SpiraPlan

We have just released the new timesheet functionality in SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan v8.5. With this new release, timesheets and time entries are stored in dedicated database tables and then used to update the corresponding artifact totals. This means that you can now report on the time entered per-person, per-day as well as per-artifact. This custom report shows you how to access this new data.

The Cost of Quality (CoQ) is about both product quality and process quality. As part of these considerations, quality assurance can focus on additional patterns. In this article, we will discuss how to graphically show the regression test efficiency.

The Cost of Quality (CoQ) is about both product quality and process quality. As part of these considerations, quality assurance can focus on additional patterns. In this article, we will discuss how to graphically show the defect resolution time metric.

The Cost of Quality (CoQ) is about both product quality and process quality. As part of these considerations, quality assurance can focus on additional patterns. In this article, we will discuss how to graphically show the software stability metric.

The Cost of Quality (CoQ) is about both product quality and process quality. As part of these considerations, quality assurance can focus on additional patterns. In this article, we will discuss how to graphically show the test cycle time metrics for test cases.

The Cost of Quality (CoQ) is about both product quality and process quality. As part of these considerations, quality assurance can focus on additional patterns. In this article, we will discuss how to graphically show the defect detection rate.

The Cost of Quality (CoQ) is about both product quality and process quality. As part of these considerations, quality assurance can focus on additional patterns. In this article, we will discuss how to graphically show the test case coverage metric.

The Cost of Quality (CoQ) is about both product quality and process quality. As part of these considerations, quality assurance can focus on additional patterns. In this article, we will discuss how to graphically show the summary of test case reusability.

For audit or any other purposes, you may need to extract a list of changes to system admin permissions for users. This is possible with a custom report (must be using Spira 8.2+).

Please note that this report is to be used in addition to reviewing the list of users who currently are system admins.

In case you need to get an execution date and time of the test step but keep the standard Test Run detailed report format, the fastest way is to modify the existing one. This article explains how to achieve that.

Several customers have asked for a way to display a grid of all the requirements in a product, showing the test coverage for just a specific release or sprint vs. the whole product. We already have a Requirements Regression Coverage graph that shows this information at summary level, but what if we want to see the individual requirements' names. Luckily, Spira custom reports comes to the rescue!

A customer asked us if it is possible to have the test cases in an existing test set added to a new release without having to add them one by one? The answer is yes. Learn how...

A customer asked us if it is possible to have the test cases in a release added to a test set before the test set is run without having to add them one by one?

Entity SQL uses a little different structure than traditional SQL and sometime, it can be that even if the query is working fine in SQL or T-SQL it may throw an error when creating a custom queries in Spira using ESQL. Here are some of the most known errors that may prevent you from getting a successful result.

In case you need to create a report that displays the list of projects in the system in Excel, HTML format this article explains how to achieve that.

The Cost of Quality (CoQ) is about both product quality and process quality. As part of these considerations, quality assurance can focus on additional patterns.  In this article, we will discuss how to graphically show the summary information on these metrics.

You may need answer questions like: who today is able to see the source code in product X, or who can bulk edit requirements. You can do so using custom reports. The example below answers the first of the above questions.

Organizations sometimes maintain a risk register and map risks from the risk register to individual projects. Each project may apply different risk rating scale, such as one project using FMEA and another using the standard Probability/Impact Assessment. This article addresses how this can be done.

If you need show the list of test sets with their test cases, execution statuses and related builds, follow this article to produce a custom report to do so.

You may need to create a list of test cases associated with a particular incident status to know that those incidents have been fixed and can now be verified by rerunning the tests.

This article explains how to generate a list of the test cases associated with incidents containing this status.

Customers frequently want to review the monthly processing times of requirements across various requirement types in specific Work-in-Progress (WIP) stages like Developed and Tested, categorizing them into four timelines: under 30 days, under 60 days, under 90 days, and above 90 days. This article addresses this request.

The Spira User Interface allows the indenting of requirements to accommodate the hierarchical thought process people envision in structuring the requirements. When these requirements are documented in a report format, the indentation visible in the user interface is missed. Some customers would prefer to see this indentation replicated in the report. This article addresses this requirement.

Often, the project stakeholders want to assess the effectiveness of the team’s development processes to prioritize tasks and allocate resources more efficiently. This request requires a time series analysis of time taken to get things addressed in the development state. Such a request looks at breaking the time taken (t) into various cohorts, such as under 30 days (t<30), falling between 30 and 60 days (30 < t < 60), falling between 60 and 90 (60 < t < 90), and more than 90 (t>90). This article addresses these requests.

Not all tasks are created equal in a project! Some activities may not contribute to the MVP and will be a "nice to have" rather than "must to have." Therefore, the analysis of tasks within a project may also look at the priority types of the tasks. This article addresses this need.

Not all tasks are created equal in a project! Some activities may not contribute to the MVP and will be a "nice to have" rather than "must to have." Therefore, the analysis of tasks within a project may also look at ideas based on the type of tasks. This article addresses this need.

Sometimes, the analysis of tasks may be associated with both known and unknown releases. Simultaneously, analysis may also involve tasks either associated to requirements within a known release or just stand alone without connection to a release. Furthermore, this analysis may be limited only to the tasks in progress or not started at all. This article addresses how to accomplish this request. 

Analyzing tasks is not limited to project releases. Sometimes, tasks may be unassigned to a release further impacting how certain project releases can't even start. So, applying Pareto level (80/20 rule) thoughts can be extended to dig deeper into the tasks. This article helps with this approach.   

One of the frequent activities that is monitored in a plan-driven project is the schedule delays due to tasks. This article helps visualizing the tasks across the iterations to evaluate any task delay patterns that can be addressed.  

As part of ongoing monitoring of risks, one of the the charts that people monitor is called a risk burn down chart. This article helps with creating a risk burn down chart.

This article explains how to properly move from the Spira Jira Server dataSync to the Jira Cloud dataSync without disrupting the previously synchronized data, ensuring the data synchronization continues to function as expected.

This article should apply to any Excel/Word 365 compatible add-on that can be downloaded through the Microsoft Office add-ons store. 

This article is specifically relevant to the Spira Excel Import / Export Tool, the Spira Excel Test Runner and the Spira MS-Word Requirements & Test Case Import Tool.

You may want to see what product membership for a product was like historically - what users in what role were able to access the product at a specific point in time.

Starting from Spira 7.13 it is possible to track product membership changes and use custom reporting to review this historical data.

A customer wanted to get a report of the number of requirements that have changed with mapped test cases that are yet to be updated (with capability to view specific requirements). When a requirement is changed and a test case is not yet changed, the test case has a suspect flag set automatically to True. So, the best way to get this data is to get a report of the number of requirements that are linked to at least one suspect test case.

One of the customer asked if it is possible to create a bar chart of the estimated duration and the actual duration of a test case against the owner. This article addresses the requirement.

This article focuses on the last stages of the risk management prior to rejection or closure. This mainly addresses evaluated and open risks. 

As part of the risk management lifecycle, frequently people look at risks in the identified, analyzed, evaluated, open, closed and rejected. While this is still a very good way to look at the risk management lifecycle, are there other things to monitor. This article reviews that thought process in depth.

