April 11, 2022
One of the great features of Spira, is the ability to create custom graphs and charts and have them appear in the various project/product reporting dashboards. We have been working to improve this feature, and in the upcoming version 6.16 release we have improved the user experience associated with adding custom graphs to your dashboard.
Read MoreSeptember 27, 2021
Many times when working on delivering a mission-critical software project, you want to get a graph or report of some data that is not available in the built-in graphs or reports. For those times when you need a specific Key Performance Indicator (KPI) or other metric, Spira's custom reporting and custom graphing is your best friend. In this article we share come recent examples we've created for clients.
Read MoreJuly 1, 2021
One of the pivotal aspects of any data captured in a system is the ability to report on such data. The application lifecycle management (ALM) tool is undoubtedly one such system where a combination of manual and automated data entries captures the transition of needs into requirements, test cases, and incidents supported by auditable comments, governance workflows of various artifacts, and the status of manual and automated execution. All these activities translate the strategic product roadmap into operational backlogs for release and iteration planning.
The Spira family of products, such as SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, and SpiraPlan, also support these needs at various levels. It should be emphasized that most of the standard reporting available from Spira and the widgets available in the project and reporting dashboard meets the majority of the clients’ needs across all the industries. Yet, a few clients may have some requirements that can be better served by modifications to existing reports as well as developing their own custom reports. Inflectra offers its implementation services to support these needs. However, the Spira product also provides support for enabling clients to develop some of these reports themselves. In this blog, we will review how to address this need.
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April 26, 2021
One of the old adages about reporting is that however many reports you create, you will always need one more! With that in mind, Spira has for many years had a powerful and flexible reporting engine built-in that lets you create custom reports and custom graphs using the Entity SQL (ESQL) query language. However users have asked us if there was a way to use their favorite reporting tool (e.g. Excel or Microsoft PowerBI) to connect to Spira to create reports. With the latest version of SpiraPlan that is now possible, for both cloud and on-premise customers using our new OData API.
Read MoreJanuary 7, 2021
We are excited about the next release of Spira 6.7.1, due to be released in early February 2021. One of the key new features is the ability to automatically save generated reports from the Reports center into the Documents Management module, where they can be archived and versioned.
Read MoreFebruary 12, 2020
As we get ready for the release of SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, and SpiraPlan 6.4 early next month, we'd like to introduce some of the new functionality that will be available in this release. This release includes two main features, plus lots of smaller enhancements and bug fixes. The two main marquee features are support for Single Sign On (SSO) using the industry standard OAuth 2.0 protocol, and some major enhancements to the Reports dashboard.
Read MoreJanuary 21, 2020
One of the maxims I always tell developers is that regardless of what you build, customers will never be satisfied with the reports you offer or the integration that you provide. In fact, the two most underestimated tasks in software development are data feeds and reporting. So one of the nice features in our Spira platform is the ability to do custom graphing, so that you are not limited to just the graphs that ship with the system. This article is the fourth and last one in a series that explains how to use these powerful custom graphing features, which continues on from our third article that explained the differences between Entity SQL (ESQL) and traditional database SQL. In this article we'll discuss some of the more advanced types of query that you will want to use when creating graphs.
Read MoreJanuary 15, 2020
One of the maxims I always tell developers is that regardless of what you build, customers will never be satisfied with the reports you offer or the integration that you provide. In fact, the two most underestimated tasks in software development are data feeds and reporting. So one of the nice features in our Spira platform is the ability to do custom graphing, so that you are not limited to just the graphs that ship with the system. This article is the third in a series that explains how to use these powerful custom graphing features, which continues on from our second article that provided the basics of writing ESQL queries. In this article we'll discuss some of the differences and limitations between ESQL and traditional database SQL.
Read MoreJanuary 3, 2020
One of the maxims I always tell developers is that regardless of what you build, customers will never be satisfied with the reports you offer or the integration that you provide. In fact, the two most underestimated tasks in software development are data feeds and reporting. So one of the nice features in our Spira platform is the ability to do custom graphing, so that you are not limited to just the graphs that ship with the system. This article is the second in a series that explains how to use these powerful custom graphing features, which continues on from our first article that explains the basics. In this article, we'll be diving deeper into some of the intricacies of the Entity SQL language itself.
Read MoreOctober 23, 2019
One of the maxims I always tell developers is that regardless of what you build, customers will never be satisfied with the reports you offer or the integration that you provide. In fact, the two most underestimated tasks in software development are data feeds and reporting. So one of the nice features in our Spira platform is the ability to do custom graphing, so that you are not limited to just the graphs that ship with the system. This article is the first in a series that explains how to use these powerful custom graphing features, which continues on from our previous series on custom reporting!
Read MoreMarch 27, 2019
On March 21st, 2019, Inflectra and #SriramRajagopalan hosted a webinar on Excellence through Reporting in Agile Projects. This webinar concluded the 5 part certificate series called: Journey Into Agile With Inflectra - A Free Webinar Course.
If you missed the webinar, please enjoy the recap in this blog.
Read MoreMarch 26, 2019
When we focus on reporting, we often fail to recognize value using benefit delivery. Instead, many view reports only as a transactional instrument. Based on my experience in managing the program management office, and being a change agent for a product development framework, I believe the purpose of a report is to tell a story! The story not only should tell what has happened but also give a preview of what may come!
Read MoreJanuary 10, 2018
As we're in the final countdown for the release of the latest version of SpiraTest, SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan v5.4, we are going to be highlighting some of the most important new features in this version to help you get ready for the release. In this article we shall be discussing some of the graphing enhancements in v5.4, both the additional standard graphs, and the new custom graphing engine that lots of customers have been waiting for!
Read MoreSeptember 22, 2017
One of the nice features in SpiraTeam is the ability to do custom reporting, so that you are not limited to just the reports that ship with the system. Due to popular demand, we recently had a webinar explaining how to use these powerful custom reporting features in your projects. Don't worry if you missed the webinar, we have a recording available as well as a copy of the presentation.
Read MoreOctober 15, 2015
One of the maxims I always tell developers is that regardless of what you build, customers will never be satisfied with the reports you offer or the integration that you provide. In fact the two most underestimated tasks in software development are data feeds and reporting. So one of the nice features in SpiraTeam is the ability to do custom reporting, so that you are not limited to just the reports that ship with the system. This article is the third in a series that explains how to use these powerful custom reporting features.
In this article we shall be creating a branch new custom report that has a custom header, footer and a custom section that displays data based on a custom ESQL (Entity SQL) query. This is useful in cases where you have some special metrics that you want to be able publish in a report.
September 11, 2015
One of the maxims I always tell developers is that regardless of what you build, customers will never be satisfied with the reports you offer or the integration that you provide. In fact the two most underestimated tasks in software development are data feeds and reporting. So one of the nice features in SpiraTeam is the ability to do custom reporting, so that you are not limited to just the reports that ship with the system. This article is the second in a series that explains how to use these powerful custom reporting features.
In this article we shall be taking one of the standard reports and using the standard section XML editor to make some changes to the XSLT template to hide some columns and add a new calculated column.
July 22, 2015
One of the maxims I always tell developers is that regardless of what you build, customers will never be satisfied with the reports you offer or the integration that you provide. In fact the two most underestimated tasks in software development are data feeds and reporting. So one of the nice features in SpiraTeam is the ability to do custom reporting, so that you are not limited to just the reports that ship with the system. This article is the first in a series that explains how to use these powerful custom reporting features.
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