The Seapine View

Active Directory integration allows you to streamline the management of users by allowing users to use their domain credentials to log in to Seapine ALM and passing the management of credentials to Active Directory. The integration is configured using the Seapine License Server Admin Utility. New users are retrieved from the Active Directory server and existing users are associated with their Active Directory counterpart.

Through the years working as a consultant, I have developed a set of common best practices that I’d like to share:

Consider Multiple Connections

Depending on the structure of your Active Directory tree, you may want to consider creating multiple connections. If the only way to query all the users is to point your connection to the root of the tree, you may want to consider creating a connection for each leaf. If your connection is pointing to the root of the tree, it will waste too much time querying leafs that contain printers, computers, and other resources that you don’t need.

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In QA Wizard Pro, you may need to select a specific item from a ComboBox but may only know partial information about the item. In cases like this, you can create a function and use a regular expression to select the item. In the following example, the FindItem function  takes a ComboBox LIST and uses pattern matching to find EXPR, which can be any valid regular expression. The regular expression allows you to select an item from a ComboBox.

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Mid-size and large organizations often find themselves constrained in adopting or scaling Agile practices by tools with limited quality and change management capabilities. These tools focus on strict Agile constructs, making it difficult for companies to meet existing quality and reporting needs without jeopardizing legacy projects.

Seapine ALM combines Agile project management with quality-centric features that allows your organization to create its own flavor of Agile—without jeopardizing existing projects.

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Alan Bustamante recently hosted the Only the Agile Survive: Understanding the Business Case for Agile webinar. There were many good questions during the Q&A session, and he wasn’t able to answer all of them due to time constraints. As a special treat, Katie Dwyer, Seapine’s Agile Padawan and Alan’s partner in Agile Services crime, is co-blogging with him. Following are the questions and answers. Also, we’d love to have your feedback – don’t forget to add your comments!

1. How do you apply Agile to multiple projects or projects that do not have dedicated teams?

For multiple projects, I favor a decentralized approach. We know that every project is unique. So, while there should be a common structure around some things that affect many stakeholders, such as reporting (burn downs, burn ups, etc.) and iteration review times, how the team functions in their day to day activities and the artifacts they are responsible for should be decided by the team. For projects that don’t have dedicated teams, it comes down to expectations. What I have learned is that the project leader must help the customer and management understand that the more multi-tasked a person is, the less they will be able to accomplish because of the cost of task switching. Many organizations want to achieve the benefits Agile has to offer, but don’t want to make the necessary trade-offs. A good article that illustrates the problems with multitasking is Multitasking Gets You There Later.
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The customers and prospects we typically work with are medium-sized and larger businesses that understand the business value of Agile, but are leery of going “all in” right away. What we see in these cases is a slow transition where they evaluate various Agile practices, keeping only the ones that improve team productivity without hampering their ability to meet existing quality, reporting, and compliance requirements.

One area where we can help is with tooling for these companies in transition. Seapine ALM provides an alternative between legacy systems built on Waterfall concepts and pure Agile tools that focus almost exclusively on the project management side of Agile. Surround SCM, an integrated source control and change management tool, is a key component of Seapine ALM for developers.

Fernando Cremer, a product consultant here at Seapine, will be demonstrating how an integrated solution like Seapine ALM can support your adoption of Agile practices. Some of what he’ll cover in Surround SCM includes:

• Flexible branching models that support rapid development and refactoring
• The benefits of linking code changes with stories and issues in TestTrack
• Using continuous integration tools with Surround SCM

If you’re struggling to make a tool like Subversion or Git work in a hybrid development environment, join us for this webinar.