FAQs for SpiraTeam

This section provides answers to some of the most Frequently Asked Questions by our prospective customers. The FAQs are grouped in several categories to make finding the answers easier:

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General Questions

  1. What makes SpiraTeam better than other Application Lifecycle Management Systems?
  2. What makes SpiraTeam better than other Planning and Collaboration Tools?
  3. What makes SpiraTeam better than other Test Management tools?
  4. Do you have a guarantee? What if I'm not happy with SpiraTeam?
  5. Can I take a trial of SpiraTeam to see how it works before purchasing?
  6. What is the difference between Spira Edition and Spira Version?
  7. Why should I use your SpiraTeam cloud service? Is it secure?

Purchasing Questions

  1. Can I pay for SpiraTeam using a purchase order?
  2. Do you offer a discount for Government, Non-Profit and Academic Institutions?
  3. Can I pay for SpiraTeam using a wire transfer or ACH payment?
  4. How will I access my instance of SpiraTeam?
  5. What is the price to upgrade from one edition of SpiraTeam to a higher edition?

Getting Started

  1. Should I setup my SpiraTeam users or products first?
  2. What are the different ways to set up users?
  3. What is the purpose behind a SpiraTeam template?
  4. What version or SpiraTeam edition is required for SpiraApps?
  5. How to Import Data into SpiraTeam from Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets?
  6. How to Import Data into SpiraTeam from Microsoft Word?
  7. Does SpiraTeam have an Application Programming Interface (API)?

On-Premise Installations

  1. How do I install SpiraTeam onto our environment? How do I resolve common issues?
  2. After restoring a backup of my database, I keep getting unable to login to database errors?
  3. SpiraTeam Javascript Not Loading Fully on Windows 8 and 8.1
  4. SpiraTeam Javascript Not Loading Fully on Windows Server 2012
  5. Application Dropdowns and Other Controls Not Displaying Correctly
  6. How do I migrate data from a trial installation of SpiraTeam to the production one?
  7. How do I move my SpiraTeam database to another server?

On-Premise Infrastructure

  1. How do I upgrade my installation of SpiraTeam to the latest version?
  2. Upgrading SpiraTeam from older version fails due to .NET 4.7.2 check failing
  3. What to do when a SpiraTeam Upgrade Fails?
  4. How should I backup my installation of SpiraTeam?
  5. Fixing I/O request taking longer than 15 seconds SQL Server errors
  6. How do I rebuild the database indexes when I get a database timemout error?
  7. Ways to Optimize SpiraTeam Performance

Technical & Support

  1. Where can I find information about SpiraTeam release notes or product roadmap?
  2. Where can I get information on the tables available for custom reporting?
  3. What is XSLT and why is it required for Custom Reporting?
  4. Where can I find more information on XSLT?
  5. How can I accelerate my knowledge of custom reporting available in SpiraTeam?
  6. What is Inflectra’s security and privacy policy for SpiraTeam?
  7. Common Email Sending Issues when using SpiraTeam

General Questions

  1. What makes SpiraTeam better than other Application Lifecycle Management systems?
    SpiraTeam has all the features you would expect in a world-class Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system yet is only a fraction of the price of our competitors. You just won't find a more feature-rich ALM suite at anywhere near the price of SpiraTeam.
  2. What makes SpiraTeam better than other Planning and Collaboration tools?
    SpiraTeam provides all the features you'd expect for creating, managing and executing project plans and tasks yet for the same price as many standalone collaboration systems you also get the tools to manage your project requirements and test cases, track the defects discovered during the project lifecycle and have a central document repository of all project artifacts.
    How many times have you wished you could prove to a customer that all the requirements have been fully completed and tested, that all bugs have been fixed. With SpiraTeam you can now manage projects with this level of rigor, using just one integrated application.
  3. What makes SpiraTeam better than other Test Management tools?
    SpiraTeam provides all the features you'd expect for creating, managing and executing user tests, yet for the same price as many standalone testing systems you also get the tools to manage your project requirements/scope, plan and estimate the development effort needed to complete the project, and track the defects discovered during the project lifecycle.
    How many times have you wished you could prove to a customer that all the requirements have been fully tested, and that all bugs have been fixed. With SpiraTeam you can now manage projects with this level of rigor, using just one integrated application.
  4. Do you have a guarantee? What if I'm not happy with SpiraTeam?
    We are so confident that you will be fully satisfied with our software that we offer an unconditional, 30-day money back guarantee!
  5. Can I take a trial of SpiraTeam to see how it works before purchasing?
    Absolutely, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial, which enables you to try out all of the features of SpiraTeam on either our SaaS environment or on your own servers. No credit card or payment needed, and you get all the features of the full system. Best of all, if you like SpiraTeam, you can switch to production and keep all your trial data. So, lets get started!
  6. What is the difference between Spira Edition and Spira Version?
    The editions control what level of artifacts, grouping, and additional functionality are available. Spira comes in three editions. These are:
    - SpiraTest
    - SpiraTeam
    - SpiraPlan

    The versions control functionality that is released or updated in the Spira editions as part of the SpiraTeam roadmap. For example, a version would be version 7.4 vs. version 7.3.

