The Seapine View

While they are not required by Surround SCM, I have to admit, I love a good changelist. In fact, it was only until recently that I was the #1 changelist user in our entire development department. Sadly, I’ve now slipped to #2. (Darn you Mitch.)

So let’s imagine that I’ve had a defect assigned to me in TestTrack about the user interface of the app I’m working on being choppy under certain situations. The next hour is a flurry of activity, keys are pressed, code is compiled, curses are muttered, and the interns are afraid to approach my desk for fear that I’ll hit them with a copy of K&R.

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The TestTrack Agile Task Board gives team the ability to work with project information via a web browser or mobile device. In a previous post, we discussed how to configure the task board. In this post, I’d like to share more information about how you can use the task board.

Mobile Meetings

The Task Board is a great way to enhance your existing meetings and stand-ups, whether they’re in a conference room or just outside of your cube. Meeting leaders can use an iPad or other tablet computer to give everyone insight into project status and make changes to project artifacts on the fly. Remote team members can get a real-time view of the same information, with the ability to view and update work items along with the rest of the team. Meetings become much more efficient, and the team isn’t left in the dark just because a member or two might be traveling and unable to reach a computer to provide their updates.

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TestTrack 2012 includes calculated fields, which allow you to configure custom fields to automatically calculate numeric, text, date/time, pop-up item, and time span values based on other field values. This new feature will have a big influence on how TestTrack can be used in different organizations. For example, you can calculate key metrics that are important to your projects, manage risk with custom risk scores, or consolidate values into a single field for simpler reporting.

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Running scripts in a clean environment is critical to ensuring that you’re able to gather the best and most precise results possible. For instance,  let’s say you’re running a series of twenty-five scripts but the first one fails, leaving a browser window open and the user logged in. This can cause successive scripts to fail because they can not log in to the application.

To make sure your scripts run without interference from applications or browser windows that are left open by other scripts, you can add a Windows taskkill command to the beginning of each script. This one line of code ensures that any running application processes are killed.

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While a QA Wizard Pro load test is running, a great deal of activity is occurring on your web server. You can use built-in performance tools on the web server to better pinpoint the type of stress that load testing is causing your server. This information allows you to better identify which pieces of your web application may be causing your server the most pain.

Watch the following video to see how to create and correlate this data.

When load testing against a web application, you may want to create a set of scripts that simulates what activities most users perform. After using your web metrics to determine where users spend their time, you can create a script for each common user action. Using the QA Wizard Pro Load Testing options, you can then match up how often your scripts are run as compared to how many users actually perform those actions.

Watch the following video to see details on how to set this up.

Standardizing your test case layout and wording has always been hard to achieve. Starting with the 2012 release, if you use TestTrack TCM and QA Wizard Pro, you can now  record test case steps as you interact with an application in QA Wizard Pro. Recording steps saves time when you need to document longer tests and reduces the possibility of incorrect or incomplete test cases. It also means that steps, like clicking on a button or typing text in a text box, will always use the same wording in your test cases.

Watch the following video to see this new feature in action.

Beginning with the release of Seapine ALM 2012, if you use both TestTrack TCM and QA Wizard Pro, you can now create automated scripts from test cases. This helps save time when creating scripts because you don’t need to swtich between applications. It also automatically links test cases and scripts.

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The very first release of Surround SCM happened in September 2002. I’ve been using Surround SCM since July of 2002. Pretty neat trick huh?

The reason, of course, is because I’ve worked at Seapine since before Surround SCM released and we dogfooded our own product before we offered it to the world. That means I’ve been using Surround SCM as a developer for something coming close to ten full years.

Original Surround SCM splash screen

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We’re very excited to release beta versions of our Seapine ALM suite of products, including TestTrack Pro, TestTrack RM, TestTrack TCM, Surround SCM and QA Wizard Pro! The betas are open to anyone, so feel free to click through and try them out. If you do try them out, please leave feedback so that we can continue to improve our product offerings.
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