While 2017 is drawing to a close, product teams remain diligent despite the constant pressure to deliver the best product in Q4 while simultaneously setting plans to improve in the New Year. CMO’s and CPO’s now realize product teams must wear many hats to juggle multiple projects; and, depend on software services. According to a recent report from Wrike, software improved business aspects including team communication (52%), quality of product (44%), efficient timeline management (44%) and customer satisfaction (38%).
Feeling like the methods in place for your teams are a bit outdated and lacking the efficiency and ease? If your company is looking for new solutions, here’s a roundup of SaaS services that will make things like development strategy, product roadmaps and validation testing woes a thing of the past.
Centercode: The best brands go-to partner for better products
While most companies want customer feedback prior to product launch, few actually get it — and if they do, it’s a clunky process that doesn't provide actionable takeaways.
Centercode is fixing that by introducing the first complete Customer Validation platform, ensuring customer feedback is feature rich, functional and as effective as possible for software developers and product managers. Centercode beta managers typically achieve participation rates above 90 percent on their beta tests, more than three times the industry average.
Centercode is trusted by hundreds of top-tier brands across all industries, from Tinder to Disney, Bose, and Apple just to name a few. These companies know its’ soft or hardware products are good because of the rigorous and targeted consumer testing.
Zephyr: All assets, across all projects, in one place.
The product suite of Zephyr addresses difficulty in the transition to agile, challenges faced by globally distributed teams, slow release cycles, sub-standard quality, business decisions based on stale data, and ever-changing tool sets. With Zephyr, there is a 45% increase in team productivity, shortening testing schedules by two weeks and slashing total costs of ownership by 63%.
For example, Hyundai tested telematics with Zephyr enterprise software, which provided a bi-directional integration to JIRA, giving Hyundais's project team complete traceability. Furthermore, by integrating Zephyr Enterprise to selenium, Hyundai was able to view manual and automated tests in one dashboard. Overall, Hyundai saved time as reporting became a result of work being done, improving communication on status and quality.
CloudPassage: offering battle-tested security with the leading enterprises
If software isn’t safe and secure, an entire project or company’s reputation is held accountable. For example, after several years of strong growth, Xero knew they needed some new technologies to support their next wave of growth. Specifically, Xero needed technologies that would enable: fast scalability, quick infrastructure deployment and automated security.
“The old adage was ‘You can go fast, or you can be secure’. Now that Xero has CloudPassage Halo, it can be both fast and secure,” said Aaron McKeown, of Xero.
CloudPassage Halo is an on-demand, automated server and cloud workload security intelligence platform that delivers continuous compliance and universal visibility across enterprise infrastructures – from data centers to public clouds. Halo employs an ultra-lightweight microagent that automatically collects and analyzes vast amounts of security configuration, vulnerability assessment, threat, and compliance parameters to discover gaps based on your own security standards.
Employing comprehensive APIs, Halo delivers information to security teams and application dev teams/owners in formats consumable by the tools used to manage configuration and remediation, including JIRA, RSA Archer, Splunk, and even Excel. In advanced CI/CD-DevOps environments Halo is integrated directly into the application development and delivery pipeline using Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, and many others.
LogiGear: The Automation Acceleration Tool for QA teams
LeapFrog partnered with LogiGear and launched an ambitious initiative to outsource 80% of all software testing. To ensure the success of the strategy, LogiGear developed a custom growth, training and execution plan that enabled the company to outsource 100% of its functional software testing.
One of the keys to the success of the campaign is found in Actions—think keywords on steroids—which lets you write tests in a plain text, business-readable, domain specific language to create, document and automate tests all in one step.
LogiGear offers a library of 386 (and counting) pre-programmed actions that interact with system, GUI controls, command-line, database, images and more, to fulfill functional testing needs. All come with rich functionalities such as auto-wait-object that make them ready to be used without scripting.When needed, user-defined actions can also be scripted in C#, Java or Python and made ready for the whole team to reuse.
While challenges and obstacles are to be expected, there is a wealth of resources available for teams looking to be on the cutting edge of development. What tools have revolutionized your product management team in 2017, or what software are you researching to potentially implement next year?
Edited by
Ken Briodagh
