SpiraTest vs TestRail: Which is a better fit?

Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Val. I'm a senior software quality assurance analyst, and I give SpiraTest a five. For more reviews, click the link below. We use it daily to track test cases and incidents or defects for our production software. We also use another software for legacy products, but this is a new configuration now, we're moving to cloud-based solutions so SpiraTest works perfectly for us. SpiraTest is different from other similar software packages or applications because what I like about it is that it has tracking mechanisms that would log any little change that you make. May be too much information but in the long run, if we need to track who made this change or that change and what they did and the progress of an incident or test case, it's easily found in the logs. Another plus is that a test case or a test plan or a incident could be easily graphed in reports and exported in a variety of formats, including Word, Excel, TXT, XML, and PDF, and also CSV. Those are the major pluses for this application besides it being easy to use and easy to teach a person to use. My company also has another software application that we use to track defects for our legacy program. And the main issue we have right now, it's not that bad, but in the future we'd like to see a plugin that would allow us to talk to this other software. Right now there's no plugin for that. So in order to import the cases or defects from the legacy program, it's a roundabout way. There's no direct plugin that you could actually run a script to import those cases into SpiraTest. So I made my opinion known to the SpiraTest reps and they told me they're working on it. Hopefully we'll see that in the future, and with that, it would make this product stronger and more valuable in the ISO management.

Berny R.: Hi, my name is Berny. I'm the head of QA. I give TestRail a five, and if you want to know more, click down below. We used to use SharePoint lists to do our test case management, and post that we actually implemented Zephyr for JIRA to manage our test cases, and it became quite clunky. We were really finding that creation of master regression tests for our projects was becoming quite time-consuming, and so at the end of each project we would take hours, if not days, to actually create a regression suite of tests, and so it was for that main reason that we decided to move to TestRail. We had four main reasons why we decided to choose TestRail. One was the ability to be able to easily copy and move our tests from a project suite into a master regression suite. One of the really important features for us is just around being able to navigate quite easily through the system, because we've got some business users who are quite new to test case and creating of test cases, so it needed to be user-friendly, which it was. We have a requirement to integrate to other software like Jira or Ranorex, and so the integration capability for TestRail was extremely important for us. And lastly, the reporting capability. To be able to report out to our stakeholders was really important, and we found that TestRail's reporting capability was really powerful. Getting started with TestRail was actually extremely easy, so much easier than most of the other software we implemented. All we really had to do was create a quick how-to guide for those business users that were new to the system, and we literally just did one hour onboarding induction sessions with the software, which got them going pretty easily. We then imported our tests from our previous software directly into TestRail and we were ready to go, to use it on our first project. When we assessed TestRail, we came up with what I suggest is to look at your top three priorities, those must haves for your test management software. So think about... don't focus on what would be nice to have. Focus on what is really important to you. For us it was that functionality around being able to copy and move tests into a regression suite, was our number one. Number two was our user-friendliness of the system, to be able to get people on board really quickly without having to spend hours trying to learn the system, and reporting. So possibly think about those three items as some of your priorities. I also recommend you download the free trial version of TestRail and have a play-around with it and learn how to use it during the free period. That helps you understand the user-friendliness of the system. If reporting is important for you, I suggest you have a look at the reporting feature, because obviously during test phases when you're actually executing your testing, your stakeholders need to be in touch with how your testing is going, so reporting I would say, have a look at the reporting system. Make sure that works for you. And lastly, if direct feedback from your test automation or your defect management integration is an important factor for you, then I also suggest you have a play-around with how it integrates with your automated tools so that you can get that direct feedback back into TestRail.