How I Use Surround SCM: Working Directory Differences –Learn more about enhanced working directory differences in Surround SCM 2012, and how they help one user remember to add new files to Surround.

Using Separate Configurations for Surround SCM Mainline Branches – Learn how to get more granular control over your mainline branches in Surround SCM 2012.

Naked Agile Helps Students Understand What Becoming Agile Really Means—The first of a three part series, this entry answers the question, “What is Agile anyway?”

Video: Calculating Risk Scores in TestTrack—This video demonstrates how to set up risk calculation fields in TestTrack 2012.

The All-New 2012 Seapine.com—Seapine’s redesigned web site includes new content and reworked site navigation to make everything easy to find. Check out the new layout and features!

Webinar: What’s New in Seapine ALM 2012—Join us on February 7 to see some of the over 100 new features and enhancements in  Seapine ALM 2012. There will be time to ask questions and learn more about specific features during the one-hour webinar. Register today!

We’ve loaded the site with new content and reworked the navigation to make it all easier to find. You’ll also see these changes:

• Home Page – The home page has been redesigned to give you quicker access to the latest content on our site. You’ll find easy access to customer stories, news, and event info.
• Solutions – The solutions pages have more industry-specific information, and we’ve also added solution pages for each area of the product development lifecycle our products address. In addition, we included a set of solutions to address Agile, traceability, and test-driven development.
• Events – We’ve been attending more trade shows lately, so we’ve put together a page to tell you which shows we’ll be at and what we’ll be doing there. Stop by a show, grab your Seapine swag, and see what’s new with TestTrack, Surround SCM, and QA Wizard Pro!
• Videos and Blog Entries – The solutions and product pages now include more video and blog entry links. We have been busy creating informative content and the new web site does a better job of showcasing it.

Explore our new site and let us know what you think! (And yes, we’re still working out the kinks, so if  you see anything that looks a little wonky, please let us know that, too.)

Peter Varhol, Seapine Solution Evangelist, will give a presentation on “Integrating Testing into Agile Development.” Peter will talk about testing and the role of testers in Agile methodologies, with a focus on integrating testing into an Agile practice. He’ll examine traditional testing practices and how those practices should adapt to achieve the goals of a chosen Agile methodology.

Martin Kochloefl, Seapine Solutions Consultant, will present “Guidelines for Software Testers in an Agile Era,” in which he explains how both testing and the role of testers change in an Agile development environment. Martin will discuss how managers can help testing teams adapt to those changes, with the goal of effectively integrating testing with development to create one cohesive team that consistently delivers quality software.

About the Conference

Software Quality Days is one of the biggest conferences on software quality. This makes it a must for anyone interested in software quality and testing.

This professional symposium and congress offers a range of comprehensive and valuable opportunities for advanced professional training, new ideas and networking with a series of keynote speeches, professional lectures, exhibits, tutorials, etc.

The top quality lectures and tutorials as well as a mixture of cutting-edge scientific topics and valuable practical lectures make this a pinnacle event in the field of software quality.

Ten Ways You Know You Need a New Approach to Test Management—Highlights some common ways for a team to identify when they have outgrown their current test case management system.

Seapine ALM 2012 Betas Now Available—TestTrack, Surround SCM, and QA Wizard Pro betas are all open and available for you to try out! Some of the highlights of this release include calculated fields in  TestTrack, improved support for offline changes in Surround SCM, and Google Chrome support in QA Wizard Pro.

Video: Simulating User Behavior with QA Wizard Pro Load Testing—Learn how to use a mix of scripts and web load testing options to emulate a variety of user types.

Video: Using Server Metrics with QA Wizard Pro Load Testing—Learn how to use web server metrics with load testing to gain insight into user tasks that cause the most strain on your server.

QA Wizard Pro: Running Successive Scripts Successfully—To ensure that scripts run successfully, it is important that they are run in a clean environment. Adding a Windows taskkill command to the beginning of each script makes sure that any running application processes are killed.

Introducing Calculated Fields in TestTrack—TestTrack 2012 now includes calculated fields, which can be used to calculate key metrics, manage risks, and consolidate values for simpler reporting.

Get more from the TestTrack Agile Task Board—The TestTrack Agile Task Board allows teams to conveniently access project information through a web browser or mobile device. Learn more about the task board and some different ways you can use it.

What’s New?

Following are some of the highlights of this release. More information is available on the beta site.