As part of the Risk Management Life Cycle, the Risk Evaluation stage reviews unresolved risks for subsequent analysis. There are many types of risk evaluation that can be done but some of the common ones are evaluating by probability and impact assessment done on the risks. This KB article discusses the approach to evaluate the unresolved risks.

The second stage of risk management lifecycle involves analyzing the risks identified. This involves expert judgement or first level subjective analysis to evaluate which risks are worth spending more time on. This article addresses how to report on such an analysis done.

One of the frequent questions that the product or project teams face is knowing the number of risks across the risk breakdown structure.  This risks identified metric not only helps with the team's ability to ensure their commitments are met but also increase the confidence that the product or project team is managing the project effectively. This article addresses how to report this metric.

We had a customer that was looking to display a table of the different test configurations that were tested and looking to display the results of all the test cases in a test set / release by configuration. Ideally they wanted an small inline bar graph as well. Using the custom reporting functionality of Spira, this is possible.

When you sign up for a trial of either SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan you can add our TaraVault source code management system as a free add-on.  This lets you initialize a new Git (or Subversion) repository, commit files, make changes and also view the branches and changes. In addition, trials of SpiraTeam/SpiraPlan also come with a built-in dummy test provider that simulates a source code repository. This is useful to see how the features work without needing to actually commit any code yourself.

This article explains the two different options you have for trying out Spira's code management features and provide guidance on which is best for you.

When the data for creation date, start date, and end date are good, we can aggregate the data in a graphical format. This article will demonstrate how to write a simple query to show the trends of these lagging metrics.  

When aggregating lead time and cycle time graphically, it is important to ensure correct data is present in the required date fields that mark the appropriate workflow status required for computing the lead time and cycle time metrics. This article explains how to perform some diagnostics before aggregating data in the graphs using the task module.

One of the frequent questions that the Agile Project teams face is computing the cycle and Lead time.  Depending upon the team's practices, this computation may be applied for Requirements, Tasks, or Defects. This article addresses how to create a report for lead time and cycle time based on tasks.

Many of our on-premise customers have integrated Spira with their Microsoft Active Directory (AD) infrastructure using our LDAP integration option. When they want to move to the cloud, they need to switch their users from LDAP to Single Sign On (SSO) using an Oauth based option such as ActiveDirectory Federated Services (ADFS) or AzureAD. This article describes the process.

This article describes how to retrieve artifact's associations due to the dependency type that become challenging.

Sometimes you may need to get the list of incidents associated with a requirement but that can be challenging in case an implicit association exist.
This article can help you to get these associations.

Beginning on February 15, 2024 and continuing into March, Atlassian will be migrating its customers to a new, centralized user management experience called Atlassian Administration. These changes will change the default permissions and roles in Atlassian's products. These changes may require you to update your permissions to ensure the integration between Jira and SpiraTest works uninterrupted.

Import/export tools (including Custom reports ) are limited on row handling, due to performance issues it may cause. To get more than 10000 rows at the time, you will need to do it in batches or filter the report in some logical way.
This article explains how to override that limitation with minimum manual efforts.

One of our customers recently asked about creating a report that brought the test set, test  case, and test step in a specific format to help them with their test planning.  This KB article explains how this can be done.

When you are installing the Spira plugin for Eclipse on workstations running Eclipse 2022-12, sometimes it won't install because of missing/invalid dependencies. This article provides information on fixing this issue and also how to deploy the fixes for customers where their Eclipse instance is not able to download packages from the Internet.

If you want to get a report of all the users in the system split by their role per product then this article helps you to achieve that. The custom reporting module in Spira allows you to create a custom report to extract that information.

One of the customers recently asked about including a link as an additional column in the tabular report so that it is easy for the receiver to directly access the link instead of navigating through the system. This article provides the query to accomplish this request as part of their query.

In a series of EVM articles, part 1, part 2, and part 3, we discussed about implementing the earned value management (EVM) lagging indicators. In this article, we will discuss the forecasting metrics.

This is the final extension to the Earned Value Management. The main difference here is that the the task module contains the details of the costs that needs to be aggregated and added to the cost of time at the blended rate. 

This is an extension of the earlier EVM article on implementing schedule metrics alone. In this article, let us explore adding cost metrics, such as the cost variance and the cost performance index, with summarized costs tracked at the release level.

Recently, an attendee in a conference asked me how Spira can support the earned value management (EVM) for project tracking. The question came up as cost is not part of the standard Spira setup. This article addresses this need. 

If you need to report against the artifacts owned by one user, but across multiple products - this article helps you to achieve that. The report example focuses specifically on incident and tasks, but can be changed to include more or different artifacts.

This article describes the steps to do so you can display the Jira ID field in certain reports and on list pages.

Spira currently limits the statuses available for the requirement artifact due to the support the requirement status level automation. One request, despite infrequent, is to address how to accommodate excluding requirements at a release level or reporting on requirements in this 'required but currently unavailable' requirement status. This article addresses this requirement.   

This article shows examples of how to find all artifacts of one type associated to another artifact. For example, getting the list of Requirements associated to a Release, or showing all Risks associated to a Requirement. This mimics what a user may see in the corresponding Associations tab but in a report.

A customer recently asked how to get a list of all risks across all projects within a portfolio. This article explains how to create such a report.

This article explains how to create several different example custom reports for program level artifacts and their associations.

While custom images in custom report headers and footers are not directly supported this article explains a workaround so that you can embed an image or a  logo inside the custom report.

From the UI the Parent requirement won't be retrieved if none of its children match the filter criteria.
This article shows you how to create a custom report that retrieves parent requirements that meet the filter criteria, even if none of their children meet it.
For example, if you need to create a custom report for requirements filtered by a custom property - here are the detailed instructions how to achieve that.

Sometimes you need to get a report of all the Programs and Products available in your Spira instance.
This article explains how to do that.

Several customers had questions about the "copying of  artifacts", specifically looking for information about which linked data and dependent data elements are copied. In this article we clarify this information.

We had a customer ask recently why this clone option at the release level in Spira did not make a copy of all the artifacts associated in the previous release. This article addresses this question.

A customer recently asked about the impact of turning off the Bulk Edit privilege in Spira. This blog addresses the specific areas this Bulk Edit privilege influences.

We have a migration tool that makes it easy to move from Jira (cloud, server and data-center editions) to Spira (SpiraTest, SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan editions). This article provides some more information on exactly what is migrated in each module.

Customers often have questions about the best way to use test sets in SpiraTest, SpiraTeam and/or SpiraPlan. In this article we cover some of the most common ways that test sets are used in projects.

When our implementation partners work with different customers to implement Spira in their organizations, often times they have questions about the tool, that are in reality more process/methodology questions. We discuss some of the most common ones in this article.

When using the SpiraPlan ODATA API to create custom reports in popular reporting platforms such as PowerBI and/or Tableau, customers have had some common questions. In this article we answer some of the most frequent ones.

When our implementation partners work with different customers to implement Spira in their organizations, often times they have questions about the tool, that are in reality more process/methodology questions. We discuss some of the most common ones in this article.

This article explains how to generate a simple test execution report that includes the list of test cases, execution dates and raised defects using PowerBI.

