1. Spira Platform

Several customers had questions about the "copying of  artifacts", specifically looking for information about which linked data and dependent data elements are copied. In this article we clarify this information.

We had a customer ask recently why this clone option at the release level in Spira did not make a copy of all the artifacts associated in the previous release. This article addresses this question.

A customer recently asked about the impact of turning off the Bulk Edit privilege in Spira. This blog addresses the specific areas this Bulk Edit privilege influences.

We have a migration tool that makes it easy to move from Jira (cloud, server and data-center editions) to Spira (SpiraTest, SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan editions). This article provides some more information on exactly what is migrated in each module.

We had a customer ask us how they could find all the test cases that are NOT part of a specific test set. Now there is unfortunately not a way to do it directly in the Spira UI. However that is where the handy custom reporting functionality comes in!

Customers often have questions about the best way to use test sets in SpiraTest, SpiraTeam and/or SpiraPlan. In this article we cover some of the most common ways that test sets are used in projects.

If you need to extract comments for artifact, for a period of time or filtered by comment creator - you can easily do that using Custom Report tool or - if you're using SpiraPlan you can use OData or (PowerBI Desktop) to visually create reports and analysis.

You may come across a situation where the base URL of your Spira instance has changed and the embedded image URLs no longer match. This will cause a broken image to display inside the various rich text editors in Spira. This article explains how you can use SQL to do a bulk update of the offending URLs.

A customer recently posted on the forums that they wanted to create a similar graph to the built-in Requirements Summary one using Spira custom graphs and ESQL. In this article we include an example.

When you use Inflectra's DataSync Service with your on premise installation of Spira, the credentials are stored in a config file. By default, these credentials are not encrypted to help users troubleshoot the connection. This article explains how to encrypt the credentials, to increase security.

You’ve probably encountered cases where it looks like you need another SELECT statement inside your main statement.
Is it possible to use nested SELECTs in ESQL? 
Yes, it’s possible!
In this article, we’ll explain the nested query (SELECT) and how to use it efficiently.

If you're using SpiraPlan's OData to extract data, Power Query helps with extraction and transformations steps that are represented as queries with share options to be used by other users.
This article covers the general mechanisms to share a query in Power Query.

This article explains how to create a graph of the number of requirements by status, assigned to any open release in a product, using the custom graphing engine.

If you're using SpiraPlan you can use OData to visually create reports and analsyis. In this example, we are getting an artifact's and product's multi-select custom property value names using Excel Power Query. The build in custom repoort views for artifacts and products show all custom fields, but only their raw values. That means that for custom lists only the ID of the custom list value(s) are shown and not the actual names. Here is what to do to find  and display the names.

In this article we will show how to get an artifact's and product's multi-select custom property values. Report views for artifacts and products contain all custom fields, but for those custom fields that use custom lists, only the ID of the custom list value(s) are shown. Here is what to do if you want to find the text that matches those IDs.

If you have created a Spira document with  .md extension, you can add formatting elements (headings, bulleted lists, URLs) to plain text without the use of a formal text editor or the use of HTML tags. Please note that Spira supports all original markdown syntax and does not support any extended syntax (like tables, footnotes, checklists)

 In this article we will show you how to create a risk exposure report to help product managers evaluate changes to risk exposures over time.

We often get asked by our customers about the types and level of support we provide, as well as details on how we host their information (for cloud customers). This article provides an overview of our support, cloud hosting and the option to deploy on-premise.

A customer of ours asked for a custom report for displaying the list of  failed Test Cases that do not have any incidents attached or created during testing.

When you run the Test Set Summary Report and filter by a specific test set or a very narrow filter, you will often see the matching test sets and all of the folders in the product. This article explains how you can modify the report to exclude the folders from the output.

Custom graphs let you see powerful and meaningful summaries of your data. One example of this is seeing how many requirements or incidents were delivered historically, broken down by the year of their release. In this article we will show you how to create such a graph to help Product Managers see delivery over time, to help them assess and manage their current and future work program.
 

Some customers may want to see the summary delivered outputs of their past releases. To do so, in this example, we create a custom report that shows a table of the total number of Incidents and requirements assigned to each past releases (releases with an end date in the past).

We had a customer that was integrating Spira that was hosted on-premise with a cloud instance of KronoDesk. When they used the feature to log the incident in Spira from a KronoDesk ticket, the incident was created in Spira, but the information did not reflect back in KronoDesk, and an error message was displayed.

You may want to extract all the artifacts that have a specific person is assigned across all products, to see their current work. 
This article provides an example of such a report.

When you integrate Spira with Microsoft Azure DevOps you might get error records generated in your Event Log, while all expected artifacts are being synced.

This guide explains the meaning of the error codes and possible causes.

Some customers have asked how to create a custom report that lets them trace back from Incidents to Test cases (information about each incident with all the IDs of the test cases associated to that Incident). This is the opposite to Test Case Traceability report.

This article explains the process.

A customer recently asked how to format the date format removing the time component in the custom report. This article address how it can be done.

We had a customer that was looking to add the current document version to the grid of attachments shown in the standard Test Case Detailed report. This article explains how you can easily add this field.

When you want to migrate your requirements, test cases, defects and other data from HP/Micro Focus ALM to SpiraTeam, you will need to make sure you have all of the ALM client components installed. However the ALM Components are normally loaded using the insecure Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) web browser. To avoid needing to use this browser, you can use the Micro Focus ALM Client Launcher instead. This article explains how.

One of our customers asked us how to extract the defects/incidents linked to the blocked test cases in a report. This article shows you how to do this using a simple custom report.

With SpiraPlan, you have the ability to create and manage risks, requirements and test cases in the same system. You can use the Associations feature to link the requirements to risks, and the test coverage feature to link requirements to test cases. However, as part of a risk based testing methodology, you will often want to see which of your test cases have the greatest overall, aggregate associated risk; if you are limited in time, these are the most critical tests to execute. This custom report generates such a view for you quickly and easily.

