The Seapine View

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.

Continue reading…

The pilot program for our new Agile Essentials For Project Teams training program is wrapping up, and we recently announced special pricing on the class for teams in North America through the end of 2011. Now’s your chance to train up to 20 members of your development organization in Agile concepts, without the costs typically associated with private training. Seapine is offering 15 private classes at a greatly reduced rate through the end of the year. All-inclusive pricing starts at only $4,995. Contact Agile Services for more information and to sign-up.

Building a Lego dune buggy during Agile Essentials class

Continue reading…

Do requirements still matter in an Agile environment? What is the business case for Agile, and why is the market moving toward Agile solutions? Agile experts from Seapine Software will answer these questions and more at the TechNet-Aero Conference in Dayton, Ohio, October 17-20.

Continue reading…

Alan Bustamante, senior agile consultant for Seapine’s Agile Services group, will be speaking at the Agile Prague Conference, which takes place September 29 and 30. Alan’s talk, Only the Agile Survive: Understanding the Business Case for Agile, takes place at noon on the 29th.

As a result of the current economic climate, many organizations have been forced to reduce head count, salaries, and benefits to shore up their finances. Now, these companies are looking for ways to satisfy their customers within the boundaries of the “new normal,” which is a reduced cost structure and increased pressure to deliver more, faster.

These organizations also need a way to divert funding from one project to another when a higher priority initiative emerges. Agile methods have proven to be an effective way to address these challenges.

Continue reading…

Will you be attending the Verify/ATI Conference at the end of September? If so, be sure to sit in on the two talks we’re hosting.

Peter Varhol will be presenting When to Ship: Using Automation to Determine Application Deployment Readiness at 2:45 p.m. on September 27. During this presentation, Peter will provide measurable criteria for determining when an application is ready to ship. He will also discuss how to create objective measures of completeness and how to collect data and track progress toward that end. Peter will explain how testers and quality assurance professionals can work with application stakeholders to contribute to both the definition and automated measurement that determines if an application is fit for its intended purpose.

Continue reading…

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 first event in our TDD 101 Learning Series. If you missed the event, take 20 minutes to watch the Intro to TDD recording. We had some great attendees who asked several interesting conversations, all of which we weren’t able to address during the event. To follow up, and invite others to participate, we’ve included a complete Q&A below.

Intro to TDD Q&A

Who writes and owns unit tests—the development team or the test/QA team?

TDD is a programming technique, so the development team writes and owns the unit tests.

How can I measure the quality of unit tests?

The real quality of the unit tests can only be observed over time. Do the tests uncover issues during development instead of during testing? Do the unit tests define the correct behavior? Are there unit tests that test good data, bad data, and invalid/null data? Make sure you attend our next TDD webinar, Writing Good Unit Tests, on July 13 for more information.

Can we use TDD for code coverage? Or does the test team need to invest time in automation for code coverage?

The goal of TDD is clean code that works. A side effect of TDD is a high percentage of code coverage. Theoretically, if you write a unit test for every change, then you should have 100% code coverage, even though that’s not the goal of TDD. If you have a code coverage goal, you’ll still need a tool to examine the code coverage. If code coverage isn’t at your goal then you will need to add additional tests or work with development to determine why there are changes without unit tests.

Continue reading…

Last chance to join—Seapine’s TDD 101 webinar series starts on Wednesday! In case you haven’t heard, our latest webinar series is targeted at helping you improve your test-driven development skills. The series is being led by Katie Dwyer, who is an Agile Services Consultant in Seapine’s Agile Services group.

Katie is going to cover the following core topics over the course of three classes.

1. Intro to Test-Driven Development
2. Writing Good Unit Tests
3. Beginning TDD in a Legacy System

BONUS: If you’re not able to commit time to attending the free classes, download our new TDD Reference Card to help you start using TDD effectively.

Seapine Solutions Evangelist, Peter Varhol, was recently interviewed about requirements traceability by Mike Lippis for the Outlook Series. The “Strengthened Traceability Drives Greater Quality & Communication” podcast is now available.

Peter and Mike discuss several aspects of requirements management, and why traceability is so important to the software development process these days. Following are a few interesting nuggets, if you don’t have time to listen to the 46-minute interview:

01:30 - Definition of requirements traceability

09:50 - How to make traceability automatic

21:55 - How to know if your traceability strategy measures up

30:00 - Information about managing requirements traceability with TestTrack

Have an opinion on traceability, or a story about how your team uses traceability to improve quality? We’d love to hear it—leave us a comment!

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.