Adventist Health System Streamlines Quality Assurance with SpiraTeam from Inflectra
SpiraTeam implemented to streamline QA processes and improve statutory reporting.
- Industry
- Healthcare
- Objective
- Replace obsolete Microsoft Office-based tools with a centralized QA and project management system that was easy to use and maintain.
- Approach
- Centralize QA processes in a single platform.
“SpiraTeam is an all-in-one QA management application which has great value for the price. Its many features, simple user interface and adaptability allow it to be used with any software development methodology.”
Streamlining quality assurance and improving reporting and metrics
Adventist Healthcare System was faced with maintaining an obsolete set of QA and project management tools. They chose to migrate to Inflectra’s SpiraTeam platform to centralize their QA and testing processes as well as improve their project tracking and management.
The adoption of SpiraTeam yielded many benefits, including the ability to automatically generate required metrics and reports and respond to audit inquiries 95% faster than before.
Background
Adventist Health System (AHS) is a non-profit health care organization operating facilities across the Southern and Midwestern United States. At the time of the case study, it had 45 hospital campuses, more than 8,200 licensed beds in nine states, and served more than five million patients annually.
AHS primarily tested highly configured and customized commercial software, while also supporting in-house web and Java applications. The organization mainly followed a waterfall methodology, with several development teams moving toward agile methodologies.
Challenge
Before SpiraTeam, AHS used Microsoft Word for requests and requirements, Microsoft Excel for test documentation, and a custom Microsoft Access application to track projects, assignments, defects and approvals.
Migrate from obsolete tools
AHS needed to replace a custom Microsoft Access 97 QA application that had become obsolete, along with a paper-based testing process and manual management of people and resources.
The QA department also wanted a single integrated platform to log projects and requirements, store testing documents, track defects and resource time, and produce custom reports by project number.
Solution
After an extensive tool evaluation, AHS selected SpiraTeam because it combined project, requirement and task management, document storage, defect management and time tracking in a single unified solution.
Easy to use and flexible
SpiraTeam allowed AHS to generate custom reports and metrics without customization. The cloud version helped the team stay within budget and transferred maintenance costs such as hardware, data backup and security patching to the hosted service.
AHS also rated SpiraTeam the easiest user interface to learn and use for its team.
Benefits
SpiraTeam enabled AHS to formalize its QA management and testing process and move to a paperless system. It also provided a central repository for QA-related documents, not just testing requests.
The custom reporting module allowed AHS to generate yearly QA metrics that had not been possible with the previous system.
Business outcomes
- Reduced audit inquiry response time by 95%.
- Automatically generated annual QA metrics for the first time.
- Streamlined and standardized QA processes across teams.
Technology outcomes
- Replaced multiple obsolete tools with one easy-to-use solution.
- Reduced total cost of ownership using a cloud-based service.
- Connected with tools including Jira, TestComplete, Subversion, Git, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word.
Reducing response time by 95%
Storing documents in SpiraTeam by project number allowed AHS to respond to auditing inquiries in under an hour. Previously, locating paper documentation, making copies and preparing a return packet could take several days.
Features used
- Requirements Management
- Release Management
- Defect Tracking
- Custom Reporting
- Test Management
- Source Code Management
- Program Management
- Document Management
- Automated Testing
Excellent support from Inflectra
“Inflectra customer support has always been excellent. They have always been very responsive to any question asked about functionality or future development plans. Since we use a hosted application, they always notify us of maintenance patches and upgrades in advance, and have been very responsive to the few times we have had connection issues.”
Learn more about Inflectra
Visit www.inflectra.com to learn more about SpiraTeam and Inflectra’s quality management solutions.