With SpiraPlan, you have the ability to create and manage both risks and requirements in the same system. You can use the Associations feature to link the requirements to risks. However, as part of a risk based testing methodology, you will often want to see which of your requirements have the greatest overall, aggregate associated risk. This custom report generates such a view for you quickly and easily.

With SpiraPlan, you have the ability to create and manage risks, requirements and test cases in the same system. You can use the Associations feature to link the requirements to risks, and the test coverage feature to link requirements to test cases. However, it is often useful to be able to generate a traceability matrix between test cases and their associated risks. This custom report generates such a table for you quickly and easily.

With SpiraPlan, you have the ability to create and manage both risks and requirements in the same system. You can use the Associations feature to link the requirements to risks. However, it is often useful to be able to generate a traceability matrix between requirements and risks. This custom report generates such a table for you quickly and easily.

A customer recently asked for assistance requirement  documentation on the Inflectra website about help on the various fields available when creating requirements in Spira. 

Specifically, the columns such as Type (List of values = Design element, Epic, Feature, Need, Quality, Use Case, User Story). They needed to understand what was the intended use of each of these fields.  and also the meaning of list of values under the status fields (Planned, Requested, developed etc). They wanted to see if we could provide a more detailed explanation or guide what each list of values means? They did not want to make any incorrect assumptions.

For performance reasons, Atlassian has made breaking changes to the Jira Server API in version 9.0 (and later). This means that is you are using the Spira data synchronization plugin for Jira Server, you need to download the most recent version from our website. This also affects Jira Data Center.

Note: this does not affect Jira Cloud.

To create new manual test runs in SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam, or SpiraTest through the API, you need to make two connected API calls. The first creates the Pending Test Run, and the second finalizes and logs the test run. The Pending Test Run call allows for the manual API test run process to support key features users experience in the UI of the app itself. These include multiple test cases in one test run pending, linked test steps, and test parameters.

How to use these two API calls is explained below, using the v6 REST API as an example. 

Spira and KronoDesk let you import existing users from LDAP into the system. That will bring over the users, and also link their user profile to their LDAP user by means of the LDAP Distinguished Name (or DN). However if you move a user in the LDAP folder structure, it may break the link with Spira, resulting in that user not being able to login.

Spira (SpiraTest, SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan) and KronoDesk all use the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) web server. A common need is to be able to change the IIS application name / virtual directory. For example, you may need to rename "SpiraTest" to "SpiraTeam" after you have upgraded your edition.

Recently (starting in March 22nd, 2022, but later for some customers) Microsoft removed support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 endpoints. If you are using an on-premise version of Spira, or a cloud version that uses an on-premise data-synchronization utility, you may get the TFS error: TF400324

Most on-premise Spira and KronoDesk installations will be using the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Server to serve the application to users.  If you are experiencing performance problems or slow page load times (and you cannot move to our cloud version), this article will help you troubleshoot IIS worker process requests.

We had a customer that was using a VPN / Firewall to access our cloud instances of Spira. Most firewalls simply pass through the HTTPS traffic on port 443 unaltered. However some more stringent ones actually decrypt the HTTPS traffic, inspect the packets and then re-encrypt it for the user. In one case, this was causing an ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED error.

A customer once asked how to create a velocity comparison chart for their Scrum Team to measure planned versus actual velocity across the releases. This article addresses how this chart can be created.

A customer recently asked about creating a custom graph based on a set of values in a custom list on an artifact. This article explains how this can be done. 

In one of the training sessions on reporting, a request came up on how data in the XSLT can be sorted similar to ordering results using the ORDER BY clause in ESQL. Both ESQL and XSLT offer its own power which is beyond the scope of this article. But, this article explains a simple way to sort the folders and the tasks in these folders by filtering out the tasks in the root folder and filtering tasks that do not have a name filled in.

A customer had a list of custom properties on the requirement artifact. Some of these custom properties on some requirement had data filled in. When they pulled a report of these requirements, some of these empty custom properties took up much of the report space. So, the customer wondered about reporting only those non-empty custom properties on the artifact. This article explains how this can be achieved.

A customer once asked how to create a list of all test cases that have electronic signature approval recorded.  For example, let us say that you have electronic signature turned on for a specific transition operation in the Test Case. Then, how do we create a list of all the test cases that have electronic signature recorded? 

Sometimes when integrating Jira with Spira, you might receive errors that refer to artifact mappings, statuses, or even users. This can happen  even if the synchronization status is marked as ‘Success’ and highlighted in green. In this article we have combined certain synchronization errors that might appear while configuring integration with Atlassian Jira.

Sometimes during the Jira plugin configuration to sync with Spira, you might get an error that is not self-describing and the errors do not point to an obvious solution. In this article we provide guidance on how to resolve some common synchronization errors with specific error codes (400, 401, 404 and 500)

VersionOne is a very customizable tool. If you followed all the steps configuring it, but you still don't see data in Spira, please make sure your instance is using the built-in fields as part of your user stories. You can find a list of all of the fields that the VersionOne API uses (and that the Spira data sync therefore uses) below.

We had a customer that was looking to use the Custom Reporting feature in Spira to generate a simple use case report that matched their existing template and format. This article shows how you can do this yourself.

In order to synchronize SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, or SpiraPlan with Microsoft Azure DevOps (ADO) formerly known as Microsoft Team Foundation Services (TFS) you may need the IDs of the Areas inside ADO. This article describes how you can get this from cloud instances of ADO where you do not have access to the database.

A customer asked us if we could provide a report of all the incidents across all projects and programs. In SpiraPlan you already have a Program Incidents list page that shows this information.  However sometimes you want the information in a report format.

Our Office365 addin let's users easily and quickly send data to Spira, or get data out of Spira, across different products and artifacts. We distribute this addin from within Microsoft's Office marketplace. This gives users convenience and confidence: the addin is easy to install, and has been vetted by Microsoft's marketplace team. Some organizations do not allow users to use this marketplace. How do you use this addin in such cases? 

