Onboarding is a Team Sport - How We Changed Evaluations | Inflectra

Onboarding is a Team Sport - How We Changed Evaluations

May 21st, 2019 by inflectra

One of the changes we have made in the latest version of Spira is to increase the trial evaluation accounts to support up to 20 concurrent users. Previously our trial cloud instances were limited to only three concurrent users. Find out why we decided to make the change.

First Some Background

When we first released SpiraTest back in 2007, it was originally released as downloadable / server software only. It's hard to believe, but it was very common at the time. For example, many other tools such as Jira, FogBugz, and Mercury TestDirector (as it was known then) were also only available in that format.

So when we provided the trial downloads we limited them to only 3-concurrent users so that canny developers and managers could not use them for real by using tricks such as "changing the PC clock back" (which was also common in those days). The idea being that a 3-concurrent user trial could only be used by small teams and therefore reduced the impact for us of 'cheating'.

Fast Forward to 2018

As we were wrapping up the scope for SpiraTest, SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan 6.0 we did some internal research and found that most prospects were opting to try out Spira in the cloud, regardless of their eventual choice of purchase mode. I.e. people would try it on the cloud while they were getting their severs or private clouds in place for a download deployment. We also found two interesting trends:

  1. Prospects signing up for multiple 3-concurrent user trials and then trying to evaluate as a team
  2. People requesting us to increase the number of concurrent users in the trial to more than three

Since Spira is meant to be used as a team, and the evaluation is best performed in a single instance with the team sharing all the data, we decided for the 6.0 release to make our evaluation / trial edition allow up to 20 concurrent users in a single instance.

Now the entire team can share the dashboards and work together:

We also discussed changing the length of our trials, since some other companies have shorter ones (e.g. Atlassian allows 7 days), but we decided that it made the most sense for our users to keep it at 30.

 

onboarding spira trials evaluation team