The Seapine View

I’m pleased to announce that we have released TestTrack 2008.2 today!

There are many new features and enhancements in 2008.2 that will save you time and make you more productive. I’ll be focusing on some of my favorite features in upcoming blog entries, but for now you can check out the What’s New page to see the highlights.

[Pssst…. Check out the new Interactive Filters!]

I’d like to give a special thanks to our wonderful TestTrack beta users. We got some great feedback from you guys that we were able to incorporate into this release. Keep the good ideas coming!

One of the many strengths of automated testing is its ability to data drive your scripts. This ensures that you have a wide coverage of inputs for your tests.  This also allows you to create data sets that can be used repeatedly with verifiable results. QA Wizard Pro allows you to read from both external data (e.g., SQL Server, Oracle, Excel, etc.) as well as the ability to use internal datasheets. These are useful when your corporate DBA does not have time to create a quick data table for your tests.

Data driving your scripts offers two great advantages. One key advantage is that scripts can quickly iterate through data that is required to complete transactions in the application. You can enter customer data with wide variations. This allows for a deeper and more thorough testing of your product.

The other critical step in data driven testing is your scripts ability to verify the result of the data entered. You can create data sets that contain the expected value or values. Since each row in a data set may have a different outcome, you can checkpoint your scripts to validate the results. You can also create data driven checkpoints to validate that lists, grids, or combos are populating with the correct data. Manually inspecting the accuracy of data in a list is often time consuming and monotonous; data driven checkpoints eliminate the need for a manual inspection.

Watch the Data-Driven Testing with QA Wizard Pro webinar for an in-depth look at how to use data to drive your QA Wizard Pro scripts.

An article in the August 12^th edition of the WSJ (“Ford Vows to Build Higher-Quality Small Cars“) noted that “The Dearborn, Mich., company promised… that its new compact and subcompact vehicles – due out in 2010 – will beat the industry average when it comes to quality.” The company’s goal is to “keep the number of quality problems – known in the industry as “things gone wrong” – at 800 per 1,000 vehicles.” I’ll have to admit that my family, including my three children, own five Toyota’s and that Ford would have an uphill battle to capture our attention at this point. How about you? Is it too late for Ford?

Has your company recently taken a vow to higher-quality? From the very beginning of understanding your customer’s needs, wants and desires through the development of customer loyalty you’ll find that quality can create a competitive advantage. Attracting new customers, expanding current relationships through cross selling and finally, retention, these are the drivers that represent revenue growth and research shows that quality impacts all three of those drivers.

The technology industry is no exception. Poor software quality (things gone wrong) – better known as “bugs” in the software industry, impact the top line, bottom line, and everything in-between; including the customer experience. In February Seapine Software introduced the quality-ready assessment. The QRA is a high-level evaluation tool that helps develop­ment organizations measure the state of their software quality-readiness in four key ALM competency areas. Those areas include tracking, testing, automation, and change. Nearly 1,000 individuals have now completed the QRA survey, and according to the results 65 percent of the respondents stated that building quality into their software was either a top or high priority. In addition, the survey found that the top two factors driving organizations to focus on application lifecycle management are:

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

The take away here is that you should not be placing your quality vows on hold because there is a high probability that your competition is moving full steam ahead.

If you would like to learn more about our research results, download the QRA Fast Facts Series white paper.

This sample uses a TestTrack trigger to create a bug in FogBugz upon a failed test run.
Continue reading…

I was recently interviewed by Mike Lippis for the Outlook Series. Listen to the interview.

Mike was interested in my perspective on test case management and issue tracking. As you might expect, I was pretty shy about talking about the advantages these types of tools bring to software development teams. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to listen to the entire interview in one sitting.)

Just out of curiosity, how would you answer these questions?

• Can you answer the question “Are we ready to ship today?” the same day you ask the question?

• Are you confident that your testers and developers are focusing their efforts on the highest priority tasks?

• Do you know if the product you shipped has all of the features your stakeholders asked for? Can you prove it to auditors?

If you didn’t answer yes to all of these, then you are a good candidate for adding an integrated test case management and issue tracking solution to your development tool arsenal. And I just happen to know of a great solution!

Check out TestTrack Studio today. You won’t be sorry.

I warned you.

In my first post to this blog I promised that I would occasionally discuss a topic whose only redeeming value would be bringing a little fun to a stressed out day. This is one of those posts.

I’d like to share a fun web site I recently discovered, Cooking for Engineers. Some of you who’ve had the misfortune of eating something cooked by me might at first be surprised (and a little alarmed) that I was exploring a cooking site.

Guest: Mmmm…, er, what is it?

Me: It’s an experiment. It’s something new!

Guest: There’s a lot of it, isn’t there?

Me: Fine. I’ll order pizza.

But Cooking for Engineers does a good job of summing up its appeal.

“Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!”

If you appreciate a well-written, reproducible bug report or delight in a tester independent test case, then I strongly suspect you will enjoy this site. Check out the recipes for English Toffee, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Barbecue Pork Ribs. There’s hope for me yet!

Make sure you scroll all the way to the bottom of the recipes. That’s where you’ll find a novel way of representing a recipe’s steps and ingredients. You won’t want to go back to a normal recipe format again! (BTW, let me know if you explore using this format to model process oriented test cases.)

Thanks to Jeff for introducing me to Cooking for Engineers. Don’t worry. I won’t bring anything I cook into the office.

Did you know that you can use folders to bookmark items in TestTrack ?

Just like you can bookmark a favorite page in your web browser, TestTrack’s folders let you keep track of your favorite issues, defects, test cases, and test runs. OK, so maybe favorite isn’t the word you would use to describe these types of items, but the fact remains that it’s awfully darn convenient to be able to quickly file away special items so they are easy to find later.

There are lots of situations where this can come in handy.

• Say you are in the middle of prioritizing newly entered bugs and there are one or two that you want to come back to after you’ve done a little research.

• It’s time to do some release planning and you want to tag items for the next maintenance release.

• The defect you are reviewing seems familiar to you, but your next meeting is about to start. Bookmark the issue so you can do a search for similar items when you get back from the meeting. Maybe you will want to merge or link the related issues.

Since TestTrack lets you file an item in more than one folder, you have lots of flexibility to organize issues in ways that make sense to you.

What do I have to do?

Create a folder (or multiple folders if you want to get fancy) that will contain your bookmarked items. Check out this Folders Wiki article for more details.

That’s it. Now you are ready to use the Add to Folder… command when you want to add items to your bookmark folder!

Thanks to one of our great TestTrack customers, Dave Kellogg, CSDP, Software Engineer, The Raymond Corporation, for suggesting I do a blog entry on this topic!