Imagine you have a situation where you want to display a requirements test coverage graph for requirements organized by a multi-select custom property. In this article we show how you can use that property to display a custom graph in the Spira reporting dashboard.

We have had several requests for sample code illustrating how to access the Spira 6.0 REST API in C# code. You can of course use the SOAP API instead where Visual Studio auto-generates the C# code for you, but since we have a complete REST Unit Test framework in C#, we are sharing the sample code

A customer wanted to know the way to correctly format their reports so that they would look correctly in HTML and MS-Word in terms of the headings.

We had a customer looking for a consolidated report of the test sets and their test cases, grouped by release and test set folder. The report needed to have the individual test case instances in the test set along with the associated test runs.

Sometimes when you have very large pages of data in the administration screens inside Spira you may receive an error due to exceeding the default number of allowed form elements posting back data. This article provides a fixed for the issue.

With the release of SpiraPlan 6.13 we changed how parent requirements work. 

In previous versions, when you had a requirement that contained children, it would automatically have its type set to either Package (v5.x) or Epic (v6.x). This was regardless of its original type before it became a parent. This approach was not flexible enough for different use cases and could lead to confusion.

Now with version 6.13, we have changed the way requirements work to allow you to make a requirement a "summary" type (with children) and keep its original type. This lets you have a more flexible hierarchy of requirements with different types. In addition, it will make synchronization of requirements with tools such as Atlassian Jira and Microsoft Azure DevOps (ADO) easier because you can now map the specific types.

To simplify the process for new product templates, when you create a new product template in Spira, it will come with an additional requirement type called Epic

Customers often ask us about the process for upgrading from SpiraTest to SpiraTeam / SpiraPlan or from SpiraTeam to SpiraPlan. In this article we address some of the common questions for both cloud and on-premise customers.https://spiradoc.inflectra.com/Spira-Administration-Guide/System/#license-details

Sometimes you will load in data into SpiraTeam using Excel, Google Sheets or other methods where you end up with dates that are invalid, for example tasks that have an end date before their start date! This article explains how you can use a custom report to quickly find them.

Sometimes you will want to get an idea how fast your manual and automated tests are taking. You can use the custom graphing feature to create a custom graph for this.

SpiraTest comes with a built in graph for displaying the requirements' test coverage information. However sometimes you want the raw data and percentages rather than just the graphical form. This KB article shows how you can use the custom reporting functionality to do this.

We have had some customers looking to upload files to Spira using our REST API. This article provides some sample code.

You can readily connect to TaraVault repos on your local environment using HTTPS. Details of the required URLs are available in the relevant SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan product under the source code pages. You can additionally connect over SSH by following the below instructions

If you are using our Excel 365 addin you may see the error message:

ADD_IN ERROR

We Can't Load This Add-In Because We Couldn't Connect to the Catalog

The steps to take to resolve this are below

After upgrading to v6.8, you may get a system error with the text in it that states that the task can not be completed. This can affect creating users, copying Products, creating new Products, among other activities.

When using Spira or KronoDesk on a separate web and database server, the easiest configuration is to use SQL Server authentication to connect between the web server and database. However that means hard coding a password in the web server (in the Web.config file). So in this article we explain how to use Windows Integrated Authentication instead.

We had a customer that was looking for a more automated way to remove test cases from a test set. The good news is that our REST API makes this easy.

Some customers have asked us how they can create a program-level requirements traceability report (RTM) in Spira using the custom reporting functionality. This article explains the process.

ISO 13485 Medical devices -- Quality management systems -- Requirements for regulatory purposes is an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard published for the first time in 1996; it represents the requirements for a comprehensive quality management system for the design and manufacture of medical devices.

Spira allows custom property at the test step level. This functionality allows testers additional flexibility. When custom reports are designed, some customers prefer to show the custom property at the test step level. This article discusses how to structure the ESQL query to accommodate this need. 

We had a customer that was looking for a way to easily purge out a large set of older automated test runs that were no longer needed in their project to free up space.

There is not currently a built-in tool to do this, but we thought it might be useful to provide a way to do it using a SQL Server Agent Job.

We had a customer ask us what was the recommended way to enter mathematical equations into a requirement in Spira. There are a couple of options depending on several factors:

• You want to do it 100% natively in Spira, vs. using an external tool with Spira
• How complex the equation is
• Does the equation need to be editable after the fact

A prospective customer asked us to elaborate on the pros and cons of importing into SpiraTeam using either ReqIF or the DOORS importer plug-in?

When you use the Perforce Provider for Spira you may sometimes run into a Windows folder permission error. This is due to the Perforce API running as a specific user that does not have access to the Windows temporary profile storage area.

This document contains an overview of how to setup and configure SpiraTest, SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan in a load balanced web farm scenario. It contains links to additional information from Microsoft, and community resources related to the scenario.

During the upgrade of an older version of Spira v6.x to the latest version of Spira v6.x the installer logs the following:

Cannot insert the value NULL into column 'TASK_WORKFLOW_ID', table 'SpiraTest.dbo.TST_TASK_TYPE'; column does not allow nulls. UPDATE fails.  The statement has been terminated. [System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException]

A customer recently asked us for some diagrams that illustrate the logical system and application architectures for use in their documentation of the system. We thought these diagrams might be useful for our other customers.

When you are running the import from HP / MicroFocus ALM into Spira, you sometimes come across error messages that look like the following:

Error "The field <RQ_USER_17> cannot be used with requirement type <Non Functional>"

When you integrate Spira with Microsoft Azure DevOps (formerly known as Team Foundation Server or TFS) you have the option of matching up the custom properties in Spira with the user defined fields in Azure DevOps. This guide explains how you get the 'system names' for custom vs. standard fields.

This article provides some information on the maintenance activities we do on our cloud platform

When you want to migrate your requirements, test cases, defects and other data from HP ALM to SpiraTeam, you will need to make sure you have all of the HP ALM client components installed.

Although we have comprehensive documentation published on our website regarding the Spira REST API, sometimes users need some additional examples. In this article we publish an example of how to record a new test run using our REST API.

One of the most common needs when using the Spira REST API is the ability to update an item in the system (e.g. test case, requirement, task, defect, etc.). This article explains how you can use the REST API to do this.

You may find that SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan reports sometimes don't open on Google Chrome, but instead try and download instead, which can be annoying. This article explains the setting you need to change in Chrome to fix it.

This guide will cover how to initially install and configure RemoteLaunch (not RemoteLaunchX) and the Command-Line execution engine as well as creating and scheduling PowerShell script executions.  It will also cover how to pass data into PowerShell and receive test results.

RemoteLaunch v5.1.0.0 was used to create this guide.

If you are integrating Spira (SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, or SpiraPlan) with Atlassian Jira, you may get this error message if you have not updated the integration for a while:

Basic auth with password is not allowed on this instance

When you are self-hosting Spira on your own Windows Server using the IIS web server, it will generate standard URL locations for the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) files used to consume SOAP services. This article explains how you can override the URL to use a different one.

When you run the Sparx Enterprise Architect (EA) importer it should import requirements from Sparx EA into Spira (SpiraTest, SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan). If that doesn't happen then you may need to enable trace logging to see what's going on.

You may come across a situation where the base URL of your Spira instance has changed and the embedded image URLs no longer match. This will cause a broken image to display inside the various rich text editors in Spira. This article explains how you can use SQL to do a bulk update of the offending URLs.

A customer recently had some questions about what synchronizes between Spira and Jira, so we thought that this article would help clarify things.

As you move your web applications (such as SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan, or KronoDesk) to newer encryption protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2, you will need to make sure the client applications are configured to use the latest version of TLS. Specifically applications using Microsoft .NET may not use the latest version by default.

Sometimes customers need to show a Graph with all the Incidents by status for a specific Component in Spira. This article explains how to use the custom graphing engine to achieve this.

One of the features of the Spira synchronization service for Atlassian Jira is that it automatically adds relevant links to the user story and issue pages in Jira to make it easier to navigate from Jira back to SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, or SpiraPlan. Some users have reported these links are no longer visible.

For additional security, customers may want to limit who can access their cloud instances of SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan, or KronoDesk to specific networks and IP addresses. This article describes why you would want to do this and how we support this.

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is an Agile software development process that encourages collaboration among developers, QA and non-technical or business participants in a software project. It encourages teams to use conversation and concrete examples to formalize a shared understanding of how the application should behave. This article outlines how you can use SpiraTest to manage BDD style requirements and test cases.

Here are a few things to check when you are integrating TestNG with Spira.

In version 6.2.1 of SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam and SpiraTest we have added a new reporting API that lets you access the reporting capabilities of Spira programatically.

When using the API to do post a new artifact, for example, you may want to also set custom properties for that artifact. You need to pass in an object with an array of objects, one object for each custom property. For each object you need to specify two fields: the custom property id, and the new value.

Sometimes when you use Spira or KronoDesk and perform actions (e.g. assigning bugs, test cases, etc.) email notifications are not received correctly. This article provides some common reasons and solutions

The SQL Server Database Engine Tuning Advisor examines how queries are processed in the databases you specify, and then recommends how you can improve query processing performance by modifying database structures such as indexes, indexed views, and partitioning. This can be used by on-premise customers to improve the performance of their Spira and KronoDesk instances.

With a recent update to Google Chrome (v76), Chrome had the CSS engine was modified which would make the sidebar navigation folder tree to become unusable. This issue was resolved by Google with the release of Chrome 77

Sometimes it is necessary to move a SpiraTeam, SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, or KronoDesk installation to another server, without wanting to lose all of your data. This KB will guide you through the steps of transferring the install over, and optionally upgrading the application. This guide will walk you through the recommended steps when needing to move both the application and database to new servers.

Sometimes when running the Spira v6.0 installer to upgrade from v5.4.0.4 to v6.0 you get the following error:

Table or indexed view 'TST_ATTACHMENT' does not have a full-text index or user does not have permission to perform this action.

This article describes the cause and provides the solution

When you are integrating Spira with Jira cloud (hosted by Atlassian) and Jira server (locally hosted) you need to to connect to Jira using a login and Jira API Key. Previously (prior to June 3rd, 2019) you could also use a Jira login and password, that is no longer allowed by Atlassian.

SpiraPlan has a range of artifacts. These  are the building blocks of a product or program and contain all of their data. Each artifact holds different data and is used in different ways. For instance, requirements are one artifact, and releases are another. They work differently, and are not interchangable. There are artifacts to help you test, plan, track bugs and tasks, and more.

Sometimes you want a simple test execution report that includes the list of test cases, execution dates and raised defects, without all the ancillary information in the standard Spira reports. This article provides an example of such a report.

When you are installing SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan or KronoDesk on a database server with a large 'model' database sometimes the install will fail because the initial Spira/KronoDesk database is not large enough to contain your model database. This article provides the solution

When you upgrade from v5.4 to v6.0, unlike previous versions of the upgrader, we don't delete the entire database and recreate it. The upgrader makes the changes to live database in-situ. However if you have missing foreign key constraints in the v5.4 database it can lead to bad data that breaks the installer.

When you upgrade from v5.4 to v6.0 upon opening a test case detail page you receive the error: "The 'TestCaseWorkflowId' property on 'TestCaseType' could not be set to a 'null' value". This article explains the cause and provides the solution

When SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, or SpiraPlan connects to the Jira API to synchronize defects and user stories it relies on the Jira API working correctly and not having internal issues. This articles explains a common issue that some of our clients have found inside Atlassian Jira.

You can use the Spira Project Backup & Migration Tool to move projects between one instance of SpiraTest and another pretty easily. However there is a known issue that can sometimes occur if you have deleted custom properties.