If you need to extract comments for artifact, for a period of time or filtered by comment creator - you can easily do that using Custom Report tool or - if you're using SpiraPlan you can use OData or (PowerBI Desktop) to visually create reports and analysis.

You may come across a situation where the base URL of your Spira instance has changed and the embedded image URLs no longer match. This will cause a broken image to display inside the various rich text editors in Spira. This article explains how you can use SQL to do a bulk update of the offending URLs.

You’ve probably encountered cases where it looks like you need another SELECT statement inside your main statement.
Is it possible to use nested SELECTs in ESQL? 
Yes, it’s possible!
In this article, we’ll explain the nested query (SELECT) and how to use it efficiently.

If you're using SpiraPlan's OData to extract data, Power Query helps with extraction and transformations steps that are represented as queries with share options to be used by other users.
This article covers the general mechanisms to share a query in Power Query.

This article explains how to create a graph of the number of requirements by status, assigned to any open release in a product, using the custom graphing engine.

If you're using SpiraPlan you can use OData to visually create reports and analsyis. In this example, we are getting an artifact's and product's multi-select custom property value names using Excel Power Query. The build in custom repoort views for artifacts and products show all custom fields, but only their raw values. That means that for custom lists only the ID of the custom list value(s) are shown and not the actual names. Here is what to do to find  and display the names.

In this article we will show how to get an artifact's and product's multi-select custom property values. Report views for artifacts and products contain all custom fields, but for those custom fields that use custom lists, only the ID of the custom list value(s) are shown. Here is what to do if you want to find the text that matches those IDs.

If you have created a Spira document with  .md extension, you can add formatting elements (headings, bulleted lists, URLs) to plain text without the use of a formal text editor or the use of HTML tags. Please note that Spira supports all original markdown syntax and does not support any extended syntax (like tables, footnotes, checklists)

 In this article we will show you how to create a risk exposure report to help product managers evaluate changes to risk exposures over time.

A customer of ours asked for a custom report for displaying the list of  failed Test Cases that do not have any incidents attached or created during testing.

When you run the Test Set Summary Report and filter by a specific test set or a very narrow filter, you will often see the matching test sets and all of the folders in the product. This article explains how you can modify the report to exclude the folders from the output.

Custom graphs let you see powerful and meaningful summaries of your data. One example of this is seeing how many requirements or incidents were delivered historically, broken down by the year of their release. In this article we will show you how to create such a graph to help Product Managers see delivery over time, to help them assess and manage their current and future work program.
 

Some customers may want to see the summary delivered outputs of their past releases. To do so, in this example, we create a custom report that shows a table of the total number of Incidents and requirements assigned to each past releases (releases with an end date in the past).

You may want to extract all the artifacts that have a specific person is assigned across all products, to see their current work. 
This article provides an example of such a report.

Some customers have asked how to create a custom report that lets them trace back from Incidents to Test cases (information about each incident with all the IDs of the test cases associated to that Incident). This is the opposite to Test Case Traceability report.

This article explains the process.

A customer recently asked how to format the date format removing the time component in the custom report. This article address how it can be done.

When you want to migrate your requirements, test cases, defects and other data from HP/Micro Focus ALM to SpiraTeam, you will need to make sure you have all of the ALM client components installed. However the ALM Components are normally loaded using the insecure Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) web browser. To avoid needing to use this browser, you can use the Micro Focus ALM Client Launcher instead. This article explains how.

With SpiraPlan, you have the ability to create and manage risks, requirements and test cases in the same system. You can use the Associations feature to link the requirements to risks, and the test coverage feature to link requirements to test cases. However, as part of a risk based testing methodology, you will often want to see which of your test cases have the greatest overall, aggregate associated risk; if you are limited in time, these are the most critical tests to execute. This custom report generates such a view for you quickly and easily.

With SpiraPlan, you have the ability to create and manage both risks and requirements in the same system. You can use the Associations feature to link the requirements to risks. However, as part of a risk based testing methodology, you will often want to see which of your requirements have the greatest overall, aggregate associated risk. This custom report generates such a view for you quickly and easily.

With SpiraPlan, you have the ability to create and manage risks, requirements and test cases in the same system. You can use the Associations feature to link the requirements to risks, and the test coverage feature to link requirements to test cases. However, it is often useful to be able to generate a traceability matrix between test cases and their associated risks. This custom report generates such a table for you quickly and easily.

With SpiraPlan, you have the ability to create and manage both risks and requirements in the same system. You can use the Associations feature to link the requirements to risks. However, it is often useful to be able to generate a traceability matrix between requirements and risks. This custom report generates such a table for you quickly and easily.

A customer recently asked for assistance requirement  documentation on the Inflectra website about help on the various fields available when creating requirements in Spira. 

Specifically, the columns such as Type (List of values = Design element, Epic, Feature, Need, Quality, Use Case, User Story). They needed to understand what was the intended use of each of these fields.  and also the meaning of list of values under the status fields (Planned, Requested, developed etc). They wanted to see if we could provide a more detailed explanation or guide what each list of values means? They did not want to make any incorrect assumptions.

For performance reasons, Atlassian has made breaking changes to the Jira Server API in version 9.0 (and later). This means that is you are using the Spira data synchronization plugin for Jira Server, you need to download the most recent version from our website. This also affects Jira Data Center.

Note: this does not affect Jira Cloud.

To create new manual test runs in SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam, or SpiraTest through the API, you need to make two connected API calls. The first creates the Pending Test Run, and the second finalizes and logs the test run. The Pending Test Run call allows for the manual API test run process to support key features users experience in the UI of the app itself. These include multiple test cases in one test run pending, linked test steps, and test parameters.

How to use these two API calls is explained below, using the v6 REST API as an example. 

Recently (starting in March 22nd, 2022, but later for some customers) Microsoft removed support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 endpoints. If you are using an on-premise version of Spira, or a cloud version that uses an on-premise data-synchronization utility, you may get the TFS error: TF400324

A customer once asked how to create a velocity comparison chart for their Scrum Team to measure planned versus actual velocity across the releases. This article addresses how this chart can be created.

A customer recently asked about creating a custom graph based on a set of values in a custom list on an artifact. This article explains how this can be done. 

In one of the training sessions on reporting, a request came up on how data in the XSLT can be sorted similar to ordering results using the ORDER BY clause in ESQL. Both ESQL and XSLT offer its own power which is beyond the scope of this article. But, this article explains a simple way to sort the folders and the tasks in these folders by filtering out the tasks in the root folder and filtering tasks that do not have a name filled in.

A customer had a list of custom properties on the requirement artifact. Some of these custom properties on some requirement had data filled in. When they pulled a report of these requirements, some of these empty custom properties took up much of the report space. So, the customer wondered about reporting only those non-empty custom properties on the artifact. This article explains how this can be achieved.

A customer once asked how to create a list of all test cases that have electronic signature approval recorded.  For example, let us say that you have electronic signature turned on for a specific transition operation in the Test Case. Then, how do we create a list of all the test cases that have electronic signature recorded? 

Sometimes when integrating Jira with Spira, you might receive errors that refer to artifact mappings, statuses, or even users. This can happen  even if the synchronization status is marked as ‘Success’ and highlighted in green. In this article we have combined certain synchronization errors that might appear while configuring integration with Atlassian Jira.

Sometimes during the Jira plugin configuration to sync with Spira, you might get an error that is not self-describing and the errors do not point to an obvious solution. In this article we provide guidance on how to resolve some common synchronization errors with specific error codes (400, 401, 404 and 500)

Sometimes you want to move or clone tests. If tests have linked Rapise test cases, then you need to properly handle the move as described here.

We had a customer that was looking to use the Custom Reporting feature in Spira to generate a simple use case report that matched their existing template and format. This article shows how you can do this yourself.

Our Office365 addin let's users easily and quickly send data to Spira, or get data out of Spira, across different products and artifacts. We distribute this addin from within Microsoft's Office marketplace. This gives users convenience and confidence: the addin is easy to install, and has been vetted by Microsoft's marketplace team. Some organizations do not allow users to use this marketplace. How do you use this addin in such cases? 

Imagine you have a situation where you want to display a requirements test coverage graph for requirements organized by a multi-select custom property. In this article we show how you can use that property to display a custom graph in the Spira reporting dashboard.

We have had several requests for sample code illustrating how to access the Spira 6.0 REST API in C# code. You can of course use the SOAP API instead where Visual Studio auto-generates the C# code for you, but since we have a complete REST Unit Test framework in C#, we are sharing the sample code

We had a customer looking for a consolidated report of the test sets and their test cases, grouped by release and test set folder. The report needed to have the individual test case instances in the test set along with the associated test runs.

Customers often ask us about the process for upgrading from SpiraTest to SpiraTeam / SpiraPlan or from SpiraTeam to SpiraPlan. In this article we address some of the common questions for both cloud and on-premise customers.https://spiradoc.inflectra.com/Spira-Administration-Guide/System/#license-details

We have had some customers looking to upload files to Spira using our REST API. This article provides some sample code.

If you are using our Excel 365 addin you may see the error message:

ADD_IN ERROR

We Can't Load This Add-In Because We Couldn't Connect to the Catalog

The steps to take to resolve this are below

We had a customer that was looking for a more automated way to remove test cases from a test set. The good news is that our REST API makes this easy.

Spira allows custom property at the test step level. This functionality allows testers additional flexibility. When custom reports are designed, some customers prefer to show the custom property at the test step level. This article discusses how to structure the ESQL query to accommodate this need. 

If you are a cloud SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan user and have been using TaraVault Git repositories, you may find that your existing repositories don't appear in Spira after the update to v6.7. This may be caused by an authentication issue that is easy to fix

We had a customer that was looking for a way to easily purge out a large set of older automated test runs that were no longer needed in their project to free up space.

There is not currently a built-in tool to do this, but we thought it might be useful to provide a way to do it using a SQL Server Agent Job.

We had a customer ask us what was the recommended way to enter mathematical equations into a requirement in Spira. There are a couple of options depending on several factors:

• You want to do it 100% natively in Spira, vs. using an external tool with Spira
• How complex the equation is
• Does the equation need to be editable after the fact

A prospective customer asked us to elaborate on the pros and cons of importing into SpiraTeam using either ReqIF or the DOORS importer plug-in?

When you use the Perforce Provider for Spira you may sometimes run into a Windows folder permission error. This is due to the Perforce API running as a specific user that does not have access to the Windows temporary profile storage area.

This document contains an overview of how to setup and configure SpiraTest, SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan in a load balanced web farm scenario. It contains links to additional information from Microsoft, and community resources related to the scenario.

During the upgrade of an older version of Spira v6.x to the latest version of Spira v6.x the installer logs the following:

Cannot insert the value NULL into column 'TASK_WORKFLOW_ID', table 'SpiraTest.dbo.TST_TASK_TYPE'; column does not allow nulls. UPDATE fails.  The statement has been terminated. [System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException]

When you are running the import from HP / MicroFocus ALM into Spira, you sometimes come across error messages that look like the following:

Error "The field <RQ_USER_17> cannot be used with requirement type <Non Functional>"

When you want to migrate your requirements, test cases, defects and other data from HP ALM to SpiraTeam, you will need to make sure you have all of the HP ALM client components installed.

Although we have comprehensive documentation published on our website regarding the Spira REST API, sometimes users need some additional examples. In this article we publish an example of how to record a new test run using our REST API.

One of the most common needs when using the Spira REST API is the ability to update an item in the system (e.g. test case, requirement, task, defect, etc.). This article explains how you can use the REST API to do this.

You may find that SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan reports sometimes don't open on Google Chrome, but instead try and download instead, which can be annoying. This article explains the setting you need to change in Chrome to fix it.

If you are integrating Spira (SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, or SpiraPlan) with Atlassian Jira, you may get this error message if you have not updated the integration for a while:

Basic auth with password is not allowed on this instance

You may come across a situation where the base URL of your Spira instance has changed and the embedded image URLs no longer match. This will cause a broken image to display inside the various rich text editors in Spira. This article explains how you can use SQL to do a bulk update of the offending URLs.

A customer recently had some questions about what synchronizes between Spira and Jira, so we thought that this article would help clarify things.

One of the features of the Spira synchronization service for Atlassian Jira is that it automatically adds relevant links to the user story and issue pages in Jira to make it easier to navigate from Jira back to SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, or SpiraPlan. Some users have reported these links are no longer visible.

For additional security, customers may want to limit who can access their cloud instances of SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan, or KronoDesk to specific networks and IP addresses. This article describes why you would want to do this and how we support this.

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is an Agile software development process that encourages collaboration among developers, QA and non-technical or business participants in a software project. It encourages teams to use conversation and concrete examples to formalize a shared understanding of how the application should behave. This article outlines how you can use SpiraTest to manage BDD style requirements and test cases.

In version 6.2.1 of SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam and SpiraTest we have added a new reporting API that lets you access the reporting capabilities of Spira programatically.

Sometimes when you use Spira or KronoDesk and perform actions (e.g. assigning bugs, test cases, etc.) email notifications are not received correctly. This article provides some common reasons and solutions

The SQL Server Database Engine Tuning Advisor examines how queries are processed in the databases you specify, and then recommends how you can improve query processing performance by modifying database structures such as indexes, indexed views, and partitioning. This can be used by on-premise customers to improve the performance of their Spira and KronoDesk instances.

With a recent update to Google Chrome (v76), Chrome had the CSS engine was modified which would make the sidebar navigation folder tree to become unusable. This issue was resolved by Google with the release of Chrome 77

This article is now obsolete.

Sometimes it is necessary to move a SpiraTeam, SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, or KronoDesk installation to another server, without wanting to lose all of your data. This KB will guide you through the steps of transferring the install over, and optionally upgrading the application. This guide will walk you through the recommended steps when needing to move both the application and database to new servers.

Sometimes when running the Spira v6.0 installer to upgrade from v5.4.0.4 to v6.0 you get the following error:

Table or indexed view 'TST_ATTACHMENT' does not have a full-text index or user does not have permission to perform this action.

This article describes the cause and provides the solution

SpiraPlan has a range of artifacts. These  are the building blocks of a product or program and contain all of their data. Each artifact holds different data and is used in different ways. For instance, requirements are one artifact, and releases are another. They work differently, and are not interchangable. There are artifacts to help you test, plan, track bugs and tasks, and more.

