Zephyr
Powering Agile Test Management

As technology is advancing and new software solutions are releasing at an unprecedented rate, the need for achieving agility in software testing through management and automation tools is becoming a prime objective for Engineering and IT organizations. Today’s market is witnessing a growing demand, from these organizations and business leaders, for a rapid execution of product life cycles, Quality Assurance (QA) and, availability of visibility and communication in the test processes.

Catering to the demand and delivering a unique test management platform to make the process of test management easier, and test cycles faster, is California based Zephyr. The company was incepted in 2007 with a sole mission to create a user friendly and full featured test management system that gives project teams the flexibility to change processes and tools as their software development needs evolve overtime.

Headed by Samir Shah, CEO and Founder of the company, Zephyr has emerged as a leading contributor of test management software, adding over 3000 customers in a mere span of two years. “We are one of the fastest growing software vendors in regards to releasing enhancements to meet our customers evolving needs with an average of one major product releasing in every three months,” mentions Samir. The company has a broad range of customers across sixteen industries and located in 80 countries. A few recognizable names include; Dell, eBay, Lufthansa, Rovio, Square, CBRE, Google, and Starbucks.

Differentiator Factors

Zephyr provides two main product lines;
1. Zephyr Enterprise Edition: Manage all aspects of software quality; integrate with JIRA and various test tools, foster collaboration and gain real-time visibility.

2. Zephyr for JIRA: Add test management capabilities right inside JIRA; enhance JIRA’s planning, collaboration, coding and support with testing to deliver fast.

Both products help project teams reduce QA costs, foster global collaboration and gain real-time insight into the quality and status of their projects. Zephyr Enterprise Edition is for large teams and departments with mature processes that execute 1000’s of tests per cycle. Zephyr for JIRA is for project teams that need to keep their testing inside JIRA.

The company is characterized by many differentiators which set them apart from other competitors; flexibility to integrate with any automation framework, tightest integration to Atlassian tools, and real-time visibility that keeps everyone in sync up and down the chain of command. Their products have won several awards for being the best test management platforms for agile teams because of its open, collaboration based software delivery. Zephyr products embrace the wide range of automation tools so project teams can take advantage of any tool they need to integrate and swap them out as their processes evolve.

The Future of Testing

Right now Zephyr sees a huge growth around the adoption of cloud and the use of more and more tools in the development process. Enterprises are making the switch to more best-of-breed tools (as opposed to larger, monolithic suites of products) because it gives them the flexibility to pick and choose what they want. This trend shows in the large number of open source and agile-focused tools available today.

Another trend is agile testing and what it means. Every organization has a different definition of agile and faces different challenges in making it work for their project teams.