Forum Discussion

SuWain's avatar
SuWain
Occasional Contributor
4 months ago

Zephyr Squad or Zephyr Scale?

Hi,

I'm working on improving connectivity between the disparate tools in use at my current company.  We are constrained to using IBM Doors for Requirements Management and have Jira for Workflow Management.  We need to connect the two and the connection between these would depend on picking up the actual Jira tickets, for example we have would instances of Requirements in both systems, kept in sync by an integrator.  And we'd somehow have to update the Requirements in Jira with a link to the tests.

This is all Data Centre by the way.

I want to add Testing inside Jira to this mix.  Does anyone have any experience of this type of thing.  If we were to go with Zephyr Scale would we still have connectivity as the Tests aren't actually Jira issues.  If we want a compliance Matrix from Requirements to Work Items to Tests, is that still doable when Tests aren't Jira issues.  Are tests in Scale easily searchable and do they use the Jira linkage system?

I'm very torn.  I've used Squad before and am pretty certain it will do what we need, but Scale is 'prettier' and has more reports and functionality.

Any advice would be welcome.

 

  • duck-tester's avatar
    duck-tester
    Contributor
    4 months ago

    Hi,

    I have recently just migrated all of our testing from an external 3rd part product to Zephyr Scale, part of the move was also moving one of our large teams from Zephyr Squad to Zephyr Scale.

    The main difference between Squad and Scale is Zephyr Squad is designed for small agile teams. So this is why their testing items appear as Jira issue types on the sprint board as efforts of work. It is every single person's responsibility for that single testing effort.

    Zephyr scale on the other hand, as you said is prettier. It has its backend which makes searching faster as it only searches Zephyr and not the entirety of your Jira Cloud. Also, the ability for cross-team collaboration across different Jira projects is something that we are already using heavily.

    As for compliance, you can link test cycles or test cases (or both) to a Jira work item to show that testing has been performed on that item. Also, this creates a traceability link in Zephyr which can then be pulled from the reports section.

    They also utilise the Jira dashboards well and this is great for a quick view of what is going on in the day-to-day testing world in real time. Think of the dashboards as your reports only you can see many at one time

    I hope this helps and if you need more information please let me know!

    • SuWain's avatar
      SuWain
      Occasional Contributor
      3 months ago

      Hi

      Thanks for your reply.  That's really helpful.  I do have another query.  When I was using Zephyr Squad, I could easily get a report showing which Requirements (Jira issue) that should have Tests (Jira issue) don't yet have them - is that something that is easy to do in Zephyr Scale.  I also used to have a matrix showing Requirements to Work Items to Tests - is that something that is possible?

      I also found that getting a decent report out of Zephyr Squad meant purchasing the midori 'Better PDF Exporter' and the 'Better Excel Exporter' because we have to send our tests to our clients for review before running, for example, factory acceptance tests and we need very nice and tidy looking reports.  The main pain with Squad is that you couldn't see the Test details (like description) from the Jira issue alongside the data from Zephyr.

      How good is the exported reporting in Zephyr Scale?

  • markos's avatar
    markos
    Occasional Contributor
    3 months ago

    We have thousands of tests in Zephyr Scale, across ~5 Jira projects. Trying to manage so many test cases is quite clumsy in Zephyr Scale. We are considering moving to Zephyr Enterprise.