The Seapine View

What a strange name for a blog.

Less stress. More quality. Isn’t that an oxymoron?

A lot of people in software development today would say that one of these words doesn’t belong with the others. If you are going to create quality software, isn’t it a given that you’ve signed up (or been volunteered) for a lot of extra hours, headaches, worry, concern, fear, uncertainty, doubt, hassles, arguments, ulcers, and anxiety?

You know, stress.

While I have been known to keep an industrial drum-sized bottle of TUMS on my desk during various projects in my career, over the years I have learned that there are ways to deliver high quality software and still keep your stress level within reasonable bounds.

It’s not always easy, but it is possible. Most of the time.

This blog will focus on what I’ve learned about creating quality software with less stress. You won’t need your antacids if you have the following available for your next project:

• good practices
• great tools
• a little fun

Good Practices
I’m not a fan of the phrase “best practices.” Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem learning from the successes and mistakes of those who have gone before me. Good software engineers, testers, and managers have sacrificed evenings with the family, their waistlines, and their next promotion to bring us hard fought knowledge of good ways to solve the software development problems that plague us.

I just don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all solution.

What works best for two programmers in a garage won’t necessarily be the best solution for the team at NASA working on a Martian explorer or a Hubble Telescope. Show me good ways others have solved similar problems and I’ll pick the best solution for my current situation.

On these blog pages, I intend to share what I’ve learned about creating quality software. In return, I hope you will share what you’ve learned on your own projects with me.

Great Tools

What can I say? There’s a reason I wanted to be the product manager for the best family of issue and defect tracking and test case management tools on the market. I love my products! I was a user and fan of TestTrack long before I joined Seapine.

Stop by these pages for tips on how to use TestTrack Pro, TestTrack TCM, and TestTrack Studio to implement your good practices.

A Little Fun
Some days we all need to be reminded to breathe deep and smile. (The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t always an oncoming train.)

Stressed-out, unhappy people make bad decisions. Bad decisions make bad software.

Good practices implemented with great tools make quality software. And nothing reduces the stress in your software development life like producing quality software.

I hope you can visit each week. I’ll be doing my best to fill these pages with good practices, great tools, and a little fun that you can use on your projects.

We’re investigating adding an annotate/blame feature in Surround SCM. If your not familiar with this concept, it allows you to mark every line in a file with the date, version and person who last changed it. For example, if the current version of your file looks something like this

int bar;
bar=7;
bar++;
if (bar>7)
    printf(“Big bar”);

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The April 2008 issue of Quirk’s Marketing Research Review noted that research company Harris Interactive conducted an online survey to learn if having a tattoo made people feel or act differently.  The article was interesting to me because my father was 18 years old and serving in the USMC during the Korean Conflict when he was tattooed.  The motto permanently inked into his skin boldly reads “Death before Dishonor.”  If you’re an old school Marine you understand the meaning; otherwise you might think he supports the Boston hard core punk band that now uses that motto for their name.  Just kidding, it would be difficult to associate a Marine from the 1950’s with today’s punk band scene. 

The word “tattoo” is a borrowing of the Samoan word tatau, meaning to mark.  Today, people choose to be marked for several reasons, and often to symbolize their belonging to or identification with a particular group.   In some respects your brand is like a tattoo.  More than just a logo, symbol or slogan though; a brand conveys to consumers a strong, positive sense of a product, its promised value, and why it’s different and better than the competition.  As a marketer you’d probably like your brand tattooed over your customers’ heart.  So, when it comes to “quality branding” – which centers on delivering a quality customer experience in order to build a quality brand – are you using permanent ink or temporary tattoos that only last a few days? 

In the Seapine Software Quality-Ready Assessment we asked respondents: “What level of priority does your company currently assign to building quality into your software development environment?”  Nearly 65% of our over 600 respondents rated their software quality initiatives as high or one of their top priorities.  Those initiatives are likely to be marked with permanent ink so to speak.

