Zephyr Enterprise Product Development Process and Roadmap

Owned by Helen Kosova (Deactivated)
Apr 28, 2021
3 min read

The intent for this page is to provide transparency into our roadmap process for Zephyr Enterprise, including when and how we address feature requests and enhancements, and when to expect fixes for bugs and defects.

Quick Links

Feature Requests and Roadmap

 

Bugs and Defects

 

Our Product Development Process

This section explain how we prioritize and select feature requests and defects for development.

Release Cadence

Our release cadence for Zephyr Enterprise is:

Major Releases

  • New features and enhancements, and as many bugs/defects as possible

  • Cadence: Approximately every quarter

Minor Releases

  • Address critical bugs and defects that cannot wait until the major release

  • Cadence: Approximately every month

Patch Releases

  • Address blocker bugs with no workaround available

  • Cadence: As needed

Process for Bugs and Defects

For filing bugs and defects, please first file a ticket with our support team who will review the bug and file it internally for our development team: https://support.smartbear.com/zephyr-enterprise/message/

Process for Feature Requests and Enhancements

Filing and upvoting on feature requests

To upvote and file new feature requests, please visit our Ideas Portal: https://zephyrenterprise.ideas.aha.io/ideas

Feature requests and enhancements go through the following steps:

  1. File: Customers file a new idea through our Ideas Portal

    1. The idea remain private to the customer only and starts in the ‘Needs Review’ status

  2. Review: The Product Team reviews the idea

    1. If aligned with our product strategy, the idea is made public and goes into the ’Gathering Interest' status

    2. If not aligned with our strategy, the idea goes into the ‘Not Aligned’ status and we provide an explanation

    3. If the idea is a duplicate or is an existing feature, the idea goes into the ‘Already Exists’ status and we provide a link to the feature

  3. Gather Interest: Ideas gather interest and votes from other customers

    1. Other customers can comment and upvote ideas in the portal

Selecting features for each release

  1. Planning kick-off: We kick off planning for new releases about 6 weeks ahead of development. We reach out to our customers and formally request to review and up-vote feature requests in our Ideas Portal.

  2. Features selected for consideration: About 4 weeks ahead of development, the ZE Product Team selects a list of candidate features for the release. These features go into the ‘Considering for next release’ status.

  3. Features committed for the release: About 2 weeks ahead of development, we select a final committed list of features for the release. The committed features go into the ‘In-progress for next release’ status, and the features that didn’t make it go back to the ‘Gathering interest’ status.

  4. Development kick-off: During release development, no more features request are considered until the next cycle.

  5. Release available: Once the release is available, the released features move into the ‘Shipped’ status

How we select features

Our new feature development bandwidth is made up from features in the following buckets:

  1. Most voted features from our Ideas Portal

  2. Features aligned to our roadmap themes: Automation, Reporting, and BDD support

  3. Special needs of our customers

Timelines for Feature Selection

We are currently working on ZE 7.0, which targets March 31, 2021

The timelines for the next release are as follows:

  • Milestone 1: Mar 3 Kick-off planning and review feature requests from the Ideas Portal

  • Milestone 2: Apr 14 Draft scope for release 7.1

  • Milestone 3: May 5 Final scope for release 7.1 and kick off development

  • Milestone 4: EO Q2 Release 7.1 available for upgrade