Posts Tagged 'Ci'

The Risks of Trusting Machines to Check Themselves

May 1, 2023

As we deploy AI and ML-based systems and applications is: how do we test them? With traditional software systems, humans write requirements, develop the system, and then have other humans (aided by computers) test them to ensure the results match. With AI/ML-developed systems, there often are no discrete requirements. Instead, there are large data sets, models, and feedback mechanisms. In this article, originally published on AI Business, we discuss the risks of letting machines check themselves and provide some potential solutions.

ChatGPT - An Ode to Inflectra

April 5, 2023

As you know, there is lots of excitement around generative artificial intelligence right now. As technologies we are both excited and slightly scared about the potential for the new technologies and what they mean for the future of work, society and business. However on a lighter note, as we celebrate spring coming to the Washington, DC area, we asked ChatGPT to write some poetry for us....

Risk Management and Software Quality: Expert Panel Webinar Recap

October 5, 2022

September 8, 2022: Inflectra and Tezza Business Solutions collaborated in a joint webinar aimed to raise awareness of the importance of the symbiotic relationship between Risk Management and Software Quality Assurance, particularly related to the financial industries in West Africa. The webinar brought together three eminent panelists, West Africa’s first EC-Council Licensed Penetration Tester, Obadare Peter Adewale, Head of Enablement for FNB Mozambique, Gui Texeira, and the Chief Executive Officer of Tezza Solutions, Roland Omoresemi. The session was moderated by Inflectra’s Enterprise Agile Evangelist, Sriram Rajagopalan, who navigated the panelists through the challenges of adopting Agile framework in West Africa, the binding regulations in the financial industry, and the technology tools required to improve transparency, inspection, and adaptation. 

Spotlight on Spira 6.16 - GitHub, GitLab and CircleCI Webhook Integrations

April 7, 2022

The upcoming release of our Spira platform includes the long-awaiting support for integrating several different DevOps Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines into Spira, including GitLab, GitHub and CircleCI. The first phase of this integration enables this support by using the ability to configure Webhooks in the three products that send the results back to Spira. We have added special API endpoints in Spira that understand each webhook format and can read the results appropriately.

Recap: QA Financial Forum in New York 2021

October 25, 2021

Inflectra was excited to sponsor The QA Financial Forum New York 2021 - an in-person conference that took place on Oct 19, 2021, in beautiful New York City. The event was packed with talks on enterprise software quality, app security and DevSecOps, continuous integration, and so much more at the Harvard Club. Learn more about what is new in the worlds of Quality Assurance, Risk Management, and Financial Services....

Financial Systems Are In Fact Mission Critical!

May 12, 2021

When people talk about 'mission-critical systems' or 'high assurance industries', they are normally referring to real-time control systems such as air traffic control, automotive, railways, hospitals, utilities, and flight-control software. However when you look at the technology that underpins our economy and society, in reality, the definition of what is truly "mission critical" is actually much broader. In this article, I discuss some of the systems that are used in banking and finance and how they are mission-critical, and if we treat them as such, we should rethink how we define, develop, test, and deploy such systems.

Recap: QA Solutions for the Financial Sector: Insurance, Banking and Capital Markets

March 18, 2021

On March 17, we hosted a webinar on QA Solutions for the Financial Sector: Insurance, Banking, and Capital Markets with Adam Sandman and Amol Khare. If you missed the webinar, here is the full recap!

The following topics were covered during the webinar:

• JIRA Server Discontinued: Its impact on software demand in the Financial sector 

• Risks, compliance, and tools in the Financial Sector

• QA And Enterprise Management Solutions for the Financial Sector: SpiraPlan on-premise, its differentiators, and long-term deployment options.

The webinar recording and presentation are also enclosed below👇

Using the SpiraPlan Document Workflow Enhancements for GxP CFR Part 11 Projects

January 28, 2021

We're very excited about the upcoming release of SpiraPlan 6.7.1 for both our cloud and on-premise customers. In addition to the powerful new tools for developers and DevOps engineers, we also have some new document management enhancements that will be amazing for customers working in the life sciences, especially on GxP projects that have to follow FDA / EMA rules such as 21 CFR Part 11.

