Zephyr

Industry Verticals

Zephyr's customers are worldwide. Our users are in more than thirty different countries across twelve different vertical industries including, but not limited to, Telecommunications, Media, Finance, High tech, Mobile, Medical, Government, Automotive, Gaming, Services, Insurance and more. Following is a succinct summary of some of our customers' challenges.

Telecom

Many Telecom teams have complex and long project durations with many individual projects spanning multiple locations that need to come together to make the final product. These teams do extensive black box testing and software failures are not an option since once their equipment is in the field, it is extremely difficult to fix. From a technical perspective, many telecom teams utilize Linux environments and build their own tools to complement the best of breed technologies that are used differently by separate teams.

Media

Media, Entertainment, and internet based businesses are always developing and testing new features and functionality. Many projects run in parallel for days, or weeks, or sometimes months. Short project cycles are often managed manually with herculean efforts, but with a commitment to organization and reuse, Zephyr's customers have been able to manage multiple projects successfully. Teams have found great value in the push based metrics that provide real time information about projects.

Financial Services

Financial services companies are traditionally process driven. Many implement V-model development paradigms and are extremely methodological with their projects. These teams frequently utilize offshore resources to be able to work on projects around the clock. The globally distributed teams present challenges to employee attrition, and truly knowing statuses of projects. Reporting is mission critical to the financial services industry as it the traceability of requirements to test cases to defects. These projects often involve cross organizational participation and the business users completing some user acceptance testing at the end of the development cycle.

High tech

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are unique in their processes and methodologies. Agile, Scrum, hybrid, and waterfall methods are utilized within these companies, in fact, multiple development paradigms may be used on the same project. ISVs work with many operating systems and browser versions which are not always supported by legacy tool vendors. The ability to extend the capabilities of tools as well as integrate with other systems via APIs are also very important considerations. Most ISVs have many software products that are being developed in parallel which presents challenges in knowing how each release is progressing, and how individual contributors and their project counterparts are doing.

Mobile

Mobile teams have an extremely large matrix of platforms to support and are constantly under pressure to release the next version of a hit application. With the incredible number of OS's for the smart phone market alone include iOS, Android, Mango, Blackberry and others, teams historically have done a lot of their testing manually. However, with the plethora of Application Stores for the smart phone market and the notion of freemium applications, Zephyr customers have found a way to plan, organize, reuse, and schedule many of the testing assets to make delivering world class software applications easier. Since teams have multiple projects that are being deployed at any given time, having accurate metrics about the quality statistics, user accomplishments, and project level detail is an absolute necessity.

Medical

Medical teams are successful users of Zephyr. Whether the business uses Zephyr for medical trials, devices, or internal IT projects, medical project teams prioritize software quality. Since an error in the medical industry could mean the difference between life and death, teams go to great lengths to ensure accuracy, repeatability, reuse, and such. With multiple iterations of the testing process, teams often invest in test automation tools (commercial, open source or homegrown) to reliably complete testing, not leaving enough time for manual testers. Traceability from requirements to test cases and to defects is paramount. Dashboards, metrics, custom reports and saving, printing and sharing these same reports in MSWord, MSExcel, html, or PDF formats is essential.

Government

Government agencies from around the world effectively use Zephyr. Paperwork and bureaucracy are functions of every government agency, therefore acquiring hardware and getting IT resources to install software can be a nightmare. Zephyr's flexible deployment model has been a savior for many software teams who have elected to deploy the SaaS model in the cloud. With the ability to get project started in a matter of minutes and to have the means to view and share dashboards with third parties has been invaluable to the success of many projects. Coordinating the testing efforts of the business side of the organization has also been simplified by utilizing Zephyrs technology. Documentation is vital to any government project and Zephyr enables team to accomplish this goal.