The Seapine View

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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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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Make plans to join us when the Seapine ALM Tour 2010 stops in Huntsville, Alabama on September 23. Meet some of our product management team, see the upcoming Seapine ALM 2011 release, and learn ways to boost agility, collaboration, and traceability! It’s all free!

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TestTrack 2010.1, which was released in April 2010, includes folder enhancements that were specifically designed to help you organize and manage the work in a project release, sprint, or iteration. Folders now have a type associated with them, which means you can create custom folders for different purposes. I am going to focus on one folder option — release planning.

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Thomism, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, holds that all intellectual knowledge comes through the senses. (ST I.84.6) This opinion is in direct contradiction with Cartesianism, the philosophy of René Descartes, which doubts the validity of sensate-derived intellectual knowledge. The scientific method implicitly agrees with Aquinas because it too begins with using our senses in the form of observations. Scientists should derive hypotheses from observations, not metaphysical ideas existing purely in the mind.

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The ability to rollback changes is a basic functionality that any software configuration management tool should have. Surround SCM provides more than one way to rollback changes. You can rollback a file to any prior point in time and you can also choose to rollback a promote or a rebase.
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Custom fields allow you to define metadata you want to capture about a file beyond the normal information (like last date modified) that Surround SCM inherently tracks. Each field can be typed as text, integer, float, list, SCM users, date/time or check box. You can also set default values for any of these.

By themselves, custom fields let you do some useful things. For example, Surround ships with a custom field called Owner, which is a drop-down list of your users. As a team lead you can grab groups of design specifications and, with one click, assign those files to an engineer to manage.

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We recently released a new requirements management product, TestTrack RM.

The early feedback on the product has been great. TestTrack RM is proving to be a valuable addition to the TestTrack family, which also includes TestTrack Pro (defect management) and TestTrack TCM (test case management).

While TestTrack RM provides many benefits on its own, the real power comes when it is used as an integrated solution with the other TestTrack applications. For example, you can easily determine if you have proper test coverage by ensuring that a test case has been created for every requirement. You can easily flag a test case if a requirement has changed, avoiding testing stale data and wasting time and money. For this post, I want to focus on one of the biggest benefits: complete traceability.
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If you use Surround SCM or any other robust software configuration management tool (gasp!), chances are you are using branches to manage your software development process. Depending on your branch strategy, you may find yourself with a defect that exists across multiple branches. There are many ways to manage this situation, the best one for you will depend on your environment and needs.

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Before I worked for Seapine Software, I was employed by a now defunct software company in the Cincinnati area. It was a small company, with about 25 employees or so. I did many jobs at this company. My main duty was customer support, but I also did things like testing, managing our bug tracking system, putting together our releases, and other things.

Reading Matt’s post on his co-op where he tracked tests on a spreadsheet made me reminisce about my old employer. You see, our defects were written down on paper. Screenshots were physically attached (I mean we used a stapler) and notes, comments, and anything else were usually handwritten all over the place.
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