However; it also appears that many companies are still not committed to quality branding.  In other words, they are only paying lip service about quality, and as a result there is a discrepancy with how their customers view the relationship.  Consider the following statistics from the Cutter Consortium, an IT advisory firm.

• 32% of organizations say they release software with too many defects.
• 38% of organizations believe they lack an adequate software quality assurance program.
• 27% of organizations do not conduct any formal quality reviews.

Quality, like branding must be a core business function, and it needs to be permanently inked into the skin of the entire organization to create a sustainable quality-advantage.

A few months ago we started our Quality Ready Assessment (QRA). This is a straightforward web tool to help companies and individuals measure their overall software quality level by asking them a short series of questions around overall application lifecycle. Companies who take this get a customize assessment, and internally we look at anonymize trends in the data.

We’ve gotten a tremendous response so far, and we continue to slice and dice the data to better understand how people who work in and around application development get things done. As a starting point, I’ve looked at the data for SCM usage and found some interesting trends.

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I spend a lot of time talking to customers. I think it is one of the best parts of my job. I enjoy talking to all my customers; even those that want to perform open-heart surgery on you with a blank DVD.
I recently had a conversation with a customer that shocked me. I have a set group of questions I always ask. I almost always get the same grouping of answers. Here are some samples:

• Tell me a little about your company’s commitment to quality?
• Describe your companies QA department?
• Why did you choose to buy a Quality Automation tool?

This last question is always answered one of two ways. Most customers answer with we want to reduce our manual testing on repetitive tests. Great reason! Another answer I always get is; we want to get our product to market faster, so we wanted to automate the repetitive tasks. Another great reason!

This customer’s answer really set me back on my heels. He said, “I have a very high turnover in my QA department. Once I started to automate, the testers felt like they were no longer drones pushing buttons.” This was one of the most enlightening conversations I have had with a customer. Not because they use automation to launch the space shuttle (not really), because they used it to keep employee turnover cost down. How much does it cost a company when a tester leaves? If you are a small company (1-2 testers), how important are your testers?

My name is Jeff Amfahr, and I am the product manager for Surround SCM here at Seapine. After a groundswell of demand (thanks Dad!), I’ve decided to start writing about some of the issues exciting ideas and opportunities around SCM in general and Surround SCM in particular. In addition, I believe it’s only a matter of time before I’m slandered by Grant so I wanted to acquire my own mouthpiece. As Rupert Murdoch already snatched up the Wall Street Journal, this seemed like my best bet.

Over time, I’ll be keeping you apprised of what’s happing with the Surround product, soliciting feedback on directions and features we’re looking at and talking about some of the challenges exciting opportunities of working in this space.

Surround is a very interesting product, since we use it internally. This is a real mixed blessing. On the one hand, when things aren’t working well we feel it ourselves. I get feature requests all the time from team members. Developers “get” almost all of the use cases.

On the other hand, it’s easy to be blinded by our internal development process and use cases. “No one does it that way” and “It’s really important that XYZ be fast as people do that all the time” are easy to slip into the thought process.

I have to try and balance making features that I and other team members want/use to be perfect versus optimizing features that we don’t use, but some large part of our customer base might. And the challenge is how to find out what people are using (and why), since the feedback loop is rarely perfect. Hence, this blog as another avenue to let people in on the fun.

Hopefully you find the information here useful, as I give some additional insight into how Surround is evolving and you give me insight on how it should evolve. If nothing else, if you regularly read this as well as Grant’s postings, you run the risk might have the chance to be deposed at the inevitable lawsuit and/or criminal case.

It’s possible to use AppleScript and Microsoft Office for the Mac to provide improved integration between Surround SCM and Microsoft Word on the Macintosh. Below are some sample AppleScript snipets that show you how to do this.
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Did you happen to see the front cover of the April 7^th copy of “InformationWeek?”  The picture was related to the article “The end run around IT – and how CIO’s can prevent it” by John Soat.  Of all the executive level positions to choose from, why was “Marketing” pictured as the player making the sweeping end run in the OPPOSITE direction of the CIO?

