Zephyr Blog What's New in Zephyr Standalone 6.4

Enterprises looking for test management software that provides more than just basic code coverage will be excited by the advanced test planning, dashboard and automation features in the latest Zephyr 6.4 Standalone Edition. Especially useful for Agile DevOps project teams that need to release products in shorter and more frequent release cycles, the new version takes advantage of Zephyr's brand-new approach to customer driven product development where customers vote on features they desire, via a public customer feedback Trello board. Highlights of this release include a user-friendly automation interface and easier dashboard creation and navigation. You now have the ability to bulk update test steps across multiple test cases and customize the names of test case priority fields (i.e. "urgent", "high", "medium", "low").Enhanced Test AutomationAutomation testing makes software testing easier, faster and more reliable and is essential in today's fast-moving software delivery environment. Usually seen as an alternative to time-consuming and labor-intensive manual testing, automation testing uses software tools to run a large number of tests repeatedly to make sure an application doesn't break whenever new changes are introduced.Agile teams can execute one-touch control of test automation from within Zephyr with Vortex, which allows you to integrate with a large and growing suite of automated testing frameworks (including EggPlant, Cucumber, Selenium, UFT, Tricentis, and more) with minimal configuration. In addition to being able to create and reuse manual tests on agile projects, Vortex makes it easy to bring in and work with automation information from across your development stack, including from systems external to your organization. Vortex allows users--wherever they are in your organization-- to integrate, execute, and report on test automation activities. By providing an intuitive screen that lets users access both manual and automated test cases at the same time, Vortex helps agile teams better monitor their overall automation effort (that is, the number of manual versus automated tests from one release to another.Integration with TestComplete and SoapUI ProZephyr Standalone 6.4 now integrates with leading SmartBear test automation tools, TestComplete and SoapUI Pro, which are included in Vortex's list of supported automation frameworks. Users can now select TestComplete and SoapUI Pro from the Vortex setup from either 'Automation' or 'Folder Watcher' setup and retrieve execution results to be visible within Zephyr. TestComplete tool has a powerful and comprehensive set of features for web, mobile, and desktop application testing. In addition to having an easy-to-use record and playback feature, TestComplete allows testers to use JavaScript, VBScript, Python, or C++Script to write test scripts. The tool also has an object recognition engine that can accurately detect dynamic user interface elements, which makes it especially useful in applications that have dynamic and frequently changing user interfaces. SoapUI is a test automation tool for functional testing, web services testing, security testing, and load testing. Specifically designed for API testing, SoapUI supports both REST and SOAP services. It provides 'drag and drop' options for creating test suites, test steps and test requests to build complex test scenarios without having to write scripts.Dashboard ImprovementsThe capability of live, automated dashboards, which can keep your whole company updated on every aspect of testing and product quality, has been further expanded in the new release. Dashboards in Zephyr Standalone have always provided users with the ability to filter data based on testing activities in a variety of areas (such as Requirements, Test Repository, Test Planning, and Test Execution) and to compare trends over different times. The new release allows multiple dashboard owners--Users, Leads, Managers, and Administrators--to manage individual dashboards in parallel, giving multiple owners the ability to manage a particular dashboard and also solves the problems caused when a dashboard manager is unavailable or has left the company. The new improvements also gives users the ability to clone all or specific gadgets on a dashboard, or easily clone an already existing complex dashboard for their next release, making dashboard creation much faster and saving users a significant amount of time.Improved Jira IntegrationZephyr Standalone is a test management solution that offers real-time, bi-directional integration with Jira, which means your requirements, user stories, epics (collections of stories), sprints, new features, improvements, tasks and sub-tasks can be connected to your test cases, test case assignments, and execution information, as well as your defects. The new release improves the way Zephyr automatically handles real-time changes in requirements in Epics when Zephyr Standalone is sync'd with Jira.Security and Privacy UpdatesMaintaining Zephyr's relentless focus on fixing any bugs that impact its customers, this upgrade addresses a security vulnerability in the Zephyr Jenkins plugin, which also makes it easier to find the subset of test cases impacted by this or other vulnerabilities. Jenkins runs tests automatically every time a developer pushes new code into the source repository. Because CI (Continuous integration) detects bugs early on in development, bugs are typically smaller, less complex and easier to resolve.The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation that requires businesses to protect the personal data and privacy of European Union (EU) citizens for transactions that occur within EU member states. To help customers maintain GDPR compliance, the latest Zephyr Standalone release also now provide a method (available upon request) to completely remove or anonymize a user's PII (Personally Identifiable Information) from the database, while still keeping historical execution and audit data.