Sometimes users have more complex LDAP configurations. For example, users may have two different "Base DN"s where the users are located. They want to know - if there a way somehow to define two different "Base DN"s ?

Customers sometimes ask us for a way to generate a report that would be a human readable requirements document. The built-in requirements detailed report often has more information that is needed in such a report.  This article describes how to create such a report.

Many of our customers are using SpiraTest / SpiraTeam with their own in-house test automation framework. In this article we explain how you can use our REST API and/or our sample jUnit code to integrate your own framework easily with Spira.

If you have disabled TLS 1.0 and 1.1 encryption protocols on your IIS web server, you may run into issues accessing the web interface of Spira or KronoDesk from older versions of Windows and/or IE.

Sometimes you want to delete the sample users in SpiraTest, SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan. This article explains the steps for doing this.

You can manage and delete all sample data from the "Manage Sample Data" system admin page. 

If this page is not available (for instance you are on a version older than 6.5) you can delete the sample data manually. 

One of the metrics that customers often find useful is the number of times that a specific incident has been reopened. We plan on adding some built-in dashboard widgets for this metric, but in the meantime, we have a custom report that you can use to report on this metric from Spira.

In Spira we have a nice incident aging graph that you can use to see the count of incidents per aging range. However sometimes customers are looking for more customizable reporting around incident aging data. This article provides some sample custom reports.

When using SpiraPlan, SpiraTest or SpiraTeam with Microsoft Azure DevOps instead of a local installation of Microsoft Team Foundation Server there are a couple of differences in the integration configuration that you will want to be aware of. This article describes those differences.

This post shows you how you can migrate or downgrade a SQL Server database from one version to a lower or earlier one. E.g. 2016 to 2014, 2014 to 2012, 2012 to 2008 etc. This can be useful if you maintain a heterogeneous environment of SQL Server instances and you have a backup from a newer version that needs to be hosted onto an older version. This happens to us quite a bit when customers installed a trial on SQL Server Express (latest version) and we need to host it on one our cloud servers.

When trying to install the Add-In SpiraTeam Explorer for Visual Studio for VS2017, the install may fail, or prevent installation due to an error.

A customer asked us for some sample code that illustrated how you can retrieve a filtered list of test sets using the Spira API. This example includes sample code using the Spira v5.0 API.

This article explains the process for making a backup image of your "on-premise" SpiraTeam (or SpiraTest, SpiraPlan) instance and preparing it so that it can be sent to Inflectra to host on our cloud environment. This can happen when you have been using SpiraTeam on-premise, but now want to migrate to the cloud.

This article explains what to do if you are attempting to execute a test set and get this error message: "There are no test runs in this pending set to be resumed." 

When you use SpiraTest with GitLab, the synchronization plugin synchronizes some fields unidirectionally and other fields bidirectionally. To clarify the details, this article illustrates which fields are synched and in which directions.

Customers running Spira v5.0 or v5.1 may experience an issue where the system will let you create test case folders that point to one of their children as parent. This causes an infinite loop which will break the system. This article provides a solution to fix the issue (though we recommend upgrading to v5.4 to prevent it happening in the future).

A customer asked us this question:

My team is using SpiraTeam 5.4 as a storage vault for all software documents. The documents are placed in a specific project "System" that has been created for this specific purpose.

The documents are placed into several subdirectories: Requirements, Risks, Design., General, etc

Can we generate a report that lists the name of the document, folder, author, and current version.

One of our customers was reporting that their instance of our TestNG plugin was reporting a 502 Connection Reset by Peer error. We did some debugging with them, and the issue appears to be a bug inside some versions of the Java Virtual Machine (VM) itself.

Sometimes customers will contact us regarding questions as to why the execution status indicator of their test sets is not being updated (i.e. everything still looks as not run) even after running some of the test cases. This article explains why this might be the case and provides solutions.

We provide the source code for a number of the data sync solutions we provide (eg Jira). This gives customers the ability to tweak the precise behavior of the sync to their specific business needs. The open source code does not run in isolation and this article explains how to make sure you have everything you need to build and test your custom code.

Sometimes you create user accounts in SpiraTeam for real users to login and test the system. For example you may have a UAT (user acceptance testing) phase, or a crowdsourced testing event (like our Software Testing Bowl). You then want to turn over the data to a third party supplier, but you need to anonymize the users' personal information

When you are first using the SpiraTeam plugin for JetBrains TeamCity, you may run into the issue where the settings for TeamCity are not being saved correctly.

A customer of ours asked for a custom report / graph for displaying the count of incidents by project and by priority.

Sometimes when you try and run certain reports you may get an strange error message "The passed in report ID or report format ID does not exist". This message is unfortunately a red herring, and there is a different reason for this error.

Of the unique needs of a requirements and test management system when working in the Defense industry, specifically when designing, building, and testing mission systems, is the ability to link individual test steps to the requirements.  This article provides you with a custom report to use to display such a traceability matrix.

Of the unique needs of a requirements and test management system when working in the Defense industry, specifically when designing, building, and testing mission systems, is the ability to link individual test steps to the requirements. Since v5 of SpiraTest, this has been possible inside the Spira user interface, however many customers have been looking for a way to map test steps to requirements in bulk using Excel.

If you have recently upgraded to Spira v5.x from an earlier version and get an error message saving artifacts that mentions 'XPKTST_ARTIFACT_CUSTOM_PROPERTY' then you may have some old artifact custom property records that are blocking the new item saving

From v5.4 of SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, and SpiraPlan, to perform any edit on the list pages for artifacts requires different permissions. Let's explore how to create new artifacts based on these new permissions.

Most of the artifacts in Spira are "soft deleted", i.e. they are simply marked with a deleted flag, and can be recovered easily by a project administrator using the Project History Changes option to review the changes, filter by deletes and revert the change. However when a system administrator deletes a whole project, it physically deletes the project and cannot be undone.

A number of artifacts have folders to help you organize your items. Folders can be created and deleted and items moved into and out of them. What happens when you delete a folder?

