Acerta is an HR services provider in Belgium that specializes in advice, computerization, and processing of administrative processes. The group supports entrepreneurs in each phase of growth and every HR process, including payroll, social security, child benefit, and branch formalities
They are also an active player in the market for recruitment, and the management and development of people. Acerta has more than 1,000 employees spread across 25 offices in Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia.
When bells and whistles get in the way
Acerta project teams there were using HP Quality Center to test its HR software. They needed to ensure that their consulting, computerization, and administrative solutions for enterprise customers did what they were supposed to do: streamline payroll, insurance, taxation, and legal matters for HR departments.
The only problem was that the test management system had more bells and whistles than useful features. This inflated costs, made things harder, and convoluted the test management process. They needed practicality.
To make matters worse, says Acerta test coordinator Jan Vriens, customer support was not responsive. One thing quickly became very clear: Acerta needed a new test management platform.
Robust test management for a growing company
Vriens noted that processes were quickly evolving, and to improve collaboration between dev and QA, while reducing costs, they decided to check out alternatives.
One of their biggest requirements was that it had to be a platform that tightly integrated with Jira. Acerta had standardized on Jira a while back, and needed a test management application that worked within it. Something to make it easy to link requirements, tests, executions, and bugs to gain traceability in one dashboard.
“The integration makes everything simple. The link between test cases and Jira issues gives testers and developers the flexibility to swap information easily - which was not well supported by HP Quality Center. We picked what we thought was the most mature product of all those we had evaluated. Zephyr Enterprise offered the most features and functionality that our project team needed. It’s very easy to use and straightforward.”
Scaling the day-to-day process
Quantifying the benefits of Zephyr Enterprise was easy. Acerta quickly realized these features greatly helped them every day:
- Support for as many as 10,000 test cases projects simultaneously
- The flexibility to manage test assets for maintenance after production
- Categorizing test cases according to phase and priority – much easier to manage several projects at once
- A straightforward interface with drag-and-drop functionality, helping everything from assigning test cases to generating reports
- Test cases easily reproduced on demand across multiple releases, within a single project or different ones
- Reduced project kickoff time by cloning entire releases on particular projects
- Streamlined project setup process, as well as simple, easy-to-use importing features
Likewise, the metrics supplied throughout the process were organized, insightful and, most importantly, they were reliable indicators of progress.
“The real-time reporting is a very helpful tool to bring the needed facts to management whenever they want. The dashboard makes it simple to view these metrics without any obstacles.”
Reliable customer support
Another significant gain cited by Acerta was improved customer and account support. Vriens referred to customer support for Zephyr Enterprise as being among "the best we consulted from any other software provider and the excellent account support they receive on a regular basis."
Next up: Automation
The next step in improving Acerta’s testing is through automation. Zephyr Enterprise has allowed Acerta to integrate any automation framework or CI tool. They believe this will improve test accuracy, giving them higher quality software at a lower process cost.
See how Zephyr Enterprise can help you. For more information, visit the SmartBear Zephyr Enterprise page or contact us directly.
“We already have a base framework set up with Selenium used on the development side. It will be a good base for the setup of our own automated tests. We look forward to seeing our manual and automated tests side by side in one Zephyr dashboard.”