Sometimes you want a simple test execution report that includes the list of test cases, execution dates and raised defects, without all the ancillary information in the standard Spira reports. This article provides an example of such a report.

When you are installing SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan or KronoDesk on a database server with a large 'model' database sometimes the install will fail because the initial Spira/KronoDesk database is not large enough to contain your model database. This article provides the solution

When you upgrade from v5.4 to v6.0, unlike previous versions of the upgrader, we don't delete the entire database and recreate it. The upgrader makes the changes to live database in-situ. However if you have missing foreign key constraints in the v5.4 database it can lead to bad data that breaks the installer.

When you upgrade from v5.4 to v6.0 upon opening a test case detail page you receive the error: "The 'TestCaseWorkflowId' property on 'TestCaseType' could not be set to a 'null' value". This article explains the cause and provides the solution

You can use the Spira Project Backup & Migration Tool to move projects between one instance of SpiraTest and another pretty easily. However there is a known issue that can sometimes occur if you have deleted custom properties.

Sometimes users have more complex LDAP configurations. For example, users may have two different "Base DN"s where the users are located. They want to know - if there a way somehow to define two different "Base DN"s ?

Many of our customers are using SpiraTest / SpiraTeam with their own in-house test automation framework. In this article we explain how you can use our REST API and/or our sample jUnit code to integrate your own framework easily with Spira.

If you have disabled TLS 1.0 and 1.1 encryption protocols on your IIS web server, you may run into issues accessing the web interface of Spira or KronoDesk from older versions of Windows and/or IE.

Sometimes you want to delete the sample users in SpiraTest, SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan. This article explains the steps for doing this.

You can manage and delete all sample data from the "Manage Sample Data" system admin page. 

If this page is not available (for instance you are on a version older than 6.5) you can delete the sample data manually. 

When SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan is connecting to a Subversion (SVN) repository running on Windows Server, sometimes the Windows server will not close connections fast enough, causing the cache build to fail.

When using SpiraPlan, SpiraTest or SpiraTeam with Microsoft Azure DevOps instead of a local installation of Microsoft Team Foundation Server there are a couple of differences in the integration configuration that you will want to be aware of. This article describes those differences.

This post shows you how you can migrate or downgrade a SQL Server database from one version to a lower or earlier one. E.g. 2016 to 2014, 2014 to 2012, 2012 to 2008 etc. This can be useful if you maintain a heterogeneous environment of SQL Server instances and you have a backup from a newer version that needs to be hosted onto an older version. This happens to us quite a bit when customers installed a trial on SQL Server Express (latest version) and we need to host it on one our cloud servers.

A customer asked us for some sample code that illustrated how you can retrieve a filtered list of test sets using the Spira API. This example includes sample code using the Spira v5.0 API.

When you integrate SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan installed on-premise with an external Git source code repository, Spira has to maintain a copy of the Git repository locally. Sometimes you need to refresh this Git repo manually if an update did not complete. This article explains the process

This article explains the process for making a backup image of your "on-premise" SpiraTeam (or SpiraTest, SpiraPlan) instance and preparing it so that it can be sent to Inflectra to host on our cloud environment. This can happen when you have been using SpiraTeam on-premise, but now want to migrate to the cloud.

This article explains what to do if you are attempting to execute a test set and get this error message: "There are no test runs in this pending set to be resumed." 

Customers running Spira v5.0 or v5.1 may experience an issue where the system will let you create test case folders that point to one of their children as parent. This causes an infinite loop which will break the system. This article provides a solution to fix the issue (though we recommend upgrading to v5.4 to prevent it happening in the future).

This article is obsolete.
The infinite loop issue was fixed in later versions of Spira.

A customer asked us this question:

My team is using SpiraTeam 5.4 as a storage vault for all software documents. The documents are placed in a specific project "System" that has been created for this specific purpose.

The documents are placed into several subdirectories: Requirements, Risks, Design., General, etc

Can we generate a report that lists the name of the document, folder, author, and current version.

One of our customers was reporting that their instance of our TestNG plugin was reporting a 502 Connection Reset by Peer error. We did some debugging with them, and the issue appears to be a bug inside some versions of the Java Virtual Machine (VM) itself.

Sometimes customers will contact us regarding questions as to why the execution status indicator of their test sets is not being updated (i.e. everything still looks as not run) even after running some of the test cases. This article explains why this might be the case and provides solutions.

Sometimes you create user accounts in SpiraTeam for real users to login and test the system. For example you may have a UAT (user acceptance testing) phase, or a crowdsourced testing event (like our Software Testing Bowl). You then want to turn over the data to a third party supplier, but you need to anonymize the users' personal information

When you are first using the SpiraTeam plugin for JetBrains TeamCity, you may run into the issue where the settings for TeamCity are not being saved correctly.

Sometimes when you try and run certain reports you may get an strange error message "The passed in report ID or report format ID does not exist". This message is unfortunately a red herring, and there is a different reason for this error.

Of the unique needs of a requirements and test management system when working in the Defense industry, specifically when designing, building, and testing mission systems, is the ability to link individual test steps to the requirements.  This article provides you with a custom report to use to display such a traceability matrix.

If you have recently upgraded to Spira v5.x from an earlier version and get an error message saving artifacts that mentions 'XPKTST_ARTIFACT_CUSTOM_PROPERTY' then you may have some old artifact custom property records that are blocking the new item saving

Most of the artifacts in Spira are "soft deleted", i.e. they are simply marked with a deleted flag, and can be recovered easily by a project administrator using the Project History Changes option to review the changes, filter by deletes and revert the change. However when a system administrator deletes a whole project, it physically deletes the project and cannot be undone.

We have a migration tool that makes it easy to move from HP ALM (aka Quality Center) to SpiraTeam. This article provides some more information on exactly what is migrated in each module.

The custom reporting functionality in SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam v5.4 (or later) includes the ability to write complex reports, joining various tables, using SQL aggregation (COUNT, SUM, etc.) functions and other advanced reporting features. A common needs is to display a list of artifacts (requirements, test cases, etc.) and join against the custom property definitions so that you get the custom fields displayed with the names of the value not just the IDs. This articles explains how to do this.

Within the standard reports included with SpiraTeam (Test/Plan),  some words exist, such as the 3-letter month abbreviations. These items are in English, even if you have chosen a different language for your Spira user interface.  The report templates can be edited to change these words to a different language. This article explains how to do that.

We had a potential customer that was looking to generate simplified test result reports from SpiraTeam that had more details for each of the executed test steps, with full size screenshots displayed, rather than the small table cells that are in the small reports. This article contains an example of such a report.

We have had some customers looking to upload files to Spira using our REST API. This article provides some sample code.

Many of our customers work in the life sciences and healthcare industries. They want to use cloud hosted versions of SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, or SpiraPlan, but they need to be able to control the updates and also be able to have a staging and production environment. This article explains the options we provide

Many of our customers are importing from other tools, such as HP QC, HP ALM, Microsoft Test Manager, TestRail, etc. We have convenient import tools for these products. However sometimes these import tasks can fail due to interruptions. This article provides some solutions

Customers sometimes contact us with questions about how the Releases and Iterations in Spira work, specifically what kinds of data (test status, task progress, etc.) roll up from an iteration to a minor release, and from a minor release to a  major release. Also they want to know whether iterations are included when you filter by release. This article provides some clarifications.

