Zephyr Blog What's New in Zephyr Standalone 6.3

Maximize testing efficiency and simplify user management with our latest Zephyr 6.3 release.In an agile DevOps environment, development, testing and operations all must work together to meet frequent iterations, releases and delivery goals. But often software teams face a number of challenges: globally distributed teams, slow release cycles, business decisions based on stale data, and an ever-changing collection of tools, from a variety of vendors. These problems are only compounded by error-prone manual processes such as handoffs from a development group to a QA group.The solution, of course, is a collaborative environment where development, testing and operations teams all work together to meet frequent iterations and releases. Zephyr Standalone is a robust test management solution offering best-in-class Jira integration, along with seamless integration with an array of automation and CI/CD tools. Zephyr provides end-to-end traceability across both manual and automated test cases, which helps your teams gain complete visibility over the entire development and QA cycle, and collaborate better.The latest enhancements in Zephyr 6.3 make it that much easier for agile teams to be on track to achieve their software quality and release goals by realizing the benefit of Zephyr's tight integration with Jira, advanced user management, and a series of enhancements in test case design, custom fields, global repository and reporting.User Group Sync and Role AssignmentsZephyr 6.3 now allows auto creation of users and assignment of user roles in Zephyr, based on their Crowd and LDAP group assignments. Within user groups a list of users can be allocated to specific projects rather than individually assigning a user to a project. By simplifying user management and significantly reducing the user administration time for admins, this capability will help boost administration efficiencies, especially for organizations with a large user base.6.3 also brings added support for different authentication methods when connecting to multi-Jira instances and provides seamless login experience for Zephyr SSO.Enhanced User Roles & PermissionsBy default, Zephyr Standalone users are assigned one of 5 roles: Test Manager, Test Lead, Tester, Defect and Dashboard user, although custom roles can be defined as needed. The new release further advances role permissions with the ability to assign project specific roles to users. For instance, you can now assign more granular permissions by customizing a testers role at the project level and also grant permissions for certain actions at the project level.This enables effective user management by empowering QA managers and admins to better manage the users/QA resources via well-defined access permissions.Advance Test Case Reusability Zephyr enables centralized test case management and facilitates test case re-use by allowing users to share and copy test cases stored in the Global Test Case Repository across Projects and Releases. With this release teams can further avert the need to re-write test cases and make better use of their testing time by easily moving the 'ownership' of a test case from the 'project' to the 'global' repository at the individual or folder level, making it available to other users and projects.Enhanced Tracking and TraceabilityIn keeping with the interoperability theme of the latest Zephyr Standalone release, users also get better traceability and tracking whenever a requirement in Jira is mapped to a test case in Zephyr via the Zephyr test case issue link that reflects both test execution status and cycle details.6.3 allows synchronization at the individual test execution level, so users can easily see the status of the latest version of a test case when it's updated in the test case repository. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 8.0px Helvetica}Custom Field EnhancementsTeams will benefit with greater customizability with custom fields now added for test steps, test cases and requirements. These custom fields can be managed at a global level across all projects, and on a project level to configure fields exclusive to specific projects.Rich Text custom fields have also been introduced for test steps, test repository and requirements, which makes it easy for customers migrating to Zephyr to retain the original format of all their test case data. An additional comment text field has been added to test steps to provide further context for a test step, together with the ability to bulk append text to the test case comments field. The addition of Cascading custom fields will help users with faster filtering and searching of relevant data. These are just some key feature additions we've made to Zephyr 6.3! The new release offers a host of new features and functionality that will make the lives of your QA teams, admins and Test managers easier while providing valuable information about how your entire release is performing. Join our live Webinar on May 15th: Maximize Your Testing Efficiency and Simplify User Management with Zephyr 6.3, to learn more about Zephyr 6.3 enhancements and see the new features in action.