Thank you to everyone who participated in the “Use the Windshield, Not the Mirror Predictive Metrics that Drive Successful Product Releases” webinar. The recording is now available if you weren’t able to attend or if you would like to watch it again.
Sharon Niemi, Practice Director of SQA, talks about how the right combination of predictive and reactive metrics can help you build a measurement portfolio that improves product quality and release consistency. You’ll learn how to build a measurement system that incorporates leading and lagging indicators to improve your team’s consistency in delivering quality products on time and within budget. Near the end, Jeff Amfahr, Director of Product management at Seapine Software, demonstrates how Seapine’s TestTrack solution for product development processes makes capturing and reporting on these metrics possible.
I’m currently taking a MOOC through Coursera called A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior, taught by renowned economist Dan Ariely at Duke University. It’s a course that fits into the area of behavioral economics, and it dovetails nicely into some of the concepts I’ve been developing about bias in testing. It builds on the biases I discuss in my previous posts, Kahneman and Thinking About Testing, and Why First Impressions Count.
One of the most amazing biases described by both Ariely and Kahneman is the anchoring bias. In an experiment, Kahneman asks subjects to spin a “wheel of fortune” that is designed to stop on one of two different numbers. He then asks these subjects how many countries are there on the African continent. The number they spun on the wheel of fortune greatly influenced their resulting guess. It turns out that we can become anchored by a random value prior to making other decisions that concern numbers.
Many workflows in TestTrack have events that track a particular date, such as a due date or completion date. The event can occur multiple times, and it’s easy to create an automation rule to let someone know that the event has re-occurred, but what if you wish to notify someone only when a date has changed?
A custom calculated field can be created as a flag using a simple formula that first finds the event count, and if the event has happened at least once compares the most recent event with the event that occurred just before that. This flag can then be used in automation rules to move items through the workflow or notify users. The output type for this field is numeric (no decimal places) as it will only have the value of 0 or 1. Since the field will only be accessed by automation rules you will want to modify the Security groups to hide the field for both Add and Edit actions.
How happy would your customers be if you could eliminate 70 percent of all product defects? How happy would your boss be if you could double the amount of projects that are delivered successfully? And how much more could your team get done if you eliminated unproductive rework?
(SPOILER: The answers are “very happy,” “very happy,” and “they might actually get to see the world outside of the office again.”)
Seapine Software, a leading provider of quality-centric product development solutions, is partnering with Software Quality Associates (SQA) to show how your team can dramatically improve productivity by adding predictive metrics to your measurement portfolio.
If you’re currently using any of the existing TestTrack web clients, the 2013.1 release this summer will replace those with one unified web interface for working with defects, executing test cases, and reviewing requirements (plus a few more goodies). Specifically, you’ll be able to:
Create, triage, prioritize, fix, and verify issues
Many of the newest Surround SCM features were added at the request of users like you! Upgrade to Surround SCM 2013.1 and you’ll get the following new capabilities:
Roll back changelists, making it easier to revert to previous versions if needed
See only the files you want to see by hiding files in cloaked repositories
Analyze Surround SCM databases to identify and repair issues
What about Surround SCM 2013?
If you haven’t upgraded to Surround SCM 2013 yet, here are three great features you’re missing out on:
Built-in code reviews to streamline your review process. Watch this short video to learn more.
Integrated risk analysis to help you predict potential problems in source files and identify areas that may need additional attention. Learn more.
Even faster branching with working directory enhancements that make it easier to reuse directories across branches
Cannot Restart Seapine Server on CentOS – Provides troubleshooting information for restarting the Seapine License Server, Surround SCM Server, or TestTrack Server on CentOS.
Surround SCM 2013.1 was recently released and we made some documentation updates you may be interested in.
All documentation is available on our web site and from the Help menu in Surround SCM. If you have documentation suggestions, please let us know.
Rolling back changelist actions – Explains how to roll back a group of changes made in a committed changelist, which makes it easier to revert to previous versions without working with individual files.
Resolving database issues – Provides information for administrators about analyzing Surround SCM databases and repairing any issues.
New!Analyze Utility Guide – Explains how to use the new standalone Surround SCM Analyze Utility to analyze and repair databases. You can use the utility on databases currently in use as you can in the Surround SCM Client or CLI. You can also analyze databases that are not currently used. For example, you may want to analyze an inactive database before making it active again.
With all of the hubbub around Yahoo’s announcement to “ban” telecommuting, I thought it might be a good time to highlight some recent customer feedback we’ve gotten on this issue. A new initiative I’ve been leading is engaging with our customers to talk about their corporate strategies and challenges, which we’re feeding into the Seapine roadmap to make sure we’re better aligned with where our customers are heading. Of course, we’re also looking at new and better places to take our customers, that they might not have considered or even knew they would benefit from. P.S. If you want to talk with me and the rest of the corporate strategy team, we’d love to chat for 20 minutes; email me!
In some environments it may be useful to run multiple instances of TestTrack. For example, if you need to connect to multiple projects at the same time. On Mac OS X, this is a problem because a user can only run one instance of a particular application at a time. However, there is a workaround.
One way to do this is to run ‘open -n /Applications/TestTrack/TestTrack\ Client.app/’ from the Terminal app. As you can imagine, this can be fairly tedious if you generally don’t work with the Terminal.