Scaling Spira On-Premise: Enterprise Deployment of Spira | InflectraCon 2020 IRL

October 27, 2020

In early October 2020, we hosted Inflectra's annual user conference - InflectraCon. In 2020, we have dedicated InflectraCon to Agile Software Testing and DevOps theme and held it virtually. InflectraCon 2020 combined multiple tracks, of which, one - called Inflectra in Real Life or IRL in short - showcased the various uses of the Inflectra platforms (SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan, Rapise, Kronodesk, etc.). 

Today, we'd like to share with you an interview with our loyal customer and friend - Jill Ball of the Cincinnati Insurance Company. This interview was recorded as part of the InfletraCon 2020 IRL track. The interview highlights the growing on-premise implementation from 20 users to 1350 with redundancy and load-balancing for Spira administrators and architects. Enjoy the presentation below!

Webinar Recap: NERC-CIP: Top Testing & Compliance Challenges & How To Address Them

June 4, 2020

On June 2, 2020, Inflectra's Adam Sandman and NVP Software Solutions' Neil Price-Jones hosted a joint webinar on NERC-CIP: Top Testing & Compliance Challenges & How To Address Them. 

The webinar covers the following:

• Key challenges in testing and developing software for the energy industry
• Key NERC-CIP requirements for operating North America's bulk electric system
• Best Practices in addressing NERC-CIP compliance
• Technology and tools: How SpiraPlan can transform your testing, verification, and compliance of NERC-CIP. 

If you missed the webinar, you can watch the recording here 👇.

Webinar Recap: Why to Use RACI to Manage Stakeholders?

April 28, 2020

On April 23, 2020, Inflectra and #SriramRajagopalan hosted a webinar called: Why to use RACI to Manage Stakeholders? This is the 1st webinar in the Risk Management series by Inflectra. If you missed the webinar, please enjoy the recap in this blog.

Main Take-Aways:

The webinar covers the following topics:

• how to establish the importance of engaging stakeholders
• review the stakeholder engagement tools
• understanding the role that RACI plays in an organizational context
• review the patterns in using the RACI correctly.

New Ways To Use Project Management Software for More Efficient Projects

April 1, 2020

Project management software has been around long enough that it’s fairly ubiquitous for businesses of all types. Teams from sales and marketing to manufacturing and software development use project management software to organize the myriad moving parts of business projects. But modern project management software doesn’t stop at tracking projects. Valuable features and reporting built right into today’s PM platforms make it easy for teams to use the software to help them build better processes, save time, and increase profitability across an organization.

Spotlight on Rapise 6.2 - Machine Learning & Self-healing Web Testing

August 29, 2019

We're very excited about the next version of our Rapise test automation system. The new version leverages research done by the Inflectra artificial intelligence and machine learning unit to introduce self-healing web testing and self-healing web locators to take the flakiness and manual effort associated with automating web testing.

Blog: STPCON San Francisco Plays Host to Inflectra's #TESTBOWL 2019

April 8, 2019

We are glad to report that our trip out west to host an annual #TestBowl (and attend the STPCon Spring 2019) was a sheer success!

But let’s go over this fantastic experience step by step:

Inflectra's Pricing Pages Are Getting A Facelift

February 7, 2019

Recently, we introduced new pricing and trial pages to Inflectra's website as part of Phase II of the website redesign. 

Webinar Recap: 5 Principles to Managing Your Application Lifecycle with SpiraTeam®

January 31, 2019

On January 24, 2019, Inflectra and #SriramRajagopalan offered to a group of aspiring agilists a webinar on Five Principles to Managing Your Application Lifecycle with SpiraTeam®. The webinar is part of Inflectra's certificate course called: Journey Into Agile With Inflectra - A Free Webinar Course.

If you missed the webinar, we understand - and are happy to share with you the most important take aways from the webinar.

