March 5th, 2020 by Adam Sandman
During our InflectraCon conference last year, one of the key themes was Harmony, and how Inflectra's software and products can foster harmony in the software development and testing lifecycle. One of the key ways we do this is by making it easy for teams to work in their favorite tools and have the data be available to other teams seamlessly. Many customers have teams using a combination of different Atlassian Jira instances, Microsoft Azure DevOps instances and other tools. In this article I will be discussing how such heterogeneous environments can benefit from SpiraPlan.
Background
When I talk to prospective (and current) customers, it is quite common for them to already have several different tools in-house. Often they are using Jira on various projects, especially where the teams are working in Java or other non-Microsoft technologies. In addition, they will sometimes have team using Microsoft Azure DevOps (including its new Pipeines feature) on their Microsoft projects. They come to us to add on more powerful requirements and test case management, which is easily done using SpiraTest, however as they start to work with our tools, they realize they can get better visibility across all their teams using SpiraPlan.
Data Synchronization with SpiraTest
Starting with the test case management need, one of the key differentiators between SpiraTest and other tools is that we can integrate with a variety of different agile planning and development tools, including Azure DevOps and Jira (though we can also integrate with GitLab, GitHub, Redmine, Bugzilla, and a host of other products as well), whereas some competitors are limited to just being a plugin to a single tool.
This means that we can have one instance of SpiraTest synchronize different projects with Jira and Azure DevOps or even different instances of those tools.
With SpiraTest, you can see easily which projects are integrated with each of the different tools:
This means that QA teams working in SpiraTest have a single easy to use interface for writing and running tests and logging defects. The defects are then automatically synchronized to the appropriate tool seamlessly without any manual intervention:
That way the different project development teams can work in Azure DevOps and Jira (in this example), and the QA and project management can have central visibility in SpiraTest.
Program-Wide View with SpiraPlan
Once customers come on board the Spira platform, they quickly realize that SpiraTest is just the beginning! They can upgrade to either SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan and gain more powerful tools for managing the projects. For example, with SpiraTeam, you can have robust planning and requirements management tools that will let you sync user stories from Jira (or DevOps) and link those to your overarching requirements to have end to end traceability:
When you upgrade to SpiraPlan from SpiraTest, in addition, you get access to a rich set of program and portfolio management views that you can use to aggregate the information from your Jira and Azure DevOps projects into a single executive dashboard: