Big updates for Zephyr Enterprise. And you.
We’ve been hard at work over the past year with new features every month, and we’re super excited to tell you about the new capabilities.
Our product roadmap focus has been relentless. Helping your teams get:
- More Agile with BDD capabilities and Gherkin editor
- Broader automation support for more CI/CD tools
- An even tighter integration to Jira
All of this while making Zephyr Enterprise more scalable and secure for your teams.
We know how important these themes are, and we’re committed to meeting Enterprise teams where they’re at, and getting them to where they’re going.
Below is a timeline of our recent releases:
Figure 1: Recent Zephyr Enterprise Releases
Let’s dig into some of the key new features:
Improved Jira Experience
Jira adoption is on the rise, and more and more of your teams are embracing it. In fact, over 65,000 companies globally have adopted Jira for its flexibility to support any type of project and extensibility to work with thousands of apps and integrations. As such, we want to make sure that Zephyr Enterprise provides the best Jira integration in the market, period.
What does this mean? It means helping your teams adopt Agile practices and bringing all quality metrics to their fingertips – with Jira at the center.
There are two main fronts of our Jira Experience improvements: the Zephyr Enterprise Jira app, and the Zephyr Enterprise integration.
Zephyr Enterprise Jira App
The Jira app is a big release. It connects your Zephyr Enterprise natively into Jira and provides real-time quality metrics. For those stakeholders who spend day-to-day within Jira, this is a game changer. This will provide relevant data without them having to navigate elsewhere.
For example, here’s a view of a specific Jira Story. Within the context of this Story, our Jira app shows quality metrics relevant to it:
Figure 2: Zephyr Enterprise’s new Jira app shows linked test cases, their latest execution status, as well as linked defects along with status - all right within Jira
Here are a few highlights of the quality data your team will now have within Jira:
- List of test cases mapped to your Jira Story
- Execution status of these test cases (including which test cycle and phase they were executed on)
- Linked defects along with defect status, so you can ensure that all important defects have been resolved before release
For more information, learn how to install and configure the Jira app here.
Zephyr Enterprise Integration
At the core of Zephyr Enterprise is its two-way integration to Jira, which lets you keep Jira requirements and defects in sync across both applications. We have made two significant updates to this integration:
- Streamlined the Jira integration process.
- Simplified the Jira integration webhook setup process to make it easier for admins to create and maintain them.
- Added support for filing defects using the Jira native defect creation screen.
BDD Capabilities
BDD practice is on the rise, and we see increased adoption by developers and testers at large Enterprises. With the latest release, our Jira app brings the SmartBear state-of-the-art BDD support to our Zephyr Enterprise customers natively in Jira.
Here’s what your teams will get with this solution:
- Everyone on your team can collaborate on new features with an integrated Gherkin editor within Jira
- As new BDD scenarios are created or existing ones updated, test cases are automatically created/updated within Zephyr Enterprise to match those scenarios – and those test cases are automatically mapped to the Jira ticket
- Once the scenarios are finalized, your developers can download the feature file directly from Jira to start coding the solution
Combined with Zephyr Enterprise’s support for Cucumber test automation, this is a powerful solution for help your teams embrace BDD.
Here are a few screenshots showing the supported workflow:
Figure 6: With the new Zephyr Enterprise JIra app, collaborate on BDD scenarios right within Jira
Figure 7: New scenarios can be easily added, with easy-to-use templates for Gherkin syntaxa
Figure 8: As BDD scenarios are created/updated, they’re automatically reflected as test cases within Zephyr Enterprise, mapped to the Jira issues
Figure 9: Finally, once the scenarios are defined, developers can download the feature file to implementation.
Broader automation support
Zephyr Enterprise is already known for its broad support for test automation:
- With Vortex, it’s possible to set up different types of automation within the UI (script and suite automation, as well as folder watcher)
- With CI plugins, it’s possible to add post-build actions in Jenkins and Bamboo
- With our customizable parser templates, you get support for standard formats (JUnit, TestComplete, SoapUI, Selenium, and others) and powerful customizations for any other framework or home-grown solutions
With releases 7.6 and 7.9, additional APIs make Zephyr Enterprise even more powerful:
- Manage Vortex jobs: programmatically create Vortex jobs, trigger them remotely, and check their completion statuses
- Push automation results directly into Zephyr Enterprise – easily integrate using any CI tool (TeamCity, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, etc.)
Documentation for these new APIs can be found here.
With these new capabilities, now all teams in the entire Enterprise can aggregate automation quality metrics in one place!
Other New Features
This is not all. There are several new capabilities introduced in recent versions, and you may find more details in our documentation pages here.
What's Next?
We’re planning tons of improvements in 2022. We invite you to engage with us on our Ideas Portal by adding your new ideas and upvoting on existing ones.
Plan Your Upgrade
Don’t forget to plan you upgrade so you can see the latest features. To upgrade, check out the Upgrading Zephyr Enterprise instructions.
Learn More
Zephyr Enterprise is constantly evolving, with relentless focus on our customers.
To learn more and see live demos of these features, join us on March 24 for our webinar.
What’s new with Zephyr Enterprise
Better features for BDD, test automation, & Jira integration