The Seapine View

Join us for the What’s New in Seapine ALM 2012 webinar on February 7th as we showcase over 100 new features and enhancements for Seapine ALM 2012. The improvements to Seapine ALM 2012, which includes TestTrack, Surround SCM, and QA Wizard Pro, aim to help you deliver quality software faster.

New TestTrack features include a new native relational database, custom fields that calculate values, and draft and active custom fields. Surround SCM’s new features include improved offline support, more flexible mainline branches, and additional integrations, while QA Wizard Pro now features stress testing, Google Chrome support, integration enhancements, and more.

In the one-hour webinar, Paula Rome and Grant Lammi, Seapine product managers, will demonstrate the new features in Seapine ALM 2012. When the demonstration is over, you’ll have time to ask questions and learn more.

The webinar is being offered twice to accommodate Europe and North America attendees. The first webinar begins at 2:00 p.m. Western European Time (9:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time), and the second will follow at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (11:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time).

Join us!

QA Wizard Pro 2012 includes stress testing, which allows you to disable your network adapter or even limit the available memory while you are running your automated scripts. You’ll now be able to see how your application will respond when the host operating system runs out of disk space or loses network connectivity. You can also limit the amount of available memory.

Watch the following video to learn how to use stress testing and see an example of how an application’s behavior changes when certain stress features are enabled.

A funny thing happened during the writing of this blog post—I found a regression bug. And what is particularly great about this (as great as any regression bug can be) is that I found it by taking some screenshots of the Surround SCM feature I wanted to talk about.

That, folks, is serendipity.

Penn and Teller

Side note: Years ago I saw a live show of Penn and Teller. And Penn did his juggling broken bottles bit where he takes bottles, typically liquor bottles, then breaks them on stage, and proceeds to juggle their broken remains. This gives a sense of authenticity to the audience as he’s doing something real right before your eyes. He even says something to the effect, “I do this trick all the time, but for real, THIS time these bottles broke in a REALLY difficult way.” That’s classic magician stuff, build the excitement even if the words aren’t true.

How does this relate here you ask? I honest to goodness, cross my heart and hope to die, REALLY did find a regression bug while researching this blog post. For real.

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Being able to calculate a risk score for your items in TestTrack enables teams to make informed decisions when doing things like ranking or project prioritization. This video shows you how to create the fields you’ll need and how to set up risk score calculation inside TestTrack. It uses a generic risk calculation formula; I expect that, in some cases, you will use different formulas to calculate your risk score.

When I’m writing code I do two things quite often.

1. I refactor and try to get rid of as much code as possible. The less code I write means the less bugs I can write. (Awesome.)
2. I nearly always forget to add new files I’ve created to Surround SCM. (Not awesome.)

At best item #2 means the continuous integration server yells at me. At worst it means one of the other developers yells at me and I need to buy donuts for breaking the build. And I don’t even like donuts.

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Surround SCM 2012 includes a new feature that enables you to set separate options for each of your mainline branches. You can now use a server-wide configuration or have individual configurations for each mainline branch, which gives you more control of your mainlines.

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You can use calculated custom fields with workflow events. This video explains how to create a new calculated custom field that shows you the number of times a workflow event has been executed. The example in the video uses the Fix event, so you can see how many times an item has been fixed. It’s easy to apply the example to other workflow events.

Calculated fields, which were introduced in TestTrack 2012, have a variety of uses. In this video, I’ll show you how to create a custom field that calculates how long an item has been in its current workflow state. This example shows you some of the date functions available with calculated fields.

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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