Synchronizing IT Service Management with ALM
One of the challenges in managing a large integrated IT organization is the need to be able to utilize information obtained from supporting an organization's IT systems and infrastructure and feed it back into the product innovation, design, and development process. That way feedback and experiences from users can be used to continually improve products and services. Without this crucial feedback loop, the product development teams can end up working in isolation from real time user feedback. This results in a crucial disconnect between designers and users of systems.
Product development organizations use tools and systems geared to designing, managing, developing and testing software products and systems. These tools form the backbone of the DevOps toolchain and advances in tooling and integration have made it easier to connect different software development, management and testing tools. For example users of our SpiraTeam ALM suite can connect to other platforms such as GitLab, Azure DevOps and Atlassian Jira. However when it comes to synchronizing information and orchestrating processes with the IT Service Management (ITSM) organization, there has been traditionally a lack of interoperability.
The new synchronization between Inflectra SpiraTeam and ServiceNow lets organizations connect change requests and other assets managed in ServiceNow with products and programs managed in SpiraTeam. For example a new change request in ServiceNow may trigger new product feature requests in SpiraTeam that then result in a new product sprint and sets of development and testing activities.
According to Simon Bor, Inflectra's Head of Development, "I am very very excited about the new integration between SpiraTeam and ServiceNow. It reinforces our commitment to an open, extensible platform, and meets the needs of many of our customers that are already using both SpiraTeam and ServiceNow in different departments and want them to work closer together."
About ServiceNow
ServiceNow is a company that provides service management software as a service. It specializes in IT services management (ITSM), IT operations management (ITOM) and IT business management (ITBM). The ServiceNow platform can be used to manage IT infrastructure and a wide variety of other tasks. ServiceNow is primarily an ITSM tool that has been specifically designed for IT departments. However, ServiceNow is not just a simple Change Management system, it has a much broader functionality, corresponding to the different aspects defined the the Infrastructure IT Library (ITIL).
ServiceNow is typically used by mid-sized or large companies for managing their IT workflows, but it can be configured or customized to the individual business needs of different enterprises. ServiceNow is a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) product, that in addition to its core ITSM functionality, has other modules, for instance, enterprise IT Operations Management (ITOM), IT Business Management (ITBM), Security, Customer Service, HR Service Management tools and a number of others.
About SpiraTeam
SpiraTeam is a complete agile software development management system that manages your project's requirements, releases, iterations, tasks and bugs/issues. Designed specifically to support agile methodologies such as Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), DSDM and Agile Unified Process (AUP) it allows teams to manage all their information in one environment. In SpiraTeam, each project has a dashboard home-page that summarizes all of the information regarding the project into a comprehensive, easily digestible form that provides a “one-stop-shop” for people interested in understanding the overall status of the project at a glance. It contains summary-level information for all types of artifact (requirements, test cases, incidents, etc.) that you can use to drill-down into the appropriate section of the application.
About Inflectra
Founded in 2006, Inflectra is a market leader in software test management, test automation and application lifecycle management space. The company is headquartered in the USA, but has offices in over 10 countries. Known globally for its legendary customer support, Inflectra makes turn-key solutions that address many challenges in software test management and QA, test automation and product lifecycle management. Its methodology agnostic software tools are used in many industries where portfolio management, requirements traceability, release planning, resource management, document workflow and enterprise risk analysis are required. The company uses a concurrent pricing model for all its tools with unlimited products, projects, sprints, tests, API calls, included in a single price. All Inflectra products have a 30-day free trial.