Zephyr as applied to Waterfall.

The Waterfall approach to software development has the following salient aspects:

• It boasts a structured, well documented and disciplined process
• While being non-iterative, it allows multiple projects to run in parallel
• It is predictive and largely used for more stable projects

For its part, Testing has its own stage within this process and benefits largely from the above. Using Zephyr as a Test Management System in such an environment is very beneficial and the above diagram shows the correlation between the various stages and the appropriate applications within Zephyr.

Zephyr is contextual based on the organization of projects and the releases that it contains. This allows for multiple releases (major, minor, patches etc.) to be planned, executed and tracked in parallel. All test cases, documents, schedules, execution, reports, metrics and dashboards are kept contextual to a particular release and accessed appropriately.

How Zephyr integrates with this process

For departments employing the Waterfall process, Zephyr is set up to have multiple releases within each project. For each release, during the Requirements Stage requirements documents are created by the Business and these are linked or uploaded within the Documents application. The Test Case Repository is then set up appropriately to track major/minor requirements as well as address all aspects of a Test Plan including the various phases of testing (Acceptance, Functionality, Regression, Integration etc.). Based on the requirements and the design documentation/POCs available during the Design Stage, detailed test cases are created by various testers assigned to this release and a review process set up.

Once the test cases have been authored and reviewed and the software is ready to exit the Development Stage, a detailed Test Execution schedule is created and appropriate assignments to different testers done. Now, test case execution begins in earnest and the test-file-fix-retest loop is put in place with the Testcase Execution and Defect Tracking applications.

Zephyr tracks everything automatically and produces live metrics on all key aspects of the testing cycle - test case creation, coverage, test execution progress and defects - thereby allowing Managers and Leads to make productivity of the team and quality statements about the software under test.

Major Advantages of Zephyr in the Waterfall Model:

1. All testing organized according to the process being followed and aligned with the Stages
2. Ability to successfully run multiple testing releases in parallel due to contextual separation
3. Ability to handle major, minor and patch releases without changing processes
4. Track productivity and quality at a granular level

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What our customers think

"We're very excited about partnering with Zephyr. Our relationship with Zephyr will now allow us to offer our clients a better way of managing their complex outsourced and offshore testing projects, eliminating many of the inefficiencies inherent in such projects"

Adrian Zwingli
CEO SwissQ