An automated test case stores its test script as a standard document inside of the SpiraTest/Team/Plan application. To GET the current script using our REST API you need to make 2 calls: 1 to get the document ID and the other to retrieve the script itself.

With the establishment of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you now may need to find old SpiraTeam projects that are not active any more so that you can delete them and reduce unnecessary storage of personal data.

If you are using SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan on-premise, and are looking at our TaraVault cloud-hosted code management service, this article explains what TaraVault is, and how you can have the same functionality on Premise.

By default, all projects are completely self-contained; artifacts in one project can only be linked or associated with artifacts in the same project.  However, there is a way for the project admin to selectively allow other projects to access artifacts in the current project.  (Administration -> Project Associations)

The cross-project functionality is being introduced gradually.  As of Spira version 6.0, it applies only to requirements, test cases, tasks (SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam), and incidents.

This article explains how and where the artifacts from another project can be used.

The incidents in Spira are able to have customizable incident types, statuses, priorities and severities. This means that each project has unique IDs for the various attributes. Sometimes when you incorrectly load in data using our Excel Add-In, you can link incidents to attributes from other projects. This article describes the problem and the solution.

Some of our customers who have SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, and SpiraTeam installations wanted to know how you can remove the "News Feed" RSS widget from all users' dashboards since it was causing Spira to access the www.inflectra.com domain.

Some of our customers wanted to know that we delete the data in the SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, and SpiraTeam tables when we delete a project.
This article outlines that approximate order of the data being deleted

When you install SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan, or KronoDesk on premise, you have a choice in different ways to configure SQL Server. Every situation is different, but this article presents some recommendations.

By default, IIS web server allows for limited file size to be uploaded to the web server. For IIS 6 and IIS 7, the default maximum file upload size is 4 MB and 28.6 MB respectively. IIS 7 returns a 404 error (HTTP Error 404.13 - CONTENT_LENGTH_TOO_LARGE) if someone uploads something larger than 30MB. In order to allow for larger file size uploads, a few server changes are required.

Integrating SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam with your LDAP or ActiveDirectory direcory server makes a lot of sense. It allows you to have a single user authentication system, with all logins and passwords centrally managed. Spira includes integration out of the box with LDAP and this article provides help for some common issues that we have come across.

Customers sometimes ask us for a simple Release Notes report that can be used to display the list of new features and enhancements / fixed bugs in a specific release. We use a report like that ourselves to generate the Release Notes for our products (Rapise, SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, etc.). This article describes how you can create a similar report yourself

SpiraTeam has been designed to work with a variety of different software development methodologies, including several different flavors of agile, waterfall and hybrid. This articles describes one of the more popular waterfall methods called the V-Model and gives best practices for how to use SpiraTeam on such projects.

With the latest version of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam, we have provided a simple button in the Data Tools section that lets you rebuild the database indexes using the same script that we published in KB10. However sometimes the database is so large that the execution takes longer than the 30 minutes allowed by the application, or you want more control over the fragmentation levels that trigger a rebuild. This article provides guidance and a more advanced script for power users.

In the standard reports that come with SpiraTeam, we have the 'Detailed' reports that are designed to include a primary artifact (e.g. requirements) and then include tables that display lists of related items (e.g. Tasks, Incidents, etc.). By default, we only show some of the fields in these tables. This article explains how to display the value of specific custom fields in the tables when you customize the standard reports.

This article explains the process for taking a SpiraTeam (or SpiraTest, SpiraPlan) backup image from Inflectra's cloud servers and installing it on a local "on-premise" instance of SpiraTeam. This can happen when you have been using SpiraTeam in the cloud, but now want to host it locally.

Sometimes, when troubleshooting complex issues with SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk, it's necessary for us to get some additional information to troubleshoot the issue further. For example, when we receive a report of performance trouble when using our cloud services, there are a lot of different factors that may contribute to the problem. To narrow down the cause of the performance problem, we need more data.

A workflow is a predefined sequence of incident statuses linked together by “workflow transitions”.  Incident statuses and workflow transitions are highly configurable. This article gives an overview of workflow transitions.

When you display a graph in the SpiraTeam reporting page, you can download a graph as a CSV file. Some customers have asked about ways to get the data making a REST call. This article explains the components of the API.

We often get questions about how the attachments in SpiraTeam are stored, and what the relationship is between the X.dat files on the file system and the original filenames. This articles provides information on this.

Sometimes you want to create a new custom report with a list of fields from SpiraTest that includes the date that a test cases was executed or the date that a defect was logged, but you don't want to clutter the report with the time part. Alternatively you want to join two tables on a date-time field where only a date comparison is needed.

The plugins listed on our website for integrating with JIRA are compatible with the latest major version (5.0 at time of writing) of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam. This article provides older versions of the JIRA data-synchronization plugin for customers that are using older versions of Spira.

When you install the Spira MS-Office Add-Ins to help import data into SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam from Excel, Word or MS-Project the installer will check that you have the Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) pre-requisite installed. Sometimes if you have this already installed with a newer version it will prevent the install from completing.

This article is obsolete, since there is a new version of the import/export tools available. To import data using SpiraPlan Excel Import/Export Too l/ SpiraPlan MS-Word Requirements & Test Case Import Tool it is not required any more to have Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) installed as a prerequisite.

When using rich text editors in SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk with Google Chrome 54, users are seeing spaces not being accepted.

This article is now obsolete.
All issues with rich text editors have been resolved.

We recently announced the release of an updated MS-Office plugin for Spira v5.0 that makes use of the new API in Spira 5.0. However some customers still need the older MS-Office 2010+ plugin for older versions of Spira (v4.x).

This article is obsolete.
Our Excel365 plugin can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store from the add-ins menu. More details about the Excel365 addin can be found here.

When running Spira or KronoDesk on certain versions of Windows, when using the Czech or Slovak culture settings (or using Server default when Windows is installed in those languages) you may get unusual formatted dates.

This article is obsolete.
There is a new Style Guide for Czech and Slovak - can be found here: https://download.microsoft.com/download/7/b/5/7b57e4a1-d299-4238-9997-f3ac51d6f763/ces-cze-StyleGuide.pdf

When using SpiraPlan, SpiraTest or SpiraTeam with Microsoft Visual Studio Online instead of a local installation of Microsoft Team Foundation Server there are a couple of differences in the integration configuration that you will want to be aware of. This article describes those differences.

As part of the v5.0 update to SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam, we made major changes to the database structure to improve performance and usability as well as lay the foundation for v5.1, v5.2 and v5.3 due out later this year. Customers using custom reports that relied on the old v4.2 database structure will need to modify their custom reports.

This article is obsolete.
This only applies to upgrading to v5.0 which was released in 2016.

A couple of our customers have run into a situation where the new font-based glyph icons that we're using in Spira 5.0 don't display. This is usually due to a configuration issue within IE itself, this article provides the recommended solution.

When you upgrade an older version of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam (hereafter referred to as Spira) from an older version to the latest version, the installer has to upgrade the application and database at the same time. This article provides some solutions to cases where the installer throws an error or fails to upgrade the database for some reason.