We have a migration tool that makes it easy to move from HP ALM (aka Quality Center) to SpiraTeam. This article provides some more information on exactly what is migrated in each module.

The custom reporting functionality in SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam v5.4 (or later) includes the ability to write complex reports, joining various tables, using SQL aggregation (COUNT, SUM, etc.) functions and other advanced reporting features. A common needs is to display a list of artifacts (requirements, test cases, etc.) and join against the custom property definitions so that you get the custom fields displayed with the names of the value not just the IDs. This articles explains how to do this.

Within the standard reports included with SpiraTeam (Test/Plan),  some words exist, such as the 3-letter month abbreviations. These items are in English, even if you have chosen a different language for your Spira user interface.  The report templates can be edited to change these words to a different language. This article explains how to do that.

We had a potential customer that was looking to generate simplified test result reports from SpiraTeam that had more details for each of the executed test steps, with full size screenshots displayed, rather than the small table cells that are in the small reports. This article contains an example of such a report.

Sometimes you want to override certain Rapise settings (e.g. the Command Interval) from within SpiraTest. For example you might to run one test set more slowly than other test sets because the environment is slower. This article explains how you can easily pass settings values from SpiraTest to Rapise.

We have had some customers looking to upload files to Spira using our REST API. This article provides some sample code.

Many of our customers work in the life sciences and healthcare industries. They want to use cloud hosted versions of SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, or SpiraPlan, but they need to be able to control the updates and also be able to have a staging and production environment. This article explains the options we provide

Many of our customers are importing from other tools, such as HP QC, HP ALM, Microsoft Test Manager, TestRail, etc. We have convenient import tools for these products. However sometimes these import tasks can fail due to interruptions. This article provides some solutions

Customers sometimes contact us with questions about how the Releases and Iterations in Spira work, specifically what kinds of data (test status, task progress, etc.) roll up from an iteration to a minor release, and from a minor release to a  major release. Also they want to know whether iterations are included when you filter by release. This article provides some clarifications.

An automated test case stores its test script as a standard document inside of the SpiraTest/Team/Plan application. To GET the current script using our REST API you need to make 2 calls: 1 to get the document ID and the other to retrieve the script itself.

With the establishment of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you now may need to find old SpiraTeam projects that are not active any more so that you can delete them and reduce unnecessary storage of personal data.

This article is kindly provided by one of our customers - Boris - who has been using the Desktop Data Sync and JIRA to integrate his on-premise JIRA instance with a cloud instance of SpiraTeam.

By default, all projects are completely self-contained; artifacts in one project can only be linked or associated with artifacts in the same project.  However, there is a way for the project admin to selectively allow other projects to access artifacts in the current project.  (Administration -> Project Associations)

The cross-project functionality is being introduced gradually.  As of Spira version 6.0, it applies only to requirements, test cases, tasks (SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam), and incidents.

This article explains how and where the artifacts from another project can be used.

When using Spira's REST API, there are a number of calls that let you create powerful filters to query for only the specific information you want. These use a POST request with the filter in the body as either JSON or XML. Here's how to correctly formulate JSON to get only artifacts that fall between two dates.

The incidents in Spira are able to have customizable incident types, statuses, priorities and severities. This means that each project has unique IDs for the various attributes. Sometimes when you incorrectly load in data using our Excel Add-In, you can link incidents to attributes from other projects. This article describes the problem and the solution.

If you are trying to run a test case or test set and you receive the following error:

Messages:
   Database constraint violation occurred [APPLICATION.Business.EntityConstraintViolationException]
   An error occurred while updating the entries. See the inner exception for details. [System.Data.UpdateException]
   Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint 'XPKTST_ARTIFACT_CUSTOM_PROPERTY'. Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'dbo.TST_ARTIFACT_CUSTOM_PROPERTY'.
The statement has been terminated. [System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException]

Then this article provides the solution for you.

Some of our customers who have SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, and SpiraTeam installations wanted to know how you can remove the "News Feed" RSS widget from all users' dashboards since it was causing Spira to access the www.inflectra.com domain.

Some of our customers wanted to know that we delete the data in the SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, and SpiraTeam tables when we delete a project. This article outlines the approximate order in Spira v5.3.0.2.

When you install SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan, or KronoDesk on premise, you have a choice in different ways to configure SQL Server. Every situation is different, but this article presents some recommendations.

By default, IIS web server allows for limited file size to be uploaded to the web server. For IIS 6 and IIS 7, the default maximum file upload size is 4 MB and 28.6 MB respectively. IIS 7 returns a 404 error (HTTP Error 404.13 - CONTENT_LENGTH_TOO_LARGE) if someone uploads something larger than 30MB. In order to allow for larger file size uploads, a few server changes are required.

Integrating SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam with your LDAP or ActiveDirectory direcory server makes a lot of sense. It allows you to have a single user authentication system, with all logins and passwords centrally managed. Spira includes integration out of the box with LDAP and this article provides help for some common issues that we have come across.

Sometimes you want to test a process which requires a handoff between departments and would involve different testers to complete the full range of functionality. This article describes how to set that up, using a test set.

Sometimes, when you try to create a new release, a error message says that "You need to choose a Version Number that's not already been used." But you cannot find a release with that version number.

Customers sometimes ask us for a simple Release Notes report that can be used to display the list of new features and enhancements / fixed bugs in a specific release. We use a report like that ourselves to generate the Release Notes for our products (Rapise, SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, etc.). This article describes how you can create a similar report yourself

SpiraTeam has been designed to work with a variety of different software development methodologies, including several different flavors of agile, waterfall and hybrid. This articles describes one of the more popular waterfall methods called the V-Model and gives best practices for how to use SpiraTeam on such projects.

This article describes some basic troubleshooting steps that you should take when the data-synchronization service between SpiraTest and another bug tracker (in this example Jira, but much of this also applies to other data syncs) does not appear to work correctly.

