The New Zephyr 3.0

Zephyr, which has made quite a stir in the testing arena with its 2.6 version, is now out with its latest version. I was sure that the new Zephyr 3.0 would have whole lot of surprises in store for the QA team just like its earlier versions and I wasn’t disappointed. Well, one would not expect anything shoddy from Zephyr, which was recently appreciated by bigwigs like Amazon, UnderTheRadar, the Gartner Group, Forrester Research, and Always On.

In its latest version, apart from its usual plus points such as innovative platform, slick web 2.0 UI, flexibility, integrations, test methodologies, organization, reporting and metrics and simplified licensing; Zephyr has brought in some good innovations. Let’s look at some of these.

Custom reports generator: Zephyr’s new custom report generator makes it simple for every team to be able to run any report they need. The new functionality builds on the existing out of the box functionality, which comes with more than 16 drill down reports and metrics.

Extensive APIs: Zephyr’s philosophy has always been to integrate with existing infrastructure and not force teams to rip one tool out to replace it with another. With the new extensive APIs, Zephyr further extends the capability of its platform to support the myriad needs of global software quality teams. The web services APIs are fully documented at http://developer.yourzephyr.com.

Enhanced productivity levels/Search Technology: Zephyr’s test management solution promotes a new level of organization at the release, project, department and global evel. With the 3.0 release, Zephyr debuts a new search technology that searches in the body of fields, not just in the title or subject field. This helps teams to achieve new levels of productivity.

Trend reporting: With Zephyr’s new first of its kind dynamic trend reports, teams now have the ability to look back at stages of former projects and quantify how long it took to complete the release. With this information in hand, the same teams will now able to plan accordingly for not only current releases, but also for future projects.

Enhanced JIRA integration: Zephyr enhances its one of a kind 2-way JIRA integration by supporting JIRA custom fields. Teams have always been able to enter, search, change, report, analyze and close any defect in JIRA from within Zephyr through optimized testing desktops. With the new release, teams who have customized or plan to customize JIRA will also be able to leverage the robust functionality and achieve higher productivity and efficiencies.

Zephyr 3.0 looks worthy of all praise. I would like to hear from you as well.