When opening the SpiraTeam MS-Excel (printable) reports in MS Excel you may get a message displayed - "The file you are trying to open 'xxx.xls' is in a different format than specified by the file extenstion". This article explains why this message appears and how to deal with it.

When using SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk with SQL Server 2012 or later, you may occasionally have a situation where the ID for an artifact (test cases, incident, ticket) suddenly jumps by exactly 1,000 values (e.g. from 214 to 1214 instead of just incrementing to 215).

Sometimes when using our MS-Office Add-Ins (for Excel, Word and Project) on a new computer you will see an error message of the type:

Unable to cast COM object of type 'System.__ComObject' to interface type 'Microsoft.Office.Tools.Excel.Worksheet'. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID ...

This article explains the cause of these types of error and provides some common solutions
 

The build in reports in SpiraTest / SpiraTeam are primarily geared to display the # passes, # fails, etc. from the perspective of test cases. It assumes that even a single fail / block / caution of any of the steps constitutes a failure of the entire test case. However some of our customers were looking for ways to display the execution information at the test step level. This articles describes how to create a simple custom report to display this.

During the course of investigating a technical support issue for SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk , the need may arise to run a query against your Microsoft SQL database. To do so, you will use Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. If you did not install this when you installed SQL, you can install it from the original source.

When connecting from Spira or Krono installed on a separate application server to a remote SQL server, you may have difficulties connecting. This article describes the steps for making sure that your SQL Server can be accessed remotely.

This usually just means that the restored database just needs to be linked to the existing database server login. This can be done by executing the appropriate SQL command listed below:

This is a common need, since you may have installed SpiraTest, SpiraPlan,  SpiraTeam, or KronoDesk  on a workstation to evaluate its capabilities and now need to install it on a production server for real use, but you don't want to lose all your existing data.

This article answers some common questions about which databases you can run SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam and KronoDesk on, and where you can get them from.

You already know the advantages of us hosting your application in our cloud:

Our web-based products: SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam and KronoDesk make use of the Microsoft IIS web-server and Microsoft SQL Server database platforms.
This KB article explains some of the more common error messages that can occur after installing one of our products and the steps to remedy them.
Article was initially written specifically for versions v3.0 - v4.2 of Spira and versions v1.x of KronoDesk, but some of the issues applicable to the recent versions as well.

One of the benefits of using Inflectra software is that you get unlimited upgrades for the first year and as long as you maintain an active service plan. This articles describes the process for upgrading your installation of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk to the latest version. It also answers many common questions about the process.

This article describes the process for backing up instances of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk (hosted on-premise). The example is written using SpiraTeam, but applies equally well to SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or KronoDesk, you just need to change the database name in the SQL files.

Sometimes you have a situation where a user deletes an entire tree of requirements and you only know the ID of one of the child items and not the parent ID that was actually deleted. This KB article provides a query that lets you find all the deleted parents of a specific requirement.

If you install SpiraTeam or KronoDesk on Windows 8 or later, you need to make sure that the various IIS Roles and Features are installed. If not, you may find that various Menus don't display correctly or that the pages do not display any data.
This article describes the features and roles that need to be included.

To save space in the various SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam reports, the default report templates use the format  xxxxx. Often times it will be required to display a different date format either across the entire report or in part of the report. This article describes how to change the date format in one of the standard reports by changing the XSLT template used to generate the report.

Sometimes you want to get a report of all the users in the system. The custom reporting system in Spira allows you to create a custom report of all the users. This articles describes the process for creating such a report.

Our Spira platform (SpiraPlan, SpiraTest, SpiraTeam) has powerful custom reporting capabilities that let you build custom reports using the Microsoft Entity SQL language. This article provides some pointers on writing such reports.

If you face performance issues with Spira or KronoDesk when the users use Internet Explorer 9.0, there is a known issue in ASP.NET 4.5 that can cause the client to disconnect and all subsequent AJAX calls do not get processed. This article describes the symptoms and the solution.

This article is now obsolete.
Internet Explorer 9 is no longer supported by Spira or KronoDesk.

Sometimes to diagnose issues with SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk it is helpful to increase the logging level to log all trace activity in the system. This KB article describes how to enable this feature.

After upgrading to Spira v4.2, if you get either of the following error messages:

• 'Width' is not a member of type 'Inflectra.SpiraTest.DataModel.IncidentView'
• 'DisplayMode' is not a member of type 'Inflectra.SpiraTest.DataModel.IncidentView'

Please follow the instructions in the article to solve the issue that happens when you try and use a saved filter that gives this issue.

This article is obsolete.
It is referring to the old bug fixed in later versions and applies only to that particular case when upgrading to Spira v4.2.

This article explains how you can use a custom report to get a list of all the email addresses of the users of a Spira installation:

This article describes how you create / modify the XSLT report templates in Spira to include embedded images without having to manually embed them in the artifacts. It uses the ability of the XSLT reports to have an <IMG> tag in the report template that references the attachment URL.

When you use our SOAP or REST web service APIs you will often times want to retrieve a filtered list of data. This is done by using the RemoteFilter that lets you query the list of requirements, test cases, tasks, incidents, etc. and pass in the field to be filtered. This article includes the list of standard fields that you can use in the RemoteFilter.

If you have an installation of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk that displays a 404 page not found message on certain pages, it may be due to a configuration issue on the server preventing the URL rewriter from functioning correctly.

Sometimes when running the SpiraTeam v4.1 installer to upgrade from an older version of SpiraTeam (same also applies to SpiraTest and SpiraPlan) you will get the error message:
You must install the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0.30319 even though .NET 4.0, 4.5 or 4.5.1 is installed.

This article is now obsolete.
Current framework requirements listed here.

If you run one of our installation packages (.msi) and receive the following message:

A DLL required for this install to complete could not be run

Sometimes we get help desk tickets from on-premise customers regarding the performance of our web-based applications (SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam and KronoDesk). Whilst every situation is different, this article provides some common best practices that should help having a high-performing system.

The custom reporting functionality in SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam v4.1 (or later) includes the ability to write complex reports, joining various tables, using SQL aggregation (COUNT, SUM, etc.) functions and other advanced reporting features. A common needs is to display a list of artifacts (requirements, test cases, etc.) and join against the custom property definitions so that you get the custom fields displayed with the names of the value not just the IDs. This articles explains how to do this.

Spira 4.1 onwards includes the ability to write custom reports against various reportable entities.
This article provides a list of reportable entities that were available in Spira version 4.1 through to 5.4

SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam versions older than v4.1 and KronoDesk versions lower than v1.1.0.7 use a screenshot capture utility written using the Java development platform. This lets the web browser capture a screenshot and attach it to items in the system without having to first save the item. This article describes some issues using this applet and outlines the replacement plan we have implemented to use HTML5 instead of Java going forward.

Several users have asked - if it is possible to extract all incidents logged in a SpiraTest server no matter what the project is.
Using the built-in Incident reports or Excel Add-In, you have to extract incidents for each project and then move into one spreadsheet however they wanted to know if it was possible to do this as one extract from within the tool.

