The Seapine View

In a 2010 study, Forrester Research reported that roughly 88% of respondents had more than 10 members on a team. And, only 17% had the entire team co-located at the company headquarters. Join us for this 60-minute Agile XXL: Scaling Agile for Project Teams webinar on Wednesday, November 9, at 2:00 p.m. EST (North America), to learn more about scaling Agile. Alan Bustamante, senior Agile consultant, will discuss the people, process, and tools—what he calls “project support pillars”—that must be in harmony before you can successfully scale an enterprise Agile team. He’ll also share common challenges in solidifying each of those pillars, and early warning signs that a project team is at risk of serious issues as it scales.

You’ll learn:

• A model for understanding what happens when people, process, and tools are not aligned.
• Common problems faced by organizations struggling with scaling Agile teams.
• Proven solutions to mitigate the risk associated with scaling Agile project teams.

Register today and learn how to scale your Agile project team regardless of team size or team location.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for our Automating Traceability and Documentation webinar. The recording is now available on YouTube if you missed the webinar or want to watch it again. Q&A from the session follows.

Seapine Software has released preliminary support for Apple’s Xcode 4.2 IDE. This is a beta and a pre-release, which may be somewhat buggy.
You can obtain the installer package here:

http://downloads.seapine.com/pub/beta/scm/xcode/SurroundSCM_xCode4.2_beta.zip

During testing, many applications create data, such as order numbers and totals, that may be needed later. Instead of only printing the data or verifying the format is correct, you can write the data to a CSV file so you’ll be able to access it again. In this example, we’ll use the “Web 02 Call” script in the QA Wizard Pro Sample Workspace to  call the “xx Print Ticket Number” script (see Figure 1). The “xx Print Ticket Number” script prints the generated ticket number to the output window. In addition to printing the ticket number, we’ll also use the AppendToFile statement to save it to a file so the data can be used by another script.

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Pop quiz, hotshot: You’ve got a major release due, you’re under the gun to get it out on time…and suddenly the developer in the next cubical turns into a brain-eating ghoul. What do you do? What do you do?

There’s no shortage of survival guides for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Heck, even the CDC has tips. Sure, you can pick up Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide—and we recommend you do—but what happens if the brains hit the fan while you’re at the office?

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Global Team

On November 9, I’ll be hosting the Agile XXL: Scaling Agile for Project Teams webinar. I haven’t ironed out the details of this webinar yet, but thought it would be good to write a primer for the event.  While I have been practicing many Agile techniques on large, distributed projects since 2002, I didn’t start formally putting them together as a collection of practices in the form of Agile projects until 2007.  It was in 2007 that I say my Agile journey and passion for Agile software development officially began. Since then, helping organizations adopt Agile practices for large and/or distributed project teams has been of particular interest to me because most of my clients have fit into the category. Let’s take a look at some numbers.

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Version control generally focuses on developers and code, but we often forget that other items, such as documentation, also need to be version controlled. Surround SCM includes Microsoft Office integration that enables users to work directly from Office applications, such as Microsoft Word, without needing to use the Surround SCM interface.

This video shows you how the integration works and how to do a few basic things, including viewing file history, viewing differences between document versions, and merging different versions of a document.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the Requirements and Agile: Keeping up with Change webinar. If you missed the event, take some time to watch the Requirements and Agile: Keeping up with Change 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 the Q&A below.

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Although QA Wizard Pro supports a large number of third-party controls and technologies, there are always ones that our customers are working with that we haven’t quite gotten to. This is where our .Net invocation technology can really come in handy.

QA Wizard Pro’s .Net invocation allows you to call methods and access properties on .Net objects. This not only allows you to get at information that isn’t readily available to the user interface, but also to interact with controls that QA Wizard Pro doesn’t know about.

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For developers that use the TestTrack SOAP SDK for integration or moving data between systems, a common issue is the ability to move HTML-formatted text. The TestTrack SOAP SDK supports HTML-formatted text, but you must add a small section of code to your SOAP application so TestTrack knows you are sending HTML-formatted text.

SOAP expects plain text for multi-line fields by default. Use the following to enable HTML-formatted text support:

ttsdk.formattedTextSupport(cookie, true);

To learn more, see step 9 in the Creating Defects how to scenario.