The Seapine View

A quick SAT-style analogy:
“Our software is bug-free.” : QA tested ::
      “Our software is easy-to-use.” : Usability tested

TestTrack TCM allows you to support the execution of any kind of application as a “script.” During installation, QA Wizard Pro scripting is configured but what if you use VBScript? or simple batch files? Or heaven forbid, an automated testing tool not named QA Wizard Pro?

That’s what we’ll address here, configuring TestTrack TCM to execute a variety of script types.
Continue reading…

Not long ago one of my marketing students asked “Will it play in Peoria?”  I don’t often hear that question anymore, but every now and then it surfaces.  If you have experience in marketing you may remember the real story behind that famous query.  You see, during the heyday of American vaudeville, the answer to that question determined whether a show would be a hit or a flop. The thinking was that if the show wasn’t acceptable to those in the heart of America’s heartland, there was no chance it would make it anywhere else in the country.  If it didn’t receive a strong approval, one of two things usually happened: The show was rewritten, or it was canceled. Later, the question was adopted by marketers as an informal phrase to stress the importance of making sure that your product or service addresses the needs and desires of your targeted market.

Interesting story Alan – but what’s your point?  Well, we recently asked the question; “Will Seapine play in Munich?”  And the answer is YES!  In fact, Seapine has acquired the business from QA Systems GmbH, a German company that has, over the past five years, distributed Seapine products. The German subsidiary will be called Seapine Software Europe GmbH, and the Munich office will be headed by Robert Riccetti, business development manager for Europe.  Building customer loyalty through quality is a long-term commitment and the establishment of Seapine Software Europe GmbH reaffirms our commitment to provide a quality customer experience for our customer base in Germany.

Trade shows and conferences can be effective vehicles for software vendors to both connect with and listen to customers.  In fact, if you attended the 2008 Game Developers Conference or SD West I hope you visited our booth and gave us the opportunity to meet you.  As we look to the future, our goal is to provide even more opportunities and channels to both listen to and connect with you – our valued software user community.  We’d also like to provide an easy way for you to network with more than just the handful of Seapine employees who attend conferences.

So, in the spirit of both connecting and networking, we invite you to join the new Seapine Software User Group on LinkedIn and/or Facebook. This action represents our initial move to both leverage the emerging power of social networks, and the beginning phase of building a formal Seapine Software User Group. Our user group efforts will start with these social networks, and gradually connect to a formal Seapine Software User Group site that we will host. In the longer term we will also organize traditional face-to-face user group meetings – starting off with regional road shows.

You may have a few questions. For example ***

1. Do I have to join LinkedIn and/or Facebook to be part of this new communications network?

2. If I do join will I get spam?

3. How does this impact the Seapine “User Forums” and support processes on Seapine.com?

The short answers ***

1. Yes. You do need a LinkedIn profile and/or Facebook profile to join a group that is associated with a social networking site.

2. No, spam has not been an issue.

3. No changes concerning customer service and support.  The purpose of these groups is not to work around the Seapine customer service processes or procedures. If you need technical support you should continue the established process which is to email your issue to support@seapine.com or call the support phone number for your region.

Like many of you we’re still learning a few things about social networks – like how to use them for the best possible customer experience.  With that in mind let me share our social networking group charter:

A LinkedIn / Facebook group for the Seapine Software User Group community. The purpose of the Seapine Software User Group is to open and expand conversation among Seapine’s associates and our colleagues using Seapine’s application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions. Opportunities to learn about and share resources related to Seapine applications as well as ALM in general will provide additional professional development benefits.

Following are the links to join LinkedIn and Facebook:

LinkedIn:

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/57703/093D49724592

Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8301473755

These groups are by invitation only.  So, if you decide to join simply click the link and provide your name, company, and the Seapine applications you are using so that we can verify your Seapine customer status.

I hope to see you in the groups.  If you have questions feel free to send me an email (seea@seapine.com).

In Search of Failure.  That’s the title of chapter seven in Frederick Reichheld’s book “The Loyalty Effect” (©1996).  In that chapter Reichheld points out that an investor who built a stock portfolio out of the companies profiled in the book “In Search of Excellence” (Peters and Waterman ©1982) would have seen their returns trounced by the mediocre performance of the S&P index during the ten year period following the books 1982 publication.  In fact, by time Reichheld’s book came out in 1996 only one-fifth of the original companies profiled as “excellent” had remained excellent.

If success breeds success, how in the “quest for benchmarking best practices” did those companies lose their lofty status?  In Reichheld’s opinion what really helps us to achieve excellence is actually the study of failure.  It’s not exactly in our nature to seek out failure though; in fact, your career is probably linked to success, which means that getting too close to failure may feel threatening.  However, most people will admit that mistakes are often better teachers than success.  In fact, QA experts will attest that when one component fails, it can cast a spotlight on the workings of an entire program.

The analysis of failure is not that easy; but when the analysis leads to sustained quality the pay-off is big.  In the Profit Impact of Marketing Strategy (PIMS) project the researchers (Buzzell and Gale, 1987) reported that the profitability of a business is affected by 37 basic factors. Based on analysis of information available in the PIMS database, Buzzell and Gale hypothesized that in the long run, the most important single factor affecting a business unit’s performance is the quality of its products and services relative to those of competitors.

The trick is to set up a process and system to track, test, analyze, and address potential issues, defects or problems before they negatively impact profitability.  In many ways quality and value are interlocked.  Customer value proposition models are based on the idea that customers with different needs require different experiences and different value propositions if the relationship between the customer and company is to be mutually beneficial.  And no value proposition will succeed in delivering profit to a company unless the customer perceives the product (or service) as meeting their needs best.

Recently we released the early results from our Seapine Software Quality-Ready Assessment, a survey that evaluates key indicators of quality within software development organizations. After collecting data from over 300 respondents, the results indicate that the top two factors driving development organizations to focus on ALM solutions are:

• The need to quickly respond to customer requests and requirements
• The need to reduce risk by preventing poor quality from impacting customer satisfaction

Software quality and reliability are lifelines to customer loyalty, and profitability.  Yet development organizations still struggle to achieve quality and deliver their products on time and within budget.  Survey results indicate that more than one third of companies completed their application development on time and within budget less than 75 percent of the time.  The survey also indicates that 70 percent of the companies are undertaking one of following actions to improve the quality of their software development:

• Clearly defining quality metrics
• Undertaking pilot projects or proof-of-concepts pertaining to software development quality
• Seeking executive sponsorship for software development quality improvements

The respondents represent companies of every size. Sixty-nine percent are small companies (less than $250M in revenue), 22 percent are mid-size ($250M – $2.5B), and nine percent are large. The leading industries represented include high tech (32%), financial services (16%), consumer products/retail (9%), and telecommunications (8%).

Software development and QA organizations can complete the assessment on-line (www.seapine.com/qualityready).  Once the initial benchmarking data has been tabulated I’ll let you know how various organizations (by revenue and industry) compare.

In the early 80’s I was a marketing director for a small oil field service company located in Abilene, Texas.  It was electrifying to be on location when a wildcatter hit oil.  If investors happen to on-site during the discovery they would literally break out the champagne bottles.  If the driller hit water and the well started pumping mud the show was over.  The only thing that can be done at that point is to plug the well, tear down the drilling rig, and move to the next location.  It seems fitting that during that early 80’s oil boom the developers at Texas Instruments would borrow oil field jargon to describe one of their error messages:

“SHUT ’ER DOWN, CLANCY, SHE’S PUMPING MUD”

Of course when a phrase of that nature is associated with code instead of oil the reaction – and results, can be devastating.  High-risk is a given when it comes to oil exploration.  In fact, only about 40% of wells recently drilled find commercial hydrocarbons.  When it comes to software though, customers expect the applications they buy to work 100 percent of the time.  Software defects can cause serious business consequences that have the power to ruin a company’s reputation, and possibly shut’er down forever.

