find there to be many holes in the current processes then there may be a need to make a change. We carried out an assessment on many test management tools (including HP QC) but it was immediately obvious with regards ROI that SpiraTest was right for our needs.

If you are looking for a fully featured test management tool (or going further, an ALM solution) either in house or SAAS and are looking for the best bang for buck then I can recommend SpiraTest without a shadow of a doubt.

Defect tracking.

It has created paper trail, and an audit history with detailed information on where the defect is currently from, what environment it is in, and whether it is being worked on, and if so, who by.

Some of the reporting can be limited. The test cases and test sets portion has its limitations and can be cumbersome when changes are needed to test scenarios. Also, the search for test cases can be time consuming and creating test sets from the cases can be hard if there are many Test Cases loaded. It would be nice to have a better search functionality within the Testing area.

I've used it for about three and a half years.

Some of the deployments have caused issues with browsers. Also, the loading of screenshots used to work without having to save it to ones desktop. This will now give an error.

6/10 – they do get back to you sometimes with helpful information.

It was pretty straightforward. The documentation does need to be updated as it seemed it was old screenshots it was displaying at the time.

This was implemented in–house.

From what I understand, this is one of the cheapest versions that offered what we needed at the time, but I believe we will be moving onto another product that will interact with our other tools.

This is good for defect tracking. I was not that impressed with the test case creation, but it did give good metrics of number of completion, not completed, on hold or defects.

The most valuable thing is that it's a test management system, in which you can handle a mass of test case specifications and executions.

It has not probably improved anything. It is just generic test management which has quite a small price tag. Of course it has provided us way to handle our test specifications.

The tool doesn't restrict the usage, so if an organization wants to plan a lot they can, so this tool is good in that sense.

It's low score is mainly because of the problems with the user interface, usability and lack of user guidance - meaning that tool has no predefined way of work.

I would like to see improvement in handling test way of work. The current version does not provide enough support for test management way of work. You have too much to plan by yourself. For example, the linkage between artefacts is hard without planning and guidance for end users. The UI has it's limitations and current folder system is hard to manage. User right handling is hard because you need to grand too much rights to the users.

I have used it about three years. I have been the main user of the product and planning how the tool should be used.

Scalability wise, it needs hardware resources. Only Microsoft IIS is supported, and it's not a Linux based solution. We had to give more resources because it was stuck with lots of users.

Support has been good so far.

Setup is pretty easy but the user guidance for the end users is complicated.

We used an in-house implementations. I advise to plan a lot about the process itself, because the tool does not support that one very well. Also, the report functions are useless without good data consistency.

The price tag is be quite cheap I guess so in that sense it is one alternative. However, a lot of time goes into handling the test objects in the tool

Plan beforehand how the team shoudl use the tool. In that sense there are better solutions available

Apart from bugs reporting and tracking, which are obvious features for test management tool, these are the important features:

• Simplicity and usability - SpiraTest is very intuitive and easy to learn
• Integration with other tools - I was integrating SpiraTest not only with Inflectra's Rapise, but also with MS TFS. I found the procedures straight forward, intuitive, logical and fairly easy to maintain. Spira Test has plugins for a number of tools.
• Reporting - Flexible reporting feature made managers' life much easier. XML based templates, easy to tailor to user's needs were really helpful in providing up to date feedback of projects progress.

We came from Excel and mindmaps to using the professional management tool, thus there were plenty of benefits. Out of the blue, we were able to link issues with requirements, hold the history of test runs, differentiate results in regards to release, provide complex reports. The organization finally became organised.

To be fully honest, it's been some time since I've last used SpiraTest, thus some of these could be addressed already. But from memory, there were as follows:

• More flexibility in setting default behaviour of particular items, e.g. releases/iterations do not inherit their child nodes' test cases, the same with requirements and subrequirements etc.
• Working better adaptability of custom fields, especially in terms of integration with other tools
• More projects interoperability, also some root settings could be able to apply for each project. I missed the ability to establish the same workflow for each project, when a change was applied, to keep the consistency we had to update each project separately
• More visual flexibility. To change the size of input fields, we had to dig into application code. Each new SpiraTest update obviously turned it all to default
• Tool integration plugins are great, which doesn't mean they couldn't be better. Synchronizing items is fine, but why not synchronize relations between them?

I've used it for nearly two years.

No issues encountered.

This is the biggest plus. I'd rate it 10/10. For the whole time I was using SpiraTest, I had an impression of being the only customer which counts. They answered even the most naive questions, patiently explained everything, went ste by step with more complex issues, even helped to fix corrupted database. If I were to recommend SpiraTest to others, I'd start with excellent technical support!I worked with TestLink, free tool not comparable with SpiraTest, in advance to the latter. Never evaluated any test management tool.

I worked with TestLink, free tool not comparable with SpiraTest, in advance to the latter. Never evaluated any test management tool.

Straightforward. As simply as it is.

If you think about the complex solution and did not purchase any tool yet, it could be wise to consider the full SpiraTeam Enterprise solution. Although integration plugins are great, it's nothing better than having the whole solution perfectly integrated with no need to spent weeks on maintaining. And the price is really good as for the quality of the system. Try the solution first, Inflectra is usually fine with extending trial period if required. And for this price - do you really think about limited number of users...?

Read the documentation first and do not shorten the process yourself. If you have any concerns, do not hesitate to ask technical support - they will help.