With the latest version of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam, we have provided a simple button in the Data Tools section that lets you rebuild the database indexes using the same script that we published in KB10. However sometimes the database is so large that the execution takes longer than the 30 minutes allowed by the application, or you want more control over the fragmentation levels that trigger a rebuild. This article provides guidance and a more advanced script for power users.

In the standard reports that come with SpiraTeam, we have the 'Detailed' reports that are designed to include a primary artifact (e.g. requirements) and then include tables that display lists of related items (e.g. Tasks, Incidents, etc.). By default, we only show some of the fields in these tables. This article explains how to display the value of specific custom fields in the tables when you customize the standard reports.

This article explains the process for taking a SpiraTeam (or SpiraTest, SpiraPlan) backup image from Inflectra's cloud servers and installing it on a local "on-premise" instance of SpiraTeam. This can happen when you have been using SpiraTeam in the cloud, but now want to host it locally.

Sometimes, when troubleshooting complex issues with SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk, it's necessary for us to get some additional information to troubleshoot the issue further. For example, when we receive a report of performance trouble when using our cloud services, there are a lot of different factors that may contribute to the problem. To narrow down the cause of the performance problem, we need more data.

A workflow is a predefined sequence of incident statuses linked together by “workflow transitions”.  Incident statuses and workflow transitions are highly configurable. This article gives an overview of workflow transitions.

When you display a graph in the SpiraTeam reporting page, you can download a graph as a CSV file. Some customers have asked about ways to get the data making a REST call. This article explains the components of the API.

We often get questions about how the attachments in SpiraTeam are stored, and what the relationship is between the X.dat files on the file system and the original filenames. This articles provides information on this.

Sometimes you want to create a new custom report with a list of fields from SpiraTest that includes the date that a test cases was executed or the date that a defect was logged, but you don't want to clutter the report with the time part. Alternatively you want to join two tables on a date-time field where only a date comparison is needed.

SpiraTeam lets you send data for POST requests in our REST API using either JSON or XML. To ensure that data is saved correctly, when using XML all fields must be in alphabetical order.

One of the limitations in SpiraTest and SpiraTeam v4.x was that for performance reasons we could not handle test sets with very large numbers of test cases and that the system was not able to display the counts of the test cases and the execution status for test set folders.

The plugins listed on our website for integrating with JIRA are compatible with the latest major version (5.0 at time of writing) of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam. This article provides older versions of the JIRA data-synchronization plugin for customers that are using older versions of Spira.

When using SpiraPlan, SpiraTest or SpiraTeam with Microsoft Visual Studio Online instead of a local installation of Microsoft Team Foundation Server there are a couple of differences in the integration configuration that you will want to be aware of. This article describes those differences.

When you upgrade an older version of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam (hereafter referred to as Spira) from an older version to the latest version, the installer has to upgrade the application and database at the same time. This article provides some solutions to cases where the installer throws an error or fails to upgrade the database for some reason.

When opening the SpiraTeam MS-Excel (printable) reports in MS Excel you may get a message displayed - "The file you are trying to open 'xxx.xls' is in a different format than specified by the file extenstion". This article explains why this message appears and how to deal with it.

Sometimes when using our MS-Office Add-Ins (for Excel, Word and Project) on a new computer you will see an error message of the type:

Unable to cast COM object of type 'System.__ComObject' to interface type 'Microsoft.Office.Tools.Excel.Worksheet'. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID ...

This article explains the cause of these types of error and provides some common solutions
 

This article describes how to export server Event Logs when requested by support.

• Test Case ID
• Test Case Name
• Last Execution Date
• Last Execution Status
• Number of Test Runs

You already know the advantages of us hosting your application in our cloud:

Our web-based products: SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam and KronoDesk make use of the Microsoft IIS web-server and Microsoft SQL Server database platforms.

This KB article explains some of the more common error messages that can occur after installing one of our products and the steps to remedy them.

This article was written specifically for versions v3.0 - v4.2 of Spira and versions v1.x of KronoDesk.

One of the benefits of using Inflectra software is that you get unlimited upgrades for the first year and as long as you maintain an active service plan. This articles describes the process for upgrading your installation of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk to the latest version. It also answers many common questions about the process.

Cucumber is a software tool that computer programmers use for testing other software. It runs automated acceptance tests written in a behavior-driven development (BDD) style. Cucumber is written in the Ruby programming language. This articles explains how you can use SpiraTest and RemoteLaunch to integrate with Cucumber.

Sometimes you have a situation where a user deletes an entire tree of requirements and you only know the ID of one of the child items and not the parent ID that was actually deleted. This KB article provides a query that lets you find all the deleted parents of a specific requirement.

Sometimes you want to get a report of all the tests executed along with their test cases with the tests organized by the order in which they are displayed in SpiraTest. The custom reporting system in Spira allows you to create a custom report of all the test runs and test run steps sorted by test case order. This articles describes the process for creating such a report.

Sometimes you want to get a report of all the users in the system. The custom reporting system in Spira allows you to create a custom report of all the users. This articles describes the process for creating such a report.

Our Spira platform (SpiraPlan, SpiraTest, SpiraTeam) has powerful custom reporting capabilities that let you build custom reports using the Microsoft Entity SQL language. This article provides some pointers on writing such reports.

If you face performance issues with Spira or KronoDesk when the users use Internet Explorer 9.0, there is a known issue in ASP.NET 4.5 that can cause the client to disconnect and all subsequent AJAX calls do not get processed. This article describes the symptoms and the solution.

After upgrading to Spira v4.2, if you get either of the following error messages:

• 'Width' is not a member of type 'Inflectra.SpiraTest.DataModel.IncidentView'
• 'DisplayMode' is not a member of type 'Inflectra.SpiraTest.DataModel.IncidentView'

Please follow the instructions in the article to solve the issue that happens when you try and use a saved filter that gives this issue.

If you are running a web application (such as SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk) on an IIS web server using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), you will want to harden the environment by removing the older versions of SSL and TLS that are no longer considered secure.