STAGE: The 5 Principles Of Application Life-Cycle Management

January 25, 2019

The blog is produced in conjunction with Journey Into Agile With Inflectra - A Free Webinar Course.

Often, when people hear about application lifecycle management, they interpret the terminology with things they know. Project Managers or Scrum Masters will think of the current scope of the project or the specific iteration/release that has a known scope and relatively short duration. Business Analysts, Product Managers, and Product Owners think of the product lifecycle management that has an uncertain scope and unclearly long duration. Architects, Designers, Developers, and Testers focus on software development lifecycle. Operations, Service Delivery, Program Managers and Portfolio Managers think of the deployment considerations, release documentation, and benefits realization.

Which test management tools provide integration with Selenium & CI tools?

September 5, 2018

Someone on Quora asked the question - "Which test management tools provide integration with Selenium & CI tools?". When I read this question, it was interesting, as we do get this question quite a lot, and the answer does depend a lot on which flavor of Selenium your are talking about, and which CI tools in particular you want to use.

Pytest Extension Now Available for SpiraTest

August 14, 2018

The use of big data and cloud computing solutions in the enterprise world has helped skyrocket Python in popularity. It is one of the most popular languages used in data science, second only to R. It’s also being used for machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and various modern technologies. So we decided it was a good time to create a Python Pytest extension for Spira.

Recording of Software Development & Testing Challenges in Financial Services

May 30, 2018

Thanks to those who attended our recent webinar discussing the challenges and opportunities testing and developing software and systems in the financial services and banking industries. We have published a recording of the webinar and Q&A.

Recording of Software Testing, Validation & Compliance in Healthcare Webinar

May 17, 2018

Thanks to those who attended our recent webinar discussing the challenges and opportunities testing and validating software and systems in the life sciences and healthcare industries. We have published a recording of the webinar and Q&A.

Meeting the Inflectra Community in California

April 17, 2018

This week we had the pleasure of holding our inaugural California User Summits in Santa Monica and San Francisco. 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 recap the ideas and information that came from the event, provide copies of the presentations from Inflectra, and also include some fun photos that we took during the event.

Notes from Inflectra's Hackathon - Social Testing Competition

March 15, 2018

On March 14, 2018 Inflectra hosted its inaugural software testing event (hackathon) called Social Testing Competition at WeWork Manhattan Laundry in Washington, DC.  

The event drew enthusiasm from the local software tester community with around 25 guest-testers. The group used a simplified version of Inflectra’s award-wining test management software -  SpiraTest  and tested a mobile app called Sickweather. The group was tasked with logging “technical bugs” and “usability issues” as two separate categories of incidents. (Technical bugs were worth 2 points and identified (reproducible) errors in the functioning of the application, whereas usability issues were worth 1 point and noted strange or confusing app behaviors.)

After about two hours of testing the app, the group collectively logged close to 250 issues into Spiratest’s centralized databank. (The unified test report will be delivered to the app owner for review and follow up).

By the end of the night, three winners were selected based on the points scored for the issues uncovered in the app.

We would like to take a moment here to recognize all women technologists who showed up, tested hard and walked away with prizes! Pleased to have you participate.

Recording of Testing & Compliance Challenges Webinar for Healthcare in the Cloud

March 12, 2018

In this presentation we discuss some of the unique testing and compliance requirements for IT projects in healthcare and the life sciences. We discuss the move to the cloud, the opportunities and challenges it will bring, and how the Inflectra platform can help. We then have a practical demonstration of our two products - SpiraTeam and Rapise - that can help you achieve compliance faster and more affordably than ever before.

Face-to-Face with Inflectra - Find Us Where Software Testing Happens

January 31, 2018

Over the years, we at Inflectra, developed a taste for all the fun that takes place at software testing and agile software development events. We have also become active members of national and international tester communities. We love to share our knowledge as software engineers and learn from your experience as testers, developers and managers. 

So, the new year brings new opportunities for Inflectra to get up close and personal with software testing peeps out there. 

