Samir’s Blog

Inspiring words. An exhilarating victory. As the world emotionally watched Barack Obama say these historical words after 21 months of solid campaigning, we couldn’t but think of how the world had changed in that time. And how our world here at Zephyr has changed in that time.
 

At around the same time Obama announced his run for the candidacy in Feb of 2007, Zephyr was born. It was born from the need to change the status quo that existed in the world of testing and quality assurance around Test Management. It was born from the need to throw away the shackles of unorganized testing information, out-of-control Excel spreadsheets, low visibility and esteem of the testing team in the eyes of the project team and upper management and expensive, restrictive licensing. We’ve come a long way since then and last week we announced Zephyr 2.0, the most flexible version to date. We’ve brought in some tremendous features in our quest to be the easiest Test Management System to buy, deploy and use while being the easiest company to do business with. We encourage you to explore the new features of Zephyr, sign up for a SaaS trial or download it.
 

We are fired up. There is a lot more coming and we need you. To quote from President-elect Barack Obama’s victory speech, “What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.” Please continue to tell us what we are doing right or wrong and how we can improve Zephyr.

Onward and upwards.  

A quick post to mention that we’ve shipped Zephyr - our Next Generation Test Management System. Its been alive for the last few weeks and the response has been tremendous with over a 100 downloads. Go get it if you haven’t already at http://www.getzephyr.com/ - we are giving away 3 free user licenses.

Eval licenses are self defeating

So we think. With short eval licenses, you really are not going to put a lot of data into a product and put it through its paces in order to evaluate it - since you know its short lived and will expire soon. On the flip side, by nature of what you have to do (i.e. evaluate the tool), you still have to do add a bunch of data to get a good feel for its capabilities. So we decided to give away 3 free user licenses that last a whole year and give you the confidence that this will not expire on you in 30-60-90 days after you download it. So you can actually start using it for your projects instead of just evaluating it. We are confident you’ll enjoy it so much more this way.

Time is of the essence

Yup. We’re all under the gun with release upon release, one sprint after another, iterations, iterations, iterations - constantly bearing down upon us. Its tough to extricate enough time to sit down and play with a new tool however much you have all the right intentions around doing that. Well, one thing we’ve seen over the years is that there is never a good time or never enough time to do that and one just has to find pockets of time here and there to “Get it done”. One of Zephyr’s major goals is to save you time and just with features such as out-of-the-box metrics and live project dashboards, you’ll be saving a bunch of your daily time that is spent in putting together status reports.

So spend some time now to save a lot of time later

Why 4? Coz thats about how long this video is that very quickly illustrates and describes what Zephyr is and how it is truly the Next Generation of Test Management tools.

Watch this 4 min video

And once you’ve checked it out, go read more about it and sign up for the beta. Have fun with Zephyr.

A large % of all testing currently being done worldwide is manual, and somehow that is translating to the process of managing all that manual testing itself being a manual one. QA Managers and Test Leads are constantly juggling Excel and Word documents, planning, assigning, creating and tracking this manual testing process - everything from writing detailed test plans, figuring out which areas need testing, assigning those areas to testers for creating test cases, building or repurposing test case templates and then tracking all that. And that is just for test case creation! Test case execution and reporting has its own set of challenges and the team is again falling back on Excel/Word or maybe Access to schedule, assign, execute and report. Add to that the various test cycles, software builds, test environments, coordinated partner testing etc. and one is now swimming in tons of data. Managers, Leads and Testers spend an enormous amount of time sifting through all this data, searching, finding, making sense of it, and reusing it.

It doesn’t have to be so. Manual Testing shouldn’t mean Manual Test Management. This whole process has at its root, a set of data that needs to be collectively and collaboratively, managed.  And there are a lot of tools for data management (one could argue that Excel is the best one out there, especially to get up and running fast), but that’s all they are - tools for data management, and none have been applied to this problem holistically.

So we built Zephyr and approached its design keeping the following tenets in mind:

• All data created by the Test Department is important, meaningful and has many potential uses
• Data (test plans, test cases, test data, schedules, assignments, metrics, reports) should be well organized and easily locatable
• Team members need to collaborate constantly
• Communication is key especially given the nature of geographically dispersed teams
• Data linkages and interpretation should be handled automatically as much as possible
• And all of this should be done in the most user-effective way

The goal was to demonstrate that Manual Testing can be carried out without resorting to time consuming and painful manual management processes. The result can be seen here. Tell us what you think.

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