The Seapine View

Requirements traceability is a best practice for developing quality software. The complexity and cost of today’s requirements management tools prohibits many companies from realizing their benefits or even purchasing a tool. Well, we’ve developed a great requirements management solution that reduces complexity and costs less. We call it TestTrack RM. Since the release of TestTrack 2009 in February, it’s been full steam ahead for the entire TestTrack team to deliver TestTrack RM.
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Most of the TestTrack Pro integration examples on our labs site are written for Windows, usually using C#. Accessing TestTrack Pro objects using Java is also straightforward and has the added benefit of running on multiple operating systems.

Take a look at our new Java Defect List lab article for information on how to access and display TestTrack Pro objects, such as defects, using Java.

For performing peer code reviews, there isn’t a better tool than Smart Bear Software’s Code Collaborator. Even if you already have a working solution, their free book “Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review“ is a great read.

Code Collaborator 5.0 is in beta and SmartBear has added direct support for our version control tool, Surround SCM. You can learn about Code Collaborator 5.0′s new features and download the beta at their web site. If you don’t already use Surround SCM, you can get a free single-user license.

Jeff Atwood recently explored the Pseudocode Programming Process and asks

“What’s your take? Is pseudocode a useful tool in your programming? Do you write pseudocode before writing code?”

His entry took me back to my software architect days at now-defunct Access Corporation (not the one that acquired Palm OS and BeOS). Back in the day (the early-nineties), we were working on a very large project to develop an engineering drawing image management system for IBM’s AS/400. Continue reading…

Fernando Cremer recently crafted a .NET utility in C# that you can use to search for text strings in Surround SCM databases. Search results are displayed in sscm:// format, giving you the ability to automatically select the file in your Surround SCM client and then view its file history, check it out, view it, etc. It’s available in Seapine Labs and full source code is included. Check it out.

If you follow our Web site, you probably have noticed we have announced TestTrack TCM. I’m excited about the productivity and quality improvements it’s going to bring to QA teams. The number of companies that have a handle of managing test cases is smaller than it should be, which directly affects the quality of their products. Test case management products, like TestTrack TCM, can change this. We designed this product over a year ago, but we delayed developing it as there were architectural changes we wanted to make to TestTrack Pro prior to extending it to manage other parts of the development lifecycle. We’ll be showing TestTrack TCM at SD Best Practices 2006 in Boston next month. Stop by for a demo if you are at the show.

There’s one more thing… Surround SCM 5 is coming and it is very cool. Surround has always been competitive with the pricing and feature sets of VSS, Perforce, AccuRev, MKS, and PVCS. That’s nice, but being the same is pretty boring and not where we want to be. With version 5, we’re changing the game. Developers and non-developers alike have expressed a need for more granular control over the change management process and Surround 5 squarely addresses this need like no other product in our space. Like TestTrack TCM, we’ll be showing Surround SCM 5 at SD Best Practices. We’ll be announcing it on the Web site soon as well.

There are more goodies in the pipeline, but I’ll save them for another day

TestTrack Studio won this year’s Jolt award in the Bug and Defect Tracking category. This is a quite an accomplishment as TestTrack Studio was only recently introduced (November 2006.) A lot of work went into designing and building TestTrack Studio and we are honored to receive the industry recognition.

Congratulations TestTrack team!