Zero defects sounds unachievable, particularly during a time when products are so complex.  After all, aren’t software bugs just part of the feature set?  In truth, research shows that given the choice of higher cost, longer delivery time or poorer quality, customers will choose to protect quality.  That means development and QA organizations need to think like customers, and put aggressive quality programs in place to remain true to their customer-focused objectives.  A sustainable competitive advantage emerges when quality-centric business practices are put into place.  A focused discipline on service, quality, and reliability has proven to be a timeless strategy that both engages the customer, and builds loyalty.

My brain is full…

WPF Internals

The WPF Internals class was less about WPF and more about what made it work. Not quite what I expected, but interesting and useful regardless.

Dependency Properties are like normal C# properties, but with some special and interesting ideas that make them work for WPF. Unlike properties, they: can have a default value, do not use a backing store if one isn’t needed (i.e. if the property is set to a default value, it won’t bother allocating memory for the property), can inherit values from parent classes (e.g. if the form’s background color is red, and a button on the form is default, it will inherit the red), and can have change notification events setup for them.

“Commands” are single actions that can be attached to menu items, toolbars, etc. so that a single place can be marked enabled/disabled and cause a single action to fire when triggered. Almost another page directly from Qt’s QActions book.

Data Binding using the Dependency Property events creates simple action-reaction lines. Sort of like how Qt handles signals and slots.

Advanced UI Design Strategies

Jim Hobart had a great session on strategies for UI design. Here’s some of the better bullet points I picked up:

• Rules vs. Strategy: Rules (like UI guidelines) are like rules to any other game. You may know all of the rules on how to play basketball, but that won’t let you win the game. You need a strategy to succeed.
• Complex systems are still usable, there are some things that have to have a learning curve because of their complexity. Are you building a kazoo or a violin?
• If you ask a user “What fields can I get rid of?” they will always claim to need all of the fields. Instead of asking what fields to remove, ask the user what they’re trying to accomplish from the page.
• For an average web user, mousing over causing a highlight is a good way to indicate interaction is possible. After staying over for 1200ms-1300ms (gathered from testing), a popup of more information can be shown.
• Delays in the UI cause a user to lose their concentration. After about 2 seconds, users will lose track of what they were trying to do.
• People don’t read.
• UI designs for probability. (What do most users do?)
  Engineers design for possibility. (What might happen?)
• Better interfaces usually have a high ratio of content to the tools necessary to navigate that content.
• Error messages make a user feel dumb, whenever possible try to interpret whatever the user inputs and use that.

Some good UI classes today, likely best explained by the slides. Jeff Patton also gave a good analogy for UX testing. Looking at a parked car, can you tell how fast it can go? Sure, with a bit of knowledge about cars, you can make an educated guess, but it’s still just a guess. Usability is like that, you can look at a product and guess how well a user can use it to accomplish a task, but you’ll never really know unless you see them try it.

He also made mention of Donald Norman’s Emotional Design which had some good points to it, and I’ll have to read that book next. In it, it’s mentioned that perceived ugly things are labeled by users as “difficult to use”. Users will even report bugs in the software and use those to claim that it’s of poor quality. A “pretty” UI will still get users to ask for fixes, but they’ll be much more forgiving of them.

Jared M. Spool also gave a good talk on what causes software to be labeled “intuitive” and steps to take to get there. A lot of his talk was theory and results of his testing, with some nice visuals on the slides. Unfortunately, the slides are not yet available.

Just a few things of interest today:

On the UI, Vista Command Links are really a quite good alternative to annoying message boxes. Unfortunately, this implementation of them is Vista-only, making them near useless.

WPF seems like a page borrowed from Qt’s book. XML describes the UI, C# (or other .NET language of choice) controls what the UI is able to do. But they go beyond that and let you customize things like colors, gradients, shapes, animations, fonts, etc.

Microsoft Virtual PC is now available for free. You could even download a 30-day eval VHD of Vista if you wanted to run that.

In C# (and .NET in general), pinvoke.net offers the C#/VB method signatures needed to call into native Win32 (and other) APIs. Handy reference if you’re in to that sort of thing.