ZenTao Blog

ZenTao once again stands out from the crowd as the most common test management tool in the industry. This is the eighth year in a row that ZenTao has been the winner of "Common Test Management Tools"!

Before we dig down on to consider migration from Jira to ZenTao, let’s start with the basics, for business positions, who might be new to this. We’ll briefly introduce you to Jira, it’s the most popular alternative — ZenTao, and then touch base on the most common reasons, why businesses decided to move from Jira to ZenTao.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, R&D teams struggle with poor cross-team collaboration, project delays, and applying Agile frameworks (e.g., Scrum) from theory to practice. ZenTao Community’s "ZenTao China Tour" offers an "Agile-Driven R&D" workshop, using painting to co-create a "Crazy Zoo" project. It forms random teams, integrates Agile games, and simulates Scrum lifecycles. The workshop helps participants master Scrum, adopt user-centric thinking, boost collaboration/leadership, and apply Scrum via gamification. With 16 years of experience, ZenTao’s practical-focused workshop acts as a catalyst for enterprises’ Agile transformation.

This article addresses proactive prevention in quality and security management amid rising global cyberattacks, noting outdated post-development security is obsolete. It introduces "Shift Left Security" and details ZenTao’s practices: clear coding/test/submission standards (tool-enforced), technical tool integration, rigid R&D processes, and improved planning meetings, aiming to control risks early.

This article highlights that traditional experience-driven software project management fails to address pain points like chaotic requirements, delayed progress, and quality-progress imbalance. It introduces ZenTao, a Chinese localized tool, which solves these issues via full-process closed-loop management (covering requirements, progress, quality) and balances professionalism with usability, enabling efficient, data-backed project delivery.

This article emphasizes the critical role of leadership for project managers, highlighting that many managers in daily work demand high standards from subordinates but fail to meet them themselves. It clarifies that "leading by example"—the core and most cost-effective management approach—includes three dimensions: behavioral demonstration, value transmission, and responsibility. Additionally, it provides four practical tips (constant self-awareness, starting with small things, avoiding evasion/shirking, proactive feedback) to practice this leadership, noting that true leadership comes from charisma and example, not just position.

This article addresses the profitability challenges faced by Chinese software companies, which are rooted in "non-standardized work in a non-standardized market." It proposes five practical solutions: strictly controlling company size (replacing labor with efficiency via tools like ZenTao), streamlining management hierarchies to enable faster communication, balancing flexible and controlled processes, emphasizing engineering practices to turn code into assets, and building an open, team-respecting culture. ZenTao, a project management tool, is highlighted throughout as a key enabler for implementing these strategies, helping companies cut costs and boost profitability.

This article states that IT project managers (PMs), as core leaders, oversee project quality, schedule, cost and risks via full-lifecycle management. It covers PMs’ basic requirements (e.g., aligning with company goals, team management), 10 core lifecycle tasks, and key capabilities in quality, schedule, cost and risk management, stressing integrated professionalism and collaboration for efficient delivery.

This article stresses data’s vital role in modern project management’s effective reporting, revealing progress, efficiency and value. It notes communication’s key part in project success and PMs’ use of data to boost credibility and decision-making. It details 6 actionable techniques (e.g., data authenticity, concise presentation), with examples like Apple and Tesla, and emphasizes combining data with stories/plans to improve reporting and PMs’ strategic leadership.

This article analyzes the starkly different strategies of Amazon and Walmart in response to Generative AI's disruption of retail. Amazon adopts a defensive "walled garden" approach, blocking AI crawlers to protect its highly profitable model of controlling the customer journey from search to sale. Conversely, Walmart pursues an open, "bridge-building" strategy, positioning itself as the indispensable fulfillment backbone for any AI assistant by making its inventory and logistics data easily accessible. This strategic divergence reflects a fundamental bet on the future of commerce, as AI threatens to unbundle the traditional path to purchase and redefine who owns the customer relationship.

This article asserts that effective product design must be fundamentally rooted in business strategy. It argues that product architecture should be a direct reflection of business architecture, rather than a collection of isolated features. Using the analogy of a building's blueprint, the piece illustrates how core business objectives—be it efficiency, risk management, or growth—must serve as the ultimate measure for all design decisions. It advocates for a forward-looking approach, creating flexible and scalable products that can evolve with the business. The central message is a call for product managers to transition from requirement takers to strategic partners focused on co-creating tangible business value.

This article reframes software engineering as a discipline focused on managing inherent complexity and chaos, rather than merely following a set of rituals. It argues against the "more, faster, better, cheaper" myth, positioning the art of making intelligent trade-offs between speed, quality, and cost as a core engineering skill. The central thesis is that software development is fundamentally a process of high-fidelity "information transformation"—from a vague business idea into precise, functional code. All practices, including abstraction, feedback loops, and automation, are presented as tools to ensure this transformation is accurate, efficient, and ultimately delivers reliable value.