• TestTrack now includes support for calculated fields, allowing custom fields to automatically calculate their values based on values in other fields. If you use our native backend database rather than an RDBMS, the format has been changed to SQLite, with a variety of performance enhancements. And, to improve the ability to create test cases, we’ve added QA Wizard Pro enhancements that allow you to automatically record and create your test steps.
• For Surround SCM, we’ve improved our support for offline changes with an enhanced working directory differences dialog and a new sync repository command. Mainline branches can also now have separate configurations from your overall server settings, giving  teams more flexibility. We’ve also added a number of new third-party integrations.
• In QA Wizard Pro, we’ve added support for the Google Chrome browser. A whole new set of testing is also now possible with our new stress testing support, allowing you to test applications in stressed conditions that are difficult to create, such as low disk space and memory, network communication problems, and read-only disk errors.

Register for the Seapine ALM 2012 Betas

Three Quick Ways to Tweak the Default Requirements Workflow – Explains how to make three quick tweaks to the sample workflow: configuring when requirements and requirement documents are locked, enabling test cases to be generated from requirements, and configuring the workflow states and events.

Collaborative Agile Task Board Boosts TestTrack – Shows how easy the Agile Task Board is when using it in TestTrack.

Webinar Recording – Agile XXL: Scaling Agile for Project Teams – Discusses the people, process, and tools that must be in harmony before you can successfully scale an enterprise Agile team.

Configuring the TestTrack Agile Task Board – Explains how to configure the TestTrack Agile Task Board.

When do you ship an application? The answer seems simple—you ship when it’s ready. However, there are many possible definitions of “ready.”

According to Seapine Software’s Peter Varhol, customers, users, and development teams must all agree on what “ready” means—before work begins on the project. Peter discusses this issue in his presentation, When to Ship: Using Automation to Determine Application Deployment Readiness, on Wednesday, November 9, at the Better Software Conference East.

If there is no common consensus on what “ready” means, you may be tempted to release an application before its product goals are met. Peter presents different approaches to determining when an application has the required quality to be ready to ship.

Learn the factors to base your ready-to-ship decision on, so the project team and the business will know whether to continue working or declare, “Ready.”

About the Conference

At the Better Software Conference East 2011, you’ll become a better, more informed software professional with an outward, customer-focused view of development. Learn about the latest tools, trends, and issues regarding project management, people and teams, software testing and QA, software requirements, process improvement, metrics, design and architecture.

Who Should Attend

Software professionals seeking the latest software development information and techniques will benefit from the educational and networking sessions at the Better Software Conference. The conference is designed for these software professionals:

• Software managers, directors, CTOs, and CIOs
• Project managers and leaders
• Measurement and process improvement specialists
• Requirements and business analysts
• Software architects
• Lead developers and software engineers
• Security engineers
• Test and QA managers

Working with HTML-formatted Text in the TestTrack SDK – Explains how the TestTrack SOAP SDK supports HTML-formatted text.

Internal Displacement – Explains how QA Wizard Pro’s .Net invocation technology can come in handy when dealing with third-party controls and technologies.

Webinar Recording – Requirements and Agile: Keeping up with Change – Explains how to bridge gaps between user stories and requirements and reduce documentation needs while maintaining a minimal level of formal requirements for validation and traceability.

Video: Surround SCM and Microsoft Office Integration – 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.

14 Days Later: Sprinting through Zombieland – Happy Halloween! Seapine’s Zombie Preparedness Team has put together an easy-to-use flowchart that will keep you and your project alive when the dead start walking.

Creating a CSV File in QA Wizard Pro – Explains how to write data to a CSV file.

Surround SCM Xcode 4.2 Integration Beta – Provides a link to the Surround SCM Xcode 4.2 download.

Webinar Recording: Automating Traceability and Documentation – Explains how the right product development toolset will help you implement and validate effective design traceability for development.

Peter Varhol, Seapine solutions evangelist, will present “Requirements and Agile: Keeping up with Change,” a presentation about how to bridge the gaps between traditional requirements and user stories. Peter will show how to reduce documentation needs while still maintaining a minimal level of more formal requirements for validation and traceability.

Alan Bustamante, senior Agile consultant for Seapine’s Agile Services group, will also be on hand to present “Only the Agile Survive: Understanding the Business Case for Agile.” Alan will discuss the bare essentials of Agile and the reasons behind the market’s move toward Agile solutions. He will also share some personal observations about successful implementations, including his experience with diverting almost $200,000 USD in project funds to another higher priority initiative, which was only possible with Agile methods.

Seapine Software will also be exhibiting at the conference in booth 405.

TechNet Aero (formerly AeroTech) is conducted annually by the Dayton-Wright Chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) since 1990. Over 2,600 industry, government, and academic professionals interested and working in all dimensions of business and defense technologies attend. The trade show features industry and government displays and demonstrations of emerging technologies.