Our partnership with Inflectra has been a long and solid one. We love their products and relate to the practical way the company functions. They have a very hands-on approach throughout the organization with their CEO, Adam, still demoing the products and creating and fostering relationships with their partners and clients. There is clearly passion there and this is definitely something that we try to nurture in our organization and revere in others. This week one of our highlights was working with Inflectra and a possible new client on a SpiraTeam implementation and Jira integration.
We’ve been working with SpiraTeam for several years now. We use it to train all of our Graduate Programs, assist our clients with implementations and support with integrations into other tools suites. The latter is always an interesting one because, unlike the majority of the tool sets out there, SpiraTeam is a fully integrated (prepackaged) Application Lifecycle Management tool- from start to finish. Most of our clients are using SpiraTeam as their test management tool, and it is very comprehensive. Most test management tools these days are being created without a Requirements module, which I still can’t wrap my head around, perhaps it’s because they’re integrating into Jira and feel that its unnecessary? But then very few practitioners realise that Test Requirements/ Acceptance criteria can become quite complex if you do your analysis correctly, and Jira is not made to manage test complexity, it is after all a task/project management tool and not a Test Management tool. But, I digress; SpiraTeam is built for end-to-end project, requirements, development and test management, which is why it’s always interesting for us when we get a request to integrate SpiraTeam to another tool- SpiraTeam is more than capable of mapping all the data and works very well when integrated. We have done multiple successful Jira and ADO integrations. But why integrate in the first place if you have one tool capable of doing it all?
Generally its human nature to feel comfortable with what we know, in some cases users know about the powerful test management features of SpiraTeam but probably arent necessarily aware of all the additional capabilities, and in other cases too much work has been done on the existing tool to consider a migration. Either way, there is commonly a lot of consideration that goes into making a decision to integrate the two tools before it is done and the company is usually doing what is best for their situation. So this week we got to be part of setting up the data mapping between the two tools and working out the kinks inbetween, and we love problem solving, so ironing out the kinks is always fun.
By the end of the week, integrations were working well and the end-to-end project management was looking seamless. Its great to see a team, and its supporting tools, come together to solve business problems. And its even better when we get to be a part of it- thank you for the opportunity Inflectra!
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