In the PLM software market, SpiraTeam is an integrated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution that manages a project’s requirements, releases, test cases, issues, and tasks in one unified environment. With integrated customizable dashboards of key project information, SpiraTeam allows you to take control of your entire project lifecycle and synchronize the hitherto separate worlds of development and testing. It contains rich features in three broad categories, including project management, quality assurance, and collaboration. Project management capabilities include the following: Develop requirements and user-stories, then decompose into detailed tasks for resource tracking; prioritize and schedule requirements for each release/iteration; assign requirements, tasks and incidents using Agile planning board; and track bugs, enhancements, risks and issues linked to changes in your source code repository. Quality assurance capabilities include the following: Create, edit and execute test-cases; map tests to requirements to track coverage; create and assign test sets for test execution management; record bugs linked to test steps for full test traceability; an manage manual and automated testing. Collaboration capabilities include the following: Personalized dashboards and customizable reporting; ability to attach documents, screenshots and URLs to all artifacts; full audit history of all changes made in the system; web-based graphs and reports in multiple formats (HTML, MS-Office and Adobe Acrobat); an integrated real-time instant messenger and chat capability. In short, SpiraTeam is designed for agile development.

Pros

People love the value they’re getting from SpiraTeam for the price. They tend to highlight how well it integrates with a variety of third party tools, its strong customizability, and how easily available are all of its key components. Several users noted that their tester seem to specifically appreciate the setup. The vast majority of users are also very pleased with promptness and effectiveness of customer and technical support, and also note that the company is receptive to customer feedback for suggestions and improvements.

Cons

The biggest drawback noted by several users is the limited reporting capabilities, both in terms of graphical representation options as well as customizability in making unique reports, a process that has been described as much less than intuitive. The reporting complaints are particularly relevant as one of the primary functional needs is for managers to extract data from the system. Other users specifically noted that integration with Jira has been especially painful. The company is aware of this problem and has been working to develop and release a direct cloud connect option for those where both tools are cloud-based. While most are pleased with the testing environment and workflows, some find it cumbersome and slow.

While most users generally find the features and functionality good, especially at the price point, users do have lots of suggestions for improvements and enhancements. With software designed to serve large numbers of customers, the company has to prioritize such requests, and with everyone wanting to “slice and dice” their data differently, keeping up with everyone’s idiosyncratic needs is a real challenge, especially in the reporting arena.