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!

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.

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.

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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TestTrack 2012 includes calculated fields, which allow you to configure custom fields to automatically calculate numeric, text, date/time, pop-up item, and time span values based on other field values. This new feature will have a big influence on how TestTrack can be used in different organizations. For example, you can calculate key metrics that are important to your projects, manage risk with custom risk scores, or consolidate values into a single field for simpler reporting.

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Standardizing your test case layout and wording has always been hard to achieve. Starting with the 2012 release, if you use TestTrack TCM and QA Wizard Pro, you can now  record test case steps as you interact with an application in QA Wizard Pro. Recording steps saves time when you need to document longer tests and reduces the possibility of incorrect or incomplete test cases. It also means that steps, like clicking on a button or typing text in a text box, will always use the same wording in your test cases.

Watch the following video to see this new feature in action.

Beginning with the release of Seapine ALM 2012, if you use both TestTrack TCM and QA Wizard Pro, you can now create automated scripts from test cases. This helps save time when creating scripts because you don’t need to swtich between applications. It also automatically links test cases and scripts.

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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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Remember when you used to be able to track test cases and pass/fail results in a simple spreadsheet? It took all of 30 minutes a week to update the data, and no one asked for it more often than that. However, over time, the need for more precise and timely test information grew and the spreadsheet grew too. At the same time, the applications you test also became more complex. You started with 100 test cases but you’re currently up to 400 and counting.

Your spreadsheet now includes more information about each test case, such as when a test case was run, how long it took, where it failed, if a defect report was created, how long it took the defect to be resolved, and much more. That spreadsheet now has several dozen columns, with a jumble of dates, numbers, and text. You can’t easily view or report on the data you’re tracking.

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