Inflectra Creates Harmony in the Software Development Univer

September 27th, 2019 by inflectra

The tempo of software development is always increasing. With the adoption of agile methodologies, the move to continuous integration and deployment, and the use of DevOps platforms, it seems that everything needs to be done faster. In this maelstrom of activity, we at Inflectra want to help customers avoid the chaos of missed deadlines, and unfulfilled requirements... and bring harmony. Learn how and why!

How Do We Bring Harmony?

One of the key themes at the InflectraCon conference was the idea of Inflectra bringing harmony to the world of software development. In this article, we'd like to expand on why we see this as so important and how in reflects in our plans, and vision for the company and our products. It comes down to three important tenets:

Harmony Across Disciplines
Harmony Through Simplicity
Harmony Across Ecosystems

Harmony Across Disciplines

The three main audiences and users of our products are the testers (test managers, test analysts, automation engineers, exploratory testers, manual testers), developers (writing code, automated tests, infrastructure) and managers (project managers, quality managers, test managers, program managers, directors of IT, etc.). Many companies providing tools tend to focus almost exclusively on just one or two of the audiences. We feel this leads to tools that work well for one constituent, but are sub-optimal for the others.

We believe that all three need to be treated equally, and in our product roadmap and release schedule we plan to make sure that we address the needs of the different audiences. that doesn't mean that a specific release might not be more focused on one of the three, but overall across multiple releases, our roadmap is balanced. This reflects our view that agile teams require collaboration and coordination to work seamlessly across disciplines. Without harmony across the disciplines, you are not truly agile.

Harmony Through Simplicity

One of the other key tenets we believe in, is the value of simplicity and ease of use. However our approach is a bit different to some other platforms. We recognize that users want to spend more time using our products to do their job and less time configuring, customizing or implementing it in the first place. This means that we have embraced the philosophy of "sensible defaults" to provide the system with an initial set of workflows, priorities, severities and configurations that will work for 90% of users without any changes.

What this means in practice is that you can start using our products with minimal upfront configuration; no need to add plugins, no need to configure processes and workflows. Instead you can immediately start writing requirements, creating tests, executing scripts, managing risks and tasks, and focusing on project success.

Harmony Across Ecosystems

We also realize that our world is not an island, and that customers and users need to use our products with different platforms, technologies and ecosystems to be successful. We made a conscious decision to be agnostic and integrate freely with different platforms such as Atlassian Jira, Microsoft Azure DevOps, and ServiceNow. That way your teams can use different tools on different projects and still communicate together in harmony. Our integration platform synchronizes the data between the different systems seamlessly and is configured using simple UI screens.

In addition, our other products (RemoteLaunch, TaraVault, and KronoDesk) integrate seamlessly with Spira and Rapise so that you can focus on building great software and experiences and less time putting all the parts together.