October 18th, 2017 by Adam Sandman
We are excited with the new release of SpiraTeam v5.3 (also including SpiraTest and SpiraPlan in case you were asking!). In this article we are going to highlight some of the enhancements in the latest version. The full list of enhancements, bug fixes and new features can be found in the release notes.
Exploratory Testing
The new exploratory testing mode in SpiraTest lets you write and execute test cases at the same time, with the ability to create tasks for developers (if you are using SpiraTeam) to create/change functionality where the tester finds unexpected behavior:
In this interface, you can add steps, drag and drop to reorder them, clone them, delete them and enter/update the Description, Expected Result, and Actual Result. This gives you an alternate way of running tests that is suited to exploratory and session based testing.
Test Configurations
The new Test Configurations module in SpiraTest (which resides under the main Testing menu) lets you create different 'test configuration sets' which can be used to store different combinations of test data that will be used during testing:
You are able to create as many different test configuration sets as you need, and each of them has a page where you can edit the name, rich text description and also define the actual test data values that will be used. For more details, please take a look at the article on test configurations we wrote in July.
Refreshed User Interface
We have completely overhauled the "detail" pages in SpiraTeam. These are the pages you arrive on when you click on an item in a list. We had already piloted some of the concepts in the defects module in v5.2, but those changes are now application-wide:
The main changes include:
- Live Loading - when you click between different artifacts in the navigation bar, the system will load in the data into the current page without having to reload the entire page. This offers massive performance improvements and provides a much more responsive user experience.
- Grouping of Fields - one of the criticisms of v5.0 was that we switched to a 3-column responsive field format that made it hard to find fields. The new layout groups the fields into sections: People, Properties, Dates and Times, and Detailed Information. This gives you a much easier to scan layout, but still works well on different sized devices.
- Restyling of Controls - we have cleaned up the display to remove the chrome and borders around the various fields so that it's easier to read the information on the page. When you click on a field, it changes into an editable style.
- Persistent Workflow Header - instead of the workflow operations being stranded on the top-left of the page, the artifact type, status, progress and workflow operations now form a persistent header that stays visible, even as you scroll up and down the page.
- Ability to Add Followers - You can now add followers to all types of artifact. This lets you subscribe other users to items that they should be watching.
New Association Dialogs
One of our pet peeves was the small size of some of the popup dialog boxes in SpiraTeam. In particular, the ones used to let you add an association from one artifact to another, were hard to use, only allowing you to enter an ID or choose an item in a very small box.
We have standardized all of the artifact selection dialog boxes to use the new "inline style" that was introduced to the requirements page in v5.2:
New Graphing Engine
We have completely overhauled the graphing engine in SpiraTeam. Previously we used a mixture of graphing libraries including c3/d3, jqPlot and an old custom HTML based chart viewer. In v5.3, we have redesigned all the graphs and charts to use c3/d3, the industry standard SVG-based graphing solution:
This providers an interactive, slick graphing experience, with nice tooltips, the ability to click-through data, and enhanced ability to export graphs as bitmap images into other applications. In addition, we have added some new time-phased defect and test case graphs to the dashboards and reports (of which the one above is an example).