The Seapine View

I recently got a call from our Support manager about a customer who was upset that TestTrack “wasn’t working and was performing horribly” and they were not happy with us. Support had already confirmed that it wasn’t a functionality issue so there wasn’t much else they could do. They asked me if I would I be able to at least review the customer’s setup? So I took the call and 2 minutes into it I knew there was something completely out of whack with their implementation.

First, the company was a supplier to BMW and the “horrible performance” was in exchanging data through the BMW defect exchange interface. We’ve done several implementations of exactly that interface over the past couple of years without any performance issues.
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Before I worked for Seapine Software, I was employed by a now defunct software company in the Cincinnati area. It was a small company, with about 25 employees or so. I did many jobs at this company. My main duty was customer support, but I also did things like testing, managing our bug tracking system, putting together our releases, and other things.

Reading Matt’s post on his co-op where he tracked tests on a spreadsheet made me reminisce about my old employer. You see, our defects were written down on paper. Screenshots were physically attached (I mean we used a stapler) and notes, comments, and anything else were usually handwritten all over the place.
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The developers at Seapine have been using the Surround SCM workflow to manage code reviews ever since that feature was released in version 5 (back in 2006). Earlier this year, I decided to start using the Surround workflow to manage documentation file reviews, instead of using TestTrack. Why? A couple reasons, but the biggest one being that we store our source files in Surround SCM. Since the technical writers are used to checking their work in/out of Surround, using the workflow seemed like the logical next step.

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A little know fact, even within Seapine, is that the digital tree is not our original logo. I recently copied files off an old Macintosh Quadra 700 and came across some of our early logo designs. Looking at those designs took me through the evolution of the Seapine logo we use today. Here’s the back story.

When working on the design of our logo in June of 1995, the engineer in me took the logical approach—the logo must consist of the sea and a pine tree. It was so obvious! So we fired up Illustrator and Canvas and went to work.

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Until recently, Eclipse seemed the IDE of choice for Java developers. At least this was the case for those developers who use Seapine Software applications, as Eclipse was the IDE that was the most mentioned in support cases, feature requests, etc.

Sure, we would hear from the occasional IntelliJ IDEA user and others, but Eclipse was the most popular by far.

Then, we started to hear about NetBeans. I was actually more familiar with NetBeans, as this was the IDE of choice of my college professor a few years back. More and more customers started requesting a plug-in for NetBeans. We released a NetBeans plug-in about a year ago for Surround SCM.

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Often while you are away from the office, you need to know what is happening in your TestTrack project. If you have a laptop and access to the Internet, no problem; the TestTrack web interface has all the power you need. But what if you only have a smartphone? Is there any way that TestTrack can notify your phone that something needs your attention?  Actually, there are two ways.
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Recently I posted a Java application called CM Toolbox on our labs site. The application allows you to select a Surround SCM branch and then get a list of TestTrack Pro items that have files attached from the selected branch. There is also the ability to use a TestTrack Pro filter, to limit the defects that are queried. For example, you may not care about items that have are closed.
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As part of Seapine’s Services team I am often asked how to import legacy data into TestTrack. The answer for this question depends. It depends on the format of the current legacy data. TestTrack has a couple of import features that can be used to import data. In this article I’d like to go over the import features in TestTrack and also mention other options out there.
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Back when I was a co-op in college, I had a dedicated machine where I did all of my testing. I meticulously followed a (usually very long) checklist to make sure that the latest and greatest feature worked as expected. Excel was our bug tracker and we certainly didn’t have anything to handle the testing work itself. The great thing was, we just installed the app and started testing!
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Requirements traceability is a best practice for developing quality software. The complexity and cost of today’s requirements management tools prohibits many companies from realizing their benefits or even purchasing a tool. Well, we’ve developed a great requirements management solution that reduces complexity and costs less. We call it TestTrack RM. Since the release of TestTrack 2009 in February, it’s been full steam ahead for the entire TestTrack team to deliver TestTrack RM.
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