Meeting the Inflectra Community in Switzerland

March 29th, 2017 by Adam Sandman

This week we had the pleasure of holding our inaugural user summits in several key cities Europe. We had events in London, Zürich, and Mannheim, with customers coming from across the UK, Switzerland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. We met lots of fantastic customers, had great conversations and got lots of valuable feedback on the development roadmaps for our products. In this article we will provide some ideas and information that came from the event in Zürich.

Zürich, CH - March 22nd

The user summit in Zürich was held at the Zürich Business School:

We had a large attendance, with our partners PTA, Intersys, and Zaar Teach all presenting as well as the Inflectra company strategy and product roadmap presentation and open discussion.

Presentation on Company Strategy and Plans

We started out with Adam Sandman, from Inflectra outlining the agenda and welcoming the attendees to the event:

Everyone who attended the event was very interested in learning more about the direction of the company and the plans for new online training courses and certifications:

We also discussed the new Inflectra marketing approach and how we are focusing on the needs of testers, developers and managers as we build and enhance our products:

Partner Presentations

Our partner and co-organizer of the event, Intersys AG then took the opportunity to present a case study discussing the integration of SpiraTeam within the DevOps pipeline / DevOps process. The presentation included detailed aspects from many real such integrations, specifically also from the Operations phase of projects.

Several members of the Intersys AG team were present and there was lots of useful information on how to use SpiraTeam and other Inflectra products in different situations as part of an integrated DevOps process.

Following on from this presentation, our co-hosts PTA GmbH presented information on their company and its experiences using SpiraTeam to deliver projects with exceptional quality and reliability:

Finally, our third partner - Markus Zaar of Zaar Teach IT gave a rousing presentation illustrating how SpiraTeam and Ranorex can be used to provided a strong framework for testing applications, using a comprehensive mix of manual and automated testing to ensure a complete test coverage:

SpiraTeam Roadmap Discussions

After the completion of the partner presentations and customer case studies, we had a great discussion on the planned features of SpiraTeam v5.2 and also on the longer-term SpiraTeam roadmap. The discussions were very insightful and the SpiraTeam roadmap has already been updated based on the reflections and feedback from the attendees.

We were able to demonstrate the latest versions of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan SpiraTeam and get real-time feedback on the user interface changes and other enhancements. Thanks to our agile methodology, the feedback can be incorporated before we go live with v5.2.

After this we had a preview of the next version of Rapise, with scriptless test automation with lots of the attendees being very interested in the new version.

Building the Swiss Testing Community

Community building is as important to the success of the event as the discussion around functionality and features. Thanks to our great hosts - PTA and the Zurich Business School, we had a great post-event reception with a bountiful sampling of the finest Swiss food and drink.

It was a great way to get to meet each other and learn about different ways of using Inflectra products.

We are looking forward to putting in place informal meetings and online groups to keep the Inflectra Swiss community together until our next user summit in 2018.

The feedback from the attendees was that the event was a great success, with a good mix of content and presentations and sufficient time for open discussions. They appreciated the fact that the SpiraTeam roadmap is not yet finalized and that their input will make changes to the prioritization and scheduling of the new versions.