The Seapine View

New capabilities were added to this functionality in Surround SCM 2012, click to read more!

In all the years that I’ve been using Surround SCM, I have occasionally needed to make changes to files when I wasn’t in the office and wasn’t connected to the Surround SCM Server. Once I returned to the office, I needed to sync those changes with Surround SCM.

In this video, I show how to use the Repository Differences feature to sync the changes in working directories with the repository in Surround SCM. Not only is this a useful feature for syncing changes made while working offline, but it’s also useful for managing changes to 3rd-party libraries.

We recently compiled and analyzed the results from a survey aimed at understanding how life science organizations are managing core product development artifacts and proving traceability. The results showed that most are still using Microsoft Word and Excel to manage and trace artifacts—at best storing documents and artifacts in a document or quality management system. I wonder how these organizations manage to tie all the documents together and prove traceability with the FDA?

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Seapine Software has released Seapine ALM 2011.1, the latest version of its popular suite of tools for application lifecycle management. Several new, customer-requested features and enhancements make Seapine ALM 2011.1 a strong solution for organizations in need of a tightly integrated ALM solution.

Seapine ALM 2011.1 includes enhanced test case management, more administrative options, and increased automation technology support for TestTrack, Surround SCM, and QA Wizard Pro. Extensive improvements have been incorporated into the product suite to enable better creation and re-use of test cases, tracking test execution progress, and ensuring adherence to best practices and compliance requirements during testing.

Seapine added workflow history diagrams and improved task board and traceability reports to TestTrack, as well as extensive TestTrack TCM enhancements. One such enhancement is a detail grid view that provides a new format for analyzing test run results. Powerful compliance options for test runs are also new for TestTrack TCM in 2011.1.

New QA Wizard Pro features include a new Keyword View, status tool enhancements, and general report improvements. In addition to the Microsoft Silverlight support added in 2011.0.1, Seapine also added support for the regression testing of Adobe Flash applications with QA Wizard Pro.

Surround SCM received an upgrade as well, and now includes support for shelving in-progress changes, enhanced trigger capabilities, and other enhancements that provide tighter integration between Surround SCM and the rest of the Seapine ALM 2011.1 product suite.

“As a fully integrated ALM solution, Seapine ALM 2011.1 simplifies the implementation of quality-critical processes,” said Jeff Amfahr, director of product management, Seapine Software. “This release of Seapine ALM makes it faster and easier for development teams to meet their compliance and best-practice objectives.”

More information on Seapine ALM 2011.1, including a recorded webinar that demonstrates the new features, can be found at www.seapine.com/alm20111/.

TestTrack supports many types of fields. One of the most used is the pop-up menu field, also known as a drop-down field. These fields sometimes end up with lists ranging in the hundreds of items in them, which makes them hard to use. In TestTrack you can specify field relationships, which allow you to limit the choices that are available to the user based on the value selected in another field. You designate a field to be the parent and one or more fields to be the child. The value chosen in the parent field determines which values will be available in the child field.

The TestTrack user guide already covers the mechanics of how to set up field relationships, so I am not going to repeat that. Instead, let’s look at some guidelines and possible use cases.

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For the eighth year in a row, Seapine Software has been named by SD Times as one of the Top 100 companies that “write the code that makes the whole software-development industry succeed.” Seapine was recognized in the ALM & SCM category for offering a suite of solutions that encompasses the entire development lifecycle.

“We’re incredibly honored to be in SD Times 100 for eight years running,” said Rick Riccetti, president and CEO, Seapine Software. “Our goal has always been to help our customers develop quality software, and being chosen again and again by SD Times makes us feel like we’re accomplishing that goal.”

Read more about the SD Times 100.

There were many updates to the blog in May. Here is our monthly recap: