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

Video: Surround SCM List Windows- Demonstrates how to use list windows in Surround SCM, including basic sorting and advanced filter filtering.

Simplifying TestTrack Item Windows- Shows how to configure, and simplify, an Item Window in TestTrack.

Video: How to Install and Configure the Seapine ALM Reporting Platform- Shows how to install and configure Seapine ALM RP, and populate the data warehouse.

The Kanban Board and Gemba Walk – Two Powerful Mechanisms for Agile Communication and Change- Alan Bustamante shares his thoughts on Kanban boards and Gemba walks. He also shares his surprise at finding two Kanban boards in the marketing department.

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Do you have enough verifiable and objective evidence for your next audit or submission? The FDA requires that you produce verifiable evidence. This means your product must meet all its key required elements that are validated through the tasks and processes at each stage of the development lifecycle. Clear-cut proof must be documented to show that safety risks and hazards were addressed properly and thoroughly. With TestTrack, teams can easily work on their project tasks while documenting objective evidence that will be needed for submissions and audits.

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The 2011.1 release of Surround SCM included a new feature that allows you to use promote and rebase as pre-event trigger actions. This makes it easy to check a certain condition and decide if you want to allow a promote or rebase to continue. The condition is evaluated on the file that contains the change that is being promoted or rebased. As an example, I’m going to show you how to prevent a promote based on file state.

This example uses a reverse waterfall branch model. Changes are checked in to a development branch and reviewed. After they are approved, the changes are promoted to a staging branch for integration testing. Once those tests pass, the changes are promoted to the production branch.

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If you’re serious about Agile, you don’t want to miss Agile2011 in Salt Lake City, August 8-12. Seapine will be there, with some of our Agile Services team members manning our booth. We’ll be demonstrating our products, including our new electronic task board. More importantly, we’ll be sharing ideas and experiences with anyone interested in learning or discussing Agile concepts and practices.

Whether you’re new to Agile, or already an experienced veteran, we’d love to meet you and talk shop. Fill out your registration form (check your conference bag) and make sure you stop by our booth to drop it off. You’ll get a free Agile Expedition kit filled with some great giveaways (Agile badger T-shirt anyone?) to help with your next sprint planning meeting.

On the product side, we’ll be showing off TestTrack for Agile project management along with our new task board that enables your team to work with tasks in a Kanban-type interface via web and mobile devices.

Seapine Agile Task Board

Seapine Agile Task Board in Action

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the FDA Design Traceability Requirements for Device Development webinar with John Avellanet, Managing Director & Principal at Cerulean Associates, LLC and Larry Nicholson, Business Development Manager for Life Sciences at Seapine Software. If you missed the event, or want to watch it again, the recording can be found below or viewed on SlideShare. Additionally, you can download the FDA Expectations for Traceability in Device Design slide deck.

Q&A

Where can I find the FDA draft document for medical applications?

All of the recent medical device guidance documents can be found on the FDA site: www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/GuidanceDocuments/ucm162707.htm. (Avellanet)

Is an application that sets up datasets for infusion pumps considered a medical application?

Take a look at the guidance, specifically at the criteria listed on pages 13-15, and then the examples provided by the agency in Appendix A of the guidance. (Avellanet)

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Buzzwords have been known to make me cringe, which is why I can’t believe I’ve jumped on the Agile bandwagon. Or dipped my toe in the Agile pool. Or gone for a swim in the Agile ocean. But let me explain.

In Alan Bustamante’s last blog post, he let the marketing and Kanban cat out of the bag. Seapine isn’t exclusively an Agile company, but Agile seems to be working its way into teams and processes throughout the company. The marketing team started using a Kanban board this past spring for a number of reasons. I’d like to share some thoughts and observations with you.

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You can manage development, test, and requirement artifacts with TestTrack. All artifacts are stored in the same database, allowing TestTrack to provide complete traceability throughout the product development lifecycle.

This video includes a high-level overview of how TestTrack can automatically link and establish relationships between artifacts. This eliminates the need to manually link artifacts, and the need to know what to update when an item changes.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the second event in our TDD 101 Learning Series. If you missed the event, take about 25 minutes to watch the Writing Good Unit Tests recorded webinar. Attendees asked several interesting questions, all of which we weren’t able to address during the webinar. To follow up, and invite others to participate, we’ve included a complete Q&A below.

Writing Good Unit Tests Q&A

How do you start adding unit tests for existing code, which may not have been originally written with unit tests in mind?

The next webinar is Beginning Test-Driven Development in a Legacy System, and I’ll be covering this topic in much more detail. Even if you are just looking at unit tests, the next webinar should be helpful. The basic idea is that you’re going to have to refactor and there are quite a few tips and tricks you can use to reduce effort and boost results. Anything you touch should be refactored so that you can write unit tests. It can be daunting, so start small!

How can a unit test NOT depend on the interface of the unit it’s testing?

It is going to depend somewhat on the interface but you really don’t want it to be too heavily dependent. For example, if I have fifty places in fifty different unit tests where I am creating an object and then calling five methods on each to further initialize the object, I am really dependent on that interface. If any of those methods changes, I am going to have a lot of find/replace work to do. When you realize that you’ve got a lot of duplications in your unit tests, just like within code when you’re coding, that’s a great opportunity to go ahead and pull that logic out into one centralized place. For example, put the five function calls that initialize the object into a constructor that can be called once. If the interface changes, you just have one place (the constructor) to update and you’re all set to continue running your unit tests.

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A common request is the ability to archive pop-up menu field values in TestTrack. You have a field with multiple values, and some of them are no longer applicable. You’d like to make them unavailable to users, but don’t want to delete them because you still want to search based on those values and also don’t want to lose historical data. In a previous post I mentioned that you can use Field Relationships to do this. In this post I’d like to show you how.

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In a recent post, I discussed how to use security groups in TestTrack to simplify the Item window. In this post, I’m going to cover Surround SCM security groups, specifically the permissions that control the access to files.

To access security groups go to View > Security Groups…

Understanding File Access Permissions in Surround SCM

Surround SCM provides three levels of file access permissions, and these are set for each security group.

Default Security

These are the permissions that will, by default, apply to all files on all branches and repositories. These are set on the Server Security tab of the Security Group window. Under the “Files (Default)” category you specify the file access permissions that will be the default for all branches and repositories. In the following screenshot, you’ll see that the Dev Team has all file permissions enabled except Destroy on all branches and repositories across all mainlines.

Edit Security Group Window

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