Purchasing Questions

  1. Can I pay for the software using a purchase order?
    Yes. We gladly accept purchase orders. Please contact us at sales@inflectra.com for more information.
  2. Do you offer a discount for Government, Non-Profit, and Academic Institutions?
    Yes. We offer a 20% discount off our already low price for non-profit, Government and academic institutions. Please contact us at sales@inflectra.com for more information.
  3. Can I pay for the software using a wire transfer or ACH payment?
    Yes. We gladly accept wire transfers and ACH payments. Please contact us at sales@inflectra.com for more information.
  4. How will I access my instance of SpiraTeam?
    Once your purchase has been confirmed you will be logged into the secure customer area of the website. For on-premise customers, this will contain the link to download the software as well as the license key for the version you purchased. For cloud customers, this will contain the URL for your dedicated instance of SpiraTeam, as well as any add-ons you have purchased for your subscription.
  5. What is the price to upgrade from one edition of SpiraTeam to a higher edition?
    The price to upgrade from one edition to a higher edition (e.g. from the 10-user to the 20-user edition) is just the incremental difference in price between the two editions. Please contact us at sales@inflectra.com for more information.

Getting Started Questions

  1. Should I setup my SpiraTeam users or products first?
    There is no preference. They can be done in parallel. What is important is that both the products and user setup are followed by product membership and role setup so that people can start working on the projects.
  2. What are the different ways to set up users?
    There are four ways to set up users. All these are based on the level of controlled access an organization plans to have. These involve the following:
    - Users sign up themselves. The benefit is that the administrator need not know the password. Any such user signed up should be approved in Spira by the administrator.
    - Users are added natively. The administrator can set up these users themselves and enforce organizational IT policies such as the password and MFA.
    - Users are signed up with OAuth providers: Users can sign up themselves by using one of the OAuth providers (like Google or OKTA Authentication). The administrator should set up the OAuth authentication.
    - Users are imported en-massse from Active Directory (using LDAP protocol). The benefit is that the organizational controls from AD are extended as part of the SSO.
  3. What is the purpose behind a SpiraTeam template?
    When products are created, they have some properties. These include types of artifact, priority, importance, severity, workflow, notifications, custom properties, etc. A business may want to have products/projects that have the same characteristics and avoid duplication of effort or potential misses among projects without a common way to standardize these properties. That common mechanism to standardize project properties is the template.
  4. What version or Spira edition is required for SpiraApps?
    SpiraApps are not connected with a specific edition but has limitations based on theedition. So, the better question would be what SpiraApps is relevant to various Spira editions. Since the Spira editions support certain artifacts, the specific SpiraApps is relevant based on the Spira edition.
    For instance, the FMEA SpiraApps uses the risk management module relevant only in SpiraPlan. Similarly, the Task and Test presets SpiraApps works with both Tasks and Tests. The task portion is relevant only for SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan but the Tests portion is relevant for all Spira editions.
  5. How to Import Data into SpiraTeam from Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets?
    SpiraTeam comes with a free utility to import tabular data (e.g. CSV or TSV exports) into the system. To make it easier, SpiraTeam provides add-ins for both Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets that allow you paste in your data and import in just a few steps.
  6. How to Import Data into SpiraTeam from Microsoft Word?
    SpiraTeam comes with a free utility to import requirement and test case Microsoft Word documents into the system. The importers can handle different document styles, images, tables and bullets/lists. To make it easier, SpiraTeam provides add-ins for both Microsoft Word 365 and Microsoft Word 2016 or earlier.
  7. Does SpiraTeam have an Application Programming Interface (API)?
    Yes, SpiraTeam comes with a robust, fully-versioned REST and SOAP API that contains built-in documentation and sample code for the different API calls. When we release a new version of SpiraTeam we make sure the older version APIs maintain backwards compatibility. This significantly reduces your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Technical & Support

  1. Where can I find information about SpiraTeam release notes or product roadmap?
    Inflectra publishes the SpiraTeam product roadmap and release notes at https://spiradoc.inflectra.com/About/roadmap/
  2. Where can I get information on the tables available for custom reporting?
    These are available in SpiraTeam documentation available from within the product as well as outside of the product. Please refer to https://spiradoc.inflectra.com/Reporting/Custom-Report-Tables/
  3. What is XSLT and why is it required for Custom Reporting?
    Custom Reporting is a niche field that requires a good understanding of extensible stylesheet language (XSLT) that transforms extended markup language (XML) required with a lot of data elements in SpiraTeam. The XSLT converts the data in XML to Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) so that these reports can be rendered in the browser or exported into one of the other formats like Portable Data Format (PDF) or Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel.
  4. Where can I find more information on XSLT?
    - Inflectra Documentation - https://spiradoc.inflectra.com/Reporting/Custom-Report-Tutorial/#understanding-xpath
    - Microsoft Documentation - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/data/xml/xslt-transformations
    - W3 Schools - https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xsl_intro.asp
  5. How can I accelerate my knowledge of custom reporting available in SpiraTeam?
    We recommend that you start with some of the tutorials first available. Once you have reviewed them, we recommend that you also look at Inflectra Knowledge Base on SpiraTeam Custom Reports.
    - Custom Reports Tutorial and Introduction
    - Webinar on Custom Reporting
    - Library of Example Custom Reports
  6. What is Inflectra’s security and privacy policy for SpiraTeam?
    Please read our security and privacy policy at https://www.inflectra.com/Company/Privacy-Policy.aspx