These steps apply to:

• Windows Server 2003 R1 & R2
• Windows Server 2008 R1 & R2

Usually Windows Server 2012 and later are already configured to be secure.

This article describes how you create / modify the XSLT report templates in Spira to include embedded images without having to manually embed them in the artifacts. It uses the ability of the XSLT reports to have an <IMG> tag in the report template that references the attachment URL.

When you use our SOAP or REST web service APIs you will often times want to retrieve a filtered list of data. This is done by using the RemoteFilter that lets you query the list of requirements, test cases, tasks, incidents, etc. and pass in the field to be filtered. This article includes the list of standard fields that you can use in the RemoteFilter.

Sometimes when running the SpiraTeam v4.1 installer to upgrade from an older version of SpiraTeam (same also applies to SpiraTest and SpiraPlan) you will get the error message:

You must install the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0.30319

even though .NET 4.0, 4.5 or 4.5.1 is installed.

If you run one of our installation packages (.msi) and receive the following message:

A DLL required for this install to complete could not be run

Sometimes we get help desk tickets from on-premise customers regarding the performance of our web-based applications (SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam and KronoDesk). Whilst every situation is different, this article provides some common best practices that should help having a high-performing system.

The custom reporting functionality in SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam v4.1 (or later) includes the ability to write complex reports, joining various tables, using SQL aggregation (COUNT, SUM, etc.) functions and other advanced reporting features. A common needs is to display a list of artifacts (requirements, test cases, etc.) and join against the custom property definitions so that you get the custom fields displayed with the names of the value not just the IDs. This articles explains how to do this.

SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam versions older than v4.1 and KronoDesk versions lower than v1.1.0.7 use a screenshot capture utility written using the Java development platform. This lets the web browser capture a screenshot and attach it to items in the system without having to first save the item. This article describes some issues using this applet and outlines the replacement plan we have implemented to use HTML5 instead of Java going forward.

Sometimes you will have a situation where you want to run the same test cases on multiple different platforms (e.g. Windows/Linux, IE/Firefox/Chrome, MySQL/Oracle/DB2), and be able to distinguish the results. This article describes several different ways to do this.

If you ever see the following message in the Application Event Logs on your SQL Server database server:

SQL Server has encountered X occurrence(s) of I/O requests taking longer than 15 seconds to complete on file [Path to either your database's MDF or LDF files]

It can often mean that the Size/Shrink settings for the database files are not correct for the size of database. This articles suggestions some techniques for fixing this error message.

This article describes the steps in integrating a hosted instance of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam with Atlassian's JIRA On-Demand (hosted). We recommend using our cloud hosted data synchronization service that means you don't need any special tools or downloads to use both products together. Let us do the work for you!

When using some versions of Java with SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk you may get the following warning message when pasting in screenshots or images:

When I click to paste a screenshot attachment, get Java security warning (see screenshot) which says " Block potentially unsafe components from being run?  Application: appSupa  Java has discovered application components that could indicate a security concern. Contact the application vendor to ensure that it has not been tampered with" with options to Block and Unblock.   "The application contains both signed and unsigned code".

This articles provides the solution to the following error messages that you may receive in Spira if you have missing default project attachment types/folders for a project:

APPLICATION.Business.Attachment::Insert: Inflectra.SpiraTest.Business.ProjectDefaultAttachmentTypeException, Can't locate the default project attachment type for project X

or

APPLICATION.Business.Attachment::Insert: Inflectra.SpiraTest.Business.ProjectDefaultAttachmentFolderException, Can't locate the default project folder for project X

In situations where your SpiraTest, SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam server is located on a company network that does not have direct Internet access (and connects through a proxy server), some of the integration features of Spira may not work correctly:

• The weather widget on the My Page
• The list of recent builds if your Jenkins server is hosted outside your network
• The RSS feed widgets on the My Page
• Data synchronization with bug-trackers that are externally hosted

This article outlines the step necessary to tell the Spira server to use the proxy server for its Internet connections.

After upgrading from v3.2 to v4.0 you may receive this error message when you access the Reports home page on certain projects:

When you try and connect to HP ALM 11 using the Spira Importer for HP QC 9.0+ you may receive the following error message:

System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80040154): Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {C5CBD7B2-490C-45F5-8C40-B8C3D108E6D7} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)).

This article describes the steps necessary to resolve this issue.

SpiraTeam is designed to work on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, taking advantage of the extra memory and power available if you have a 64-bit operating system. However Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) - part of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) - only runs in 32-bit mode. Therefore when using our integration there are a couple of steps you need to perform.

This article has a couple SQL commands that can be run to optimize database speed and performance.  This article applies to on-premise instances only.  If your instance is cloud-hosted, please create a Help Desk ticket.

This article describes the steps for importing data from an Excel spreadsheet into SpiraTeam. You can use this to import requirements, test cases, tasks, incidents and releases.

This articles describes how to write custom reports in SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam. It also can be used to modify the layout and styling of the various built-in reports.

This information applies to the following versions of Spira:

• v2.3
• v2.3.1
• v3.0
• v3.1
• v3.2

This article describes how to resolve the following error message that can occur on new installations of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk when ASP.NET is not correctly configured. This message typically only occurs on Windows Vista, Windows7 or Windows 2008 Server.

HTTP Error 500.21 - Internal Server Error
Handler "PageHandlerFactory-Integrated" has a bad module "ManagedPipelineHandler" in its module list.

This knowledge base article describes how to connect to the SpiraTest, SpiraPlan & SpiraTeam SOAP web services using Java code. It assumes that you've generated the SOAP proxy classes using JAX-WS. If you need to download pre-compiled versions of the classes, they can be downloaded from our website at: JavaSoap30Classes.zip

This knowledge base article describes how to connect to the SpiraTest, SpiraPlan & SpiraTeam SOAP web services using .NET code written in C#. The code assumes that you're using Visual Studio 2008 or later and are using the newer .NET 3.0+ Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) "Add Service Reference" rather than the older .NET 2.0 ASMX web service client.