Apart from continuing with our now-traditional weekly webinars (a good way to meet new people), we have made plans to meet software testing superheros and agile gurus during the following events in the first half of 2018:

1. Social Testing - Washington, DC
2. STPCon - Newport Beach, CA
3. ISTC & DevGeekWeek - Israel
4. Agile Testing Days USA - Boston, MA

So if you are planning on attending one of these events, stop by to say hi!

Concurrent User Licensing, Why It's A Big Deal

September 19, 2017

We often get questions from prospective customers about the pricing on our website. We pride ourselves on having a transparent price list available at all times so that there are no surprises later. However the most common question is about the number of users they need, and whether they to purchase a special read-only license for users that may only login occasionally.

Preview of SpiraTest v5.2 - Revamped User Interface for Incidents

April 10, 2017

We're very excited about the next version of SpiraTest (also SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam) coming out on April 26th. It features a lot of enhancements which will be the subject of future blog posts. However one big area is the redesign of the Incidents pages (both the one that displays the list of incidents and the one that displays a single incident when you click on it). This article explains some of the reasons behind the change and an explanation of what you can expect in v5.2. For those not heavily using the incidents module, it is still worth reading because in v5.3 we will be similarly changing all of the testing pages.

Save The Date: North America User Summits

March 3, 2017

It is no secret that our work revolves around our amazing community of partners, product users, followers and fellow software enthusiasts. So, this year we are upping our game in building our user community worldwide through various Inflectra Gives Back Initiatives.

We know full well that it is a privilege to work with all of you. That’s why we are making time to get to know you better. And we figured the best way to connect is to get together and talk about things we have in common, i.e. Inflectra’s simple tools that help you build your awesome products. So, save the dates of two User Summits in North America!

Boards for when you are bored!

January 13, 2017

As we wrote earlier in the month, we're going to be engaging with our users and partners more actively through social media. In addition to our existing channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, G+, YouTube), we have just launched our new Pinterest account.

Getting Social with Inflectra?

January 6, 2017

One of our new year's resolutions for 2017 was being more engaged with our global community of developers, testers, managers, agilsts, evangelists and partners. As part of this we are going to be improving our use of social media channels as well as email and our website. This will bring you more up to date information on what we're doing as well as give you a voice in helping shape our plans for the future.

Unlock The Secrets of SpiraTeam v5.1!

December 12, 2016

Spira v5.1 is now out! This blog gives you some insight into the release and discusses our accelerated release strategy going forward.

Spira 5.1 - Cross Project Associations

November 3, 2016

One of the key new features is that you can share artifacts between different projects. This is useful for customers that have projects in Spira that contain requirements for core components that can be reused by other projects that are composed of those core components.

The Value of Continuity - Or Why We Develop In-House

December 31, 2015

Like most software companies, every day we get several emails from various IT service companies offering us low-cost developers and testers to help us with the development and testing of our products. Every day we put these emails in the trash folder. So why have we always built our products in-house? Are we foolish? Are we myopic?

20 Tips for Effective Requirements Elicitation

July 3, 2015

Requirements Elicitation is the act of teasing the true needs from users and other stakeholders, including most departments in the development organization such as sales and training. Elicitation is not simply gathering: gathering is a passive action, whereas elicitation is proactive. This article provides some tips on how to best elicit them. Read More

To Report or Not Report - That is the Question?

October 22, 2014

There is an underlying question we all need to think about. That is how many person-hours go into creating reports? In a typical organization it can range as high as 70%(documentation and reporting) of the available person-hours. Whether this is a good use of time is debatable. Analyzing report output and statistics can easily let you know whether your actual testing efforts are delivering good results, or what you are missing. Is the time spent compiling the reports and data really where your hours should go. Read More

Is it a bug, is it a defect, no it's an incident!

July 24, 2014

Is it a "BUG"?  We call them bugs because of that time so long ago, when a moth made its presence known in an early computing device.  Bug has come to be known as a generic term for anything that does not work correctly.  We say it is buggy. This is a bug.  But it is not really a good indicator of what is happening unless we have an agreed upon lexicon, and even then, staff new to the process would require training. Read More