Well, marketing automation, marketing optimization, marketing resource management, BI / customer profitability projects, SEM, and social networking initiatives (just to name a few) do provide plenty of technology situations in which it might be tempting to bypass my CIO and ask for forgiveness later.  On the other hand, I prefer a play book in which the CMO and CIO are leading the charge together with power sweeps.  Let me explain; at USC, opponents are often fed a healthy diet of the Trojans’ famed “student body left” and “student body right” toss sweeps. Hordes of very large sized linemen lead fleet tailbacks left or right with regularity for healthy gains.  In a like manner, I’ve found my marketing strategy is more likely to produce healthy gains when I keep my IT organization in tight, leading the charge with me.

With that said, how about your development and QA organizations?  Are they in tight leading the power quality sweep for competitive gains that result in customer loyalty and healthy profitability?  Or does it sometimes look like end runs heading in opposite directions?

The Seapine Software Quality-Ready Assessment (www.seapine.com/qualityready) asked the following key question:  How well do your development and QA teams collaborate? To date we’ve had nearly 600 responses to our survey, and the results are very interesting. The answers follow:

1. Regularly scheduled meetings keep the development and QA teams up-to-date.  29%
2. All team members stay informed of each other’s tasks and progress through automatic assignments, email notifications, and RSS feeds.  24%
3. The QA manager is informed when development is completed.  18%
4. The teams do not interact. New builds are “thrown over the wall” when they are completed.  16%
5. Development teams track their status in a spreadsheet, which the QA team can access to check the project status.  13%

At a glance it appears about half of those who have taken the survey are facing 3^rd and long situations.  By that I mean there isn’t tight collaboration between development and QA capable of producing a sustainable competitive quality-drive.  For your marketing and sales counterparts that’s disappointing news because the odds are low that they’ll be able to provide the Hail Mary pass capable of keeping your customer relationship drive alive.  No matter how you try to spin it – poor quality is a tough sell, especially in the red zone.

Does your software development and QA strategy clearly support your customer relationship strategy?  Feel free to take my polling question (to the right) and let’s see how many power sweeps are in play.

The April 2008 copy of QP magazine pays homage to Joseph M. Juran. In 1951, the first edition of Dr. Juran’s “Quality Control Handbook” was published establishing his reputation as an authority on quality.

Dr. Juan’s take on quality control: “For quality in the sense of freedom from deficiencies, the long-range goal is perfection.”

Quality to Dr. Juan also involved the human experience. So, is there such a thing as the perfect customer experience? Well, we’d like to set that standard. In fact, Seapine Software recently joined the ASQ as a sustaining member bringing additional substance behind our commitment.

How about your company? What kind of standard would you like to set? Juran’s take on standards: “Without a standard, there is no logical basis for making a decision or taking action.”

Top flight customer support can create a sustainable competitive advantage for company’s that are able to deliver the right customer care.  Delivering superior customer support may sound easy; however, it’s not.  In fact, according to a survey by Harris Interactive and RightNow Technologies 85% of consumers say they’ve sworn, shouted, cried, smashed things, or experienced chest pains while waiting for help on tech-support call lines.  In other words, many support organizations are not doing it right.       

In my marketing role at Seapine I’m very thankful to have a world-class support organization standing behind our brand.  The Seapine Customer Support organization is staffed by individuals who are truly customer-focused, and their efforts positively impact our customers.  That impact was recently reflected in our March customer satisfaction surveys.  The attached is an amusing and fun message that originally went out only to Seapine employees.  I’m going to take a chance and share it with you:

You’re invited to view a short presentation titled Seapine Software Customer Support:

http://www.brainshark.com/seapine/Great_Customer_Support

OK, OK …my impersonation of Harry Caray isn’t world-class, but now you know why I’m excited about our customer support.  Great support is part of a quality customer experience.