Software Testing Takes Up Residence in the Cloud

EddieC 0 511 Views

Zephyr today launched version 2.0 of its namesake software test management tool, which is now available as a SaaS in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. Zephyr gives development teams a Flash-based system for communication, collaboration, resource, document and project management, test-case creation automation and archiving, defect tracking and reporting. The system was previously available only as a self-hosted system.

"The advantage of a SaaS is that you need no hardware," said Zephyr CEO Samir Shah. "It’s a predeveloped back-end up and running immediately with 24/7 availability, backup, restore, and high bandwidth access from from anywhere." The cost for either system is US$65 per user per year. If you deploy in-house, you also get 3 free users for the first year.

Also new in Zephyr 2.0 is Zbots, which Shah said are automation agents for integrating Zephyr with other test tools. "These are little software agents that run on the remote machines on which you run Selenium, [HP QuickTestPro] or [Borland] SilkTest." They let you run all your automated tests from within Zephyr, and bring the results back into Zephyr for analysis, reporting and communication to the team. "You build your automation scripts in those tools," he explained, "then within Zephyr, you get comprehensive views of all test cases so you can look at the coverage you have across manual and automated tests."

The system also lets you schedule test to run. "When it comes time to run automated scripts, we can kick off automation scripts on the target machines, bring results back to Zephyr and update metrics and dashboards in real time." Shah claims that moving test cases into Zephyr is largely automatic, particularly if they're stored in Excel spreadsheets or Word documents, which is said is common. "At the end of the day, you have to give a report of the quality of your software. That process is manual and laborious. We automate that by bringing all that [data] into one place, from release to release, sprint to sprint, via a live dashboard. We give the test team and management a view into everything you are testing."

Also new in Zephyr 2.0 is two-way integration with the JIRA defect tracking system. "Objects stay in JIRA, and if they’re modified in one place they’re modified in the other. We built a clean Web services integration, and the live dashboard also reflects changes in JIRA."

Version 2.0 improves the UI, Shah said, making test cases faster and easier to write thanks to a full-screen mode. "When a tester is just writing test cases, we expand that for them and let them speed through that process. Importing and reporting also were improved, he said.

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This thread points to a bigger shift: when test-management moves off your servers, the risks and the UX tradeoffs change. ’s post raises the right questions — below are practical checks and patterns teams can apply right away when evaluating or using a cloud-hosted test system.

Prioritize the authoring experience. Look for editors that autosave and resolve sync conflicts, offer a distraction‑free edit mode, support keyboard workflows and bulk edits, and treat test steps as structured fields (not just one big text blob). Confirm good performance with thousands of cases, robust search and tagging, clear version history/diffs, and easy export to common formats so you retain a local copy of your canonical tests.

Plan automation integration and execution carefully. Prefer runners/agents that initiate outbound, TLS‑encrypted connections (so you don’t have to open inbound firewall ports), use short‑lived tokens, and let you tag results with build number, commit SHA and environment. Ensure results map back to stable test IDs and include duration, logs and artifact URLs. Example minimal result payload to expect/support:

{
  "test_case_id": "TC-1234",
  "status": "PASS",
  "duration_ms": 1240,
  "build": "2025.11.16-237",
  "environment": "staging",
  "artifacts": ["s3://bucket/log-1234.txt"]
}

Don’t overlook governance and exit planning. Verify export and backup options, SLAs, legal/data‑residency boundaries, SSO/RBAC support, audit logs, and how the vendor handles test data that may contain sensitive values. Keep a rolling export of your tests and results in a neutral format, and model total cost (active users + automation runners + data egress) before committing. These checks will make the move to hosted test management practical rather than risky.

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EddieC 0 Posting Whiz in Training

CORRECTION: The cost is US$65 per user per MONTH (not per year, as I had written). Also, the RIA technology in use for the UI is Adobe Flex. I had understood from Samir that it was built with Flash. -EC

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