As a proud partner of Inflectra, Coveros helps organizations seamlessly implement the Spira toolset.
Improving delivery with Spira
Spira helps accelerate delivery and increase the quality of products and software through a comprehensive toolset designed for managers, developers, and testers alike.
- SpiraTest combines test management, requirements traceability, and bug-tracking.
- SpiraTeam brings teams together to manage the entire application lifecycle.
- SpiraPlan helps manage your programs and portfolio of projects. It adds integrated enterprise risk management and tracking.
Overcoming Common Implementation Challenges
As with the adoption of any new toolset, organizations that are new to Spira face common challenges. At Coveros, our experts help organizations build the culture, processes, and knowledge necessary to overcome these obstacles:
Lack of Structured Strategy: When attempting to improve your process, a definitive plan and strategy are often lacking. As with any modern improvement effort, an effective strategy must include an incremental roadmap for improving the organization, processes, tooling, and staff skills over time.
Ad-Hoc Improvement Process: Improvement of process, staff, and tooling is something that takes time and planning. Just documenting processes and procedures does not result in change. Effective coaching, training, and hands-on pairing are necessary to ingrain new concepts and help your staff build the muscle memory necessary to make new practices the norm.
New Processes Defined Only at a High Level: When new processes are to be adopted, it is critical that they are defined at a level that makes them actionable. Descriptions of processes that do not include workflow diagrams, definitions of best practices, anti-patterns to avoid, examples of the process in action, or templates to use will significantly increase adoption time.
Big Bang Adoption: It is one thing to document a process and another to successfully enable teams to adopt. It is critical in any improvement program that changes be implemented incrementally, alongside effective coaching and support to make sure adoption sticks.
Tools Before Process: Many organizations begin improvement initiatives by purchasing products before ensuring their process, people, and organizational structure are aligned.
How Coveros Can Help
For nearly 15 years, we’ve been helping organizations align processes, people, organizational structure, and appropriate tool customization to help solve their biggest business problems. As an exclusive partner of Inflectra, our experts are well-versed in how to create the transformations necessary for effectively adopting the Spira toolset.
Our Customized Approach
Our experts will guide you through a 3-staged approach to Spira adoption and organizational transformation customized to your organization’s specific needs.
1. Plan
Coveros experts will work with your team to understand the business problems, define success, create a risk register, and create a backlog of project stories. We will also collaboratively decide with your team on decisions regarding project sprint cadence, frequency of standups, and other Agile ceremonies.
2. Understand
Our engineers will work with your team to understand the current processes, existing resources, roles, responsibilities, access needs, and tool usage for the management of requirements, releases, documents, test cases, incidents, and tasks. We will then collaborate with your team on ways those can be adjusted to improve effectiveness and leverage tool support.
Design decisions will be made during this phase that will provide guidance for the Implement phase regarding product templates, artifact workflows, statuses, types, custom properties, custom lists, etc. The project backlog and risk register will be updated to reflect the results of this phase.
3. Implement
We work with your team to configure and codify the design decisions from the Understand phase. We then implement and test our suggested configurations, making key adjustments to ensure a smooth adoption for your team.
The following artifact elements will be created or configured to reflect implementation needs: artifact workflows, statuses, types, custom properties, custom lists, and transition and event notifications. After each logical segment implementation, we will work together with your team to try out/test the implementation and evolve it so that it incorporates improvements identified during each of the testing sessions.
To better understand your Spira implementation needs and how Coveros can help, set up a conversation with one of our experts today.
Spira Quick Starts
Looking to accelerate your Spira implementation immediately? Our QuickStart Solutions are designed to help teams quickly recover if initiatives have stalled or to deploy new processes and technologies rapidly. Using a predefined scope of work, these engagements focus effort on specific areas to realize gains within weeks.
Spira Tools—DevSecOps Pipeline Integration QuickStart
The Pipeline-Spira Tools Integration QuickStart is a four-week engagement to successfully integrate your pipeline into your Spira toolset so you can get rapid feedback, quickly find and fix defects, and make release decisions based on the actual quality level and security posture of your applications.
Immersive Team Learning
Coveros encourages continuous improvement through ongoing coaching opportunities as well as public and private training on key tools, concepts, and approaches like agile transformation, testing and test automation, DevSecOps, AppSec. Learn more about our immersive learning approach.