The January 2012 issue of The Seapine View Bulletin is now available. The newsletter includes Seapine news, product announcements, upcoming events, product tips, and more. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on the latest Seapine news and information.
Join us for the What’s New in Seapine ALM 2012 webinar on February 7th as we showcase over 100 new features and enhancements for Seapine ALM 2012. The improvements to Seapine ALM 2012, which includes TestTrack, Surround SCM, and QA Wizard Pro, aim to help you deliver quality software faster.
New TestTrack features include a new native relational database, custom fields that calculate values, and draft and active custom fields. Surround SCM’s new features include improved offline support, more flexible mainline branches, and additional integrations, while QA Wizard Pro now features stress testing, Google Chrome support, integration enhancements, and more.
In the one-hour webinar, Paula Rome and Grant Lammi, Seapine product managers, will demonstrate the new features in Seapine ALM 2012. When the demonstration is over, you’ll have time to ask questions and learn more.
The webinar is being offered twice to accommodate Europe and North America attendees. The first webinar begins at 2:00 p.m. Western European Time (9:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time), and the second will follow at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (11:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time).
Join us!
Seapine’s kicking off the New Year (okay, the Chinese New Year) with a completely revamped web site! Click on over to www.seapine.com and check out our new layout and features.
We’ve loaded the site with new content and reworked the navigation to make it all easier to find. You’ll also see these changes:
- Home Page – The home page has been redesigned to give you quicker access to the latest content on our site. You’ll find easy access to customer stories, news, and event info.
- Solutions – The solutions pages have more industry-specific information, and we’ve also added solution pages for each area of the product development lifecycle our products address. In addition, we included a set of solutions to address Agile, traceability, and test-driven development.
- Events – We’ve been attending more trade shows lately, so we’ve put together a page to tell you which shows we’ll be at and what we’ll be doing there. Stop by a show, grab your Seapine swag, and see what’s new with TestTrack, Surround SCM, and QA Wizard Pro!
- Videos and Blog Entries – The solutions and product pages now include more video and blog entry links. We have been busy creating informative content and the new web site does a better job of showcasing it.
Explore our new site and let us know what you think! (And yes, we’re still working out the kinks, so if you see anything that looks a little wonky, please let us know that, too.)
QA Wizard Pro 2012 includes stress testing, which allows you to disable your network adapter or even limit the available memory while you are running your automated scripts. You’ll now be able to see how your application will respond when the host operating system runs out of disk space or loses network connectivity. You can also limit the amount of available memory.
Watch the following video to learn how to use stress testing and see an example of how an application’s behavior changes when certain stress features are enabled.
A funny thing happened during the writing of this blog post—I found a regression bug. And what is particularly great about this (as great as any regression bug can be) is that I found it by taking some screenshots of the Surround SCM feature I wanted to talk about.
That, folks, is serendipity.
Penn and Teller
Side note: Years ago I saw a live show of Penn and Teller. And Penn did his juggling broken bottles bit where he takes bottles, typically liquor bottles, then breaks them on stage, and proceeds to juggle their broken remains. This gives a sense of authenticity to the audience as he’s doing something real right before your eyes. He even says something to the effect, “I do this trick all the time, but for real, THIS time these bottles broke in a REALLY difficult way.” That’s classic magician stuff, build the excitement even if the words aren’t true.
How does this relate here you ask? I honest to goodness, cross my heart and hope to die, REALLY did find a regression bug while researching this blog post. For real.
Seapine is proud to help sponsor Software Quality Days 2012 in Vienna, Austria. Seapine will also be exhibiting and presenting at the conference, which takes place January 17-19 at the Austria Trend Hotel Savoyen Vienna.
Peter Varhol, Seapine Solution Evangelist, will give a presentation on “Integrating Testing into Agile Development.” Peter will talk about testing and the role of testers in Agile methodologies, with a focus on integrating testing into an Agile practice. He’ll examine traditional testing practices and how those practices should adapt to achieve the goals of a chosen Agile methodology.
Martin Kochloefl, Seapine Solutions Consultant, will present “Guidelines for Software Testers in an Agile Era,” in which he explains how both testing and the role of testers change in an Agile development environment. Martin will discuss how managers can help testing teams adapt to those changes, with the goal of effectively integrating testing with development to create one cohesive team that consistently delivers quality software.
Being able to calculate a risk score for your items in TestTrack enables teams to make informed decisions when doing things like ranking or project prioritization. This video shows you how to create the fields you’ll need and how to set up risk score calculation inside TestTrack. It uses a generic risk calculation formula; I expect that, in some cases, you will use different formulas to calculate your risk score.
In 2011, we released the Agile Essentials for Project Teams class for external pilot and it quickly sold out. The feedback we have received so far has been great and we are hard at work making the content even better for the 2012 classes. In this post and in the next two, I’ll write a total of three primers, each discussing a section from the class. Hopefully these primers will help you decide if the Agile Essentials for Projects Team class is right for you and encourage you to take the class.
What is Agile anyway? This question is answered in the Naked Agile section of the class. Many people have made the mistake of confusing Agile with Scrum. It’s important to understand that Agile is not Scrum—Scrum is one Agile methodology among many. While Scrum is a good method, it is unfortunately often sold as the Agile pill to cure all ills. To truly be Agile, teams need a deeper understanding of the philosophy behind Agile methodologies such as Scrum.
When I’m writing code I do two things quite often.
- I refactor and try to get rid of as much code as possible. The less code I write means the less bugs I can write. (Awesome.)
- I nearly always forget to add new files I’ve created to Surround SCM. (Not awesome.)
At best item #2 means the continuous integration server yells at me. At worst it means one of the other developers yells at me and I need to buy donuts for breaking the build. And I don’t even like donuts.
Surround SCM 2012 includes a new feature that enables you to set separate options for each of your mainline branches. You can now use a server-wide configuration or have individual configurations for each mainline branch, which gives you more control of your mainlines.
