Zephyr: Setting the Standards in Software Test Management

Hamesh Chawla, Chief Product Officer

From the time software industry was in adolescence in the early 90s, "testing" as a practice has grown in complexity and prominence. From testing being conducted in simple, ad hoc way, without any specific processes or methodologies, the practice improved when the Google and the initial wave of technology companies came into the picture. Today, in an era, where, everyone from media to manufacturing, from healthcare to government, retail to defense, is building software that needs to be tested, test management tools that foster a disparate project team collaboration, cost reduction, shortened release cycles, and real-time visibility into the status and quality of the software projects, is quintessential. In short, arming QA and product teams with an intelligent Software Test Management solution has become an indispensable business requirement. That is where a company from Santa Clara, Zephyr is making a mark.

With a management team that comprises of savvy entrepreneurs and industry experts who bring years of experience in the space, Zephyr adheres to its mission of developing "real-time test management products that support the software quality initiatives of global customers. "The products of Zephyr--the industry leader in testing and development markets--negates the pain points such as the transition to agile, slow release cycles, the challenges of globally distributed teams, sub-standard quality, business decisions based on stale data, and evolving toolsets. As a result, the company promises an increase in the productivity of the customer's team by 45 percent.

In particular, Zephyr's Enterprise Test Management platform is designed anticipating customer needs and aspirations. The leading platform cleverly manages the various aspects of software quality and integrates with JIRA, Confluence, Crowd, LDAP, and continuous Integration tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, not to mention, automation tools such as Selenium, QTP/UFT all within the enterprise. The team has also ensured the liberty in choosing any mode of deployment--Cloud, Server or Data Center, OS or Databases, making it what the management calls it, "truly enterprise-ready." “Zephyr is built on a horizontally scalable architecture with clustering that provides the scalability and high availability that any enterprise would need,” explains Hamesh Chawla, Chief Product officer, Zephyr. The cherry on the cake is the analytics capabilities that the platform brings in increasing the customer visibility, end-to-end. Rather than a sticking to a reactive approach, teams can now lean towards a proactive approach by developing prediction models.

Today, 12,000 global companies across 100 countries use and highly appreciate Zephyr's solutions and support services. One such company is Hyundai. The QA Manager at Hyundai AutoEver America and his team chose Zephyr Enterprise in an attempt to move away from Excel spreadsheets for a dedicated test management solution. With specific challenges such as linking testcases to either defects or requirements in JIRA, and need for visibility of manual testcases and automated tests on one dashboard, it was a daunting task!

Apart from the ease of use, configurability and proven scalability that the platform brought to the game, it provided a bi-directional integration to JIRA, giving Hyundai's project team complete traceability and Hyundai was able to view manual and automated tests in one dashboard because the platform integrated to selenium. There are many other companies such as Daimler, Dell, eBay, Staples, Oracle among others who have been benefitted by Zephyr.

The company recently released Zephyr Enterprise's latest version, Zephyr 6.0 with various new features that include, One-click Automation Integration with over 30 test automation frameworks for reporting quality across the DevOps pipeline and Agile Real-Time Analytics providing the industry’s first end-to-end visibility in agile sprints and releases with drill-down capabilities.

The recent platform from Zephyr already helps companies gain a competitive advantage by catering to their need-- delivering higher quality software. Stepping into 2018, the firm aims to continue to add customers-driven features to its test management platform while enabling more use cases for the development to provide an end-to-end software delivery experience on the platform.