If you have installed the MS-Office Add-In for SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam and the necessary prerequisites (VSTO and the Primary Interop Assemblies if using the MS-Office 2003 Add-In) but it won't display the Add-In in your instance of MS-Excel, MS-Word or MS-Project, follow these instructions to help us troubleshoot.

This article describes the steps in integrating a hosted instance of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam with Atlassian's JIRA On-Demand (hosted). We recommend using our cloud hosted data synchronization service that means you don't need any special tools or downloads to use both products together. Let us do the work for you!

When using some versions of Java with SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk you may get the following warning message when pasting in screenshots or images:

When I click to paste a screenshot attachment, get Java security warning (see screenshot) which says " Block potentially unsafe components from being run?  Application: appSupa  Java has discovered application components that could indicate a security concern. Contact the application vendor to ensure that it has not been tampered with" with options to Block and Unblock.   "The application contains both signed and unsigned code".

This article is obsolete, due to the fact Java has been disabled for most of the browsers.

This knowledge base article describes how to connect to the SpiraTest, SpiraPlan & SpiraTeam 4.x SOAP web services using Java code. It assumes that you've generated the SOAP proxy classes using JAX-WS. If you need to download pre-compiled versions of the classes, they can be downloaded from this knowledge base article.

Note: We now recommend customers use our REST web service instead as Java has removed a lot of the JAX-WS classes from the newest versions of the JRE: https://api.inflectra.com/Spira/Services/v7_0/RestService.aspx

Sample code is here: GitHub JUnit Sample.

This article can be considered as obsolete, we now recommend customers use our REST web service instead as Java has removed a lot of the JAX-WS classes from the newest versions of the JRE: https://api.inflectra.com/Spira/Services/v7_0/RestService.aspx

This knowledge base article describes how to connect to the SpiraTest, SpiraPlan & SpiraTeam SOAP web services using Java code. It assumes that you've either generated the SOAP proxy classes using JAX-WS or are using the pre-compiled ones attached to this KB article.

This article is obsolete, we now recommend customers use our REST web service instead as Java has removed a lot of the JAX-WS classes from the newest versions of the JRE: https://api.inflectra.com/Spira/Services/v7_0/RestService.aspx

This articles provides the solution to the following error messages that you may receive in Spira if you have missing default project attachment types/folders for a project:

APPLICATION.Business.Attachment::Insert: Inflectra.SpiraTest.Business.ProjectDefaultAttachmentTypeException, Can't locate the default project attachment type for project X
or
APPLICATION.Business.Attachment::Insert: Inflectra.SpiraTest.Business.ProjectDefaultAttachmentFolderException, Can't locate the default project folder for project X

This article is obsolete, since new versions of Spira have this issue already resolved and do not require any manual intervention to correct the possible error message.

Since our MS-Office 2007 Add-In for SpiraTeam uses the Microsoft VSTO technology, it's limited to being installed for a single user on a given PC.
However if you need to be able to have multiple users access it, there are some registry keys that you can manually add.

In situations where your SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam server is located on a company network that does not have direct Internet access (and connects through a proxy server), some of the integration features of Spira may not work correctly:

• The weather widget on the My Page
• The list of recent builds if your Jenkins server is hosted outside your network
• The RSS feed widgets on the My Page
• Data synchronization with bug-trackers that are externally hosted

This article outlines the step necessary to tell the Spira server to use the proxy server for its Internet connections.

Article can be considered as obsolete.
Described fix applies to outdated versions of the application only.

SpiraTeam uses Java (tm) for attaching screenshots to artifacts and for adding a user logo or avatar on My Profile page.

When you need to embed an image inside the description of a requirement, test case, task, etc. you need to follow the process outlined in this article. With the release of SpiraTeam 4.0 you can then have these images appear in the PDF, HTML and MS-Word 2003 format reports.

This article is now obsolete.
It is not required anymore to first upload the images and then specify the URL to display it in the description of the artifact (and then report) - all description fields are now rich text and screenshot images can be copied directly from the clipboard - the file will be automatically added to the description of any artifact.

The new release of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam 4.0 includes the ability to write custom reports against various reportable entities. This articles provides a list of the available entities.

This article is now obsolete.
Currently Spira has a number of views available that helps to create powerful custom reports using ESQL queries. Each available table is listed with all of their exact field names. In our documentation you can find a full list of available custom report tables.

Sometimes after your instance of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk is upgraded (or you upgrade an on-premise edition), the screen doesn't display correctly.

After upgrading from v3.2 to v4.0 you may receive this error message when you access the Reports home page on certain projects:

The steps to perform when needing to move the database to another SQl Server, or when changing the DNS name of your SQL Server.

This article describes the process and steps for moving your SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam database from one computer to another.
The article will refer to SpiraTeam, but it applies equally to the other products.

In SpiraTest, when you create a new custom property in the incidents section, they are disabled by default. Unlike other parts of the system, the incident tracker has a customizable workflow. This article describes the steps necessary to enable the new custom properties in the workflow (which will make the custom property enabled).

This article is now obsolete.
Custom Properties are now always active and do not require separate activation.

SpiraTeam is designed to work on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, taking advantage of the extra memory and power available if you have a 64-bit operating system. However Microsoft's Azure DevOps Server (ADO) also known as Team Foundation Server (TFS) - only runs in 32-bit mode. Therefore when using our integration there are a couple of steps you need to perform.

This article has a couple SQL commands that can be run to optimize database speed and performance.  This article applies to on-premise instances only.  If your instance is cloud-hosted, please create a Help Desk ticket.

This article describes the steps for importing data from an Excel spreadsheet into SpiraTeam. You can use this to import requirements, test cases, tasks, incidents and releases.

This articles describes how to write custom reports in SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam. It also can be used to modify the layout and styling of the various built-in reports.
This information applies to the following versions of Spira:

• v2.3
• v2.3.1
• v3.0
• v3.1
• v3.2

This article is obsolete. To create a new report it is not currently necessary to populate the tables, all applicable tables are already populated and available as ‘views’. To find more about available custom report tables, getting started tutorial, information about using dynamic tokens in reports, custom reports, custom graphs, OData (SpiraPlan only), please refer to our documentation here.

This article describes how to resolve the following error message that can occur on new installations of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk when ASP.NET is not correctly configured. This message typically only occurs on Windows Vista, Windows7 or Windows 2008 Server.

HTTP Error 500.21 - Internal Server Error
Handler "PageHandlerFactory-Integrated" has a bad module "ManagedPipelineHandler" in its module list.

This knowledge base article describes how to connect to the SpiraTest, SpiraPlan & SpiraTeam SOAP web services using Java code. It assumes that you've generated the SOAP proxy classes using JAX-WS. If you need to download pre-compiled versions of the classes, they can be downloaded from our website at: JavaSoap30Classes.zip

Note: We now recommend customers use our REST web service instead as Java has removed a lot of the JAX-WS classes from the newest versions of the JRE: https://api.inflectra.com/Spira/Services/v7_0/RestService.aspx

Sample code is here: GitHub JUnit Sample.

This knowledge base article describes how to connect to the SpiraTest, SpiraPlan & SpiraTeam SOAP web services using .NET code written in C#. The code assumes that you're using Visual Studio 2008 or later and are using the newer .NET 3.0+ Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) "Add Service Reference" rather than the older .NET 2.0 ASMX web service client.