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!

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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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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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 very first release of Surround SCM happened in September 2002. I’ve been using Surround SCM since July of 2002. Pretty neat trick huh?

The reason, of course, is because I’ve worked at Seapine since before Surround SCM released and we dogfooded our own product before we offered it to the world. That means I’ve been using Surround SCM as a developer for something coming close to ten full years.

Original Surround SCM splash screen

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We’re very excited to release beta versions of our Seapine ALM suite of products, including TestTrack Pro, TestTrack RM, TestTrack TCM, Surround SCM and QA Wizard Pro! The betas are open to anyone, so feel free to click through and try them out. If you do try them out, please leave feedback so that we can continue to improve our product offerings.
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Andrew Horner, one of our Sales Engineers, was recently on-site with a customer that purchased Surround SCM, and had a large amount of source code which they wanted to import into Surround SCM from another tool. The customer had also been using a source code plug-in that allowed them to perform source code control (SCC) actions from within Visual Studio. Surround SCM has a similar plug-in that allows you to perform all of the standard SCC actions as well as other actions specific to Surround SCM, such as attaching source code changes to an item in TestTrack Pro.

In this post, Andrew explains how to bind to Surround SCM as the source code provider for an existing project. This example uses one of our sample Visual Studio solutions, Bug Reporter, that is currently bound with Visual SourceSafe, and shows you how to change the binding from Visual SourceSafe to Surround SCM Integration Provider. If you’re converting from another source code management tool, the steps will be similar.

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Seapine Software has released preliminary support for Apple’s Xcode 4.2 IDE. This is a beta and a pre-release, which may be somewhat buggy.
You can obtain the installer package here:

http://downloads.seapine.com/pub/beta/scm/xcode/SurroundSCM_xCode4.2_beta.zip

Version control generally focuses on developers and code, but we often forget that other items, such as documentation, also need to be version controlled. Surround SCM includes Microsoft Office integration that enables users to work directly from Office applications, such as Microsoft Word, without needing to use the Surround SCM interface.

This video shows you how the integration works and how to do a few basic things, including viewing file history, viewing differences between document versions, and merging different versions of a document.