Less Stress. More Quality.

I was recently interviewed by Mike Lippis for the Outlook Series. Listen to the interview.

Mike was interested in my perspective on test case management and issue tracking. As you might expect, I was pretty shy about talking about the advantages these types of tools bring to software development teams. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to listen to the entire interview in one sitting.)

Just out of curiosity, how would you answer these questions?

• Can you answer the question “Are we ready to ship today?” the same day you ask the question?

• Are you confident that your testers and developers are focusing their efforts on the highest priority tasks?

• Do you know if the product you shipped has all of the features your stakeholders asked for? Can you prove it to auditors?

If you didn’t answer yes to all of these, then you are a good candidate for adding an integrated test case management and issue tracking solution to your development tool arsenal. And I just happen to know of a great solution!

Check out TestTrack Studio today. You won’t be sorry.

I warned you.

In my first post to this blog I promised that I would occasionally discuss a topic whose only redeeming value would be bringing a little fun to a stressed out day. This is one of those posts.

I’d like to share a fun web site I recently discovered, Cooking for Engineers. Some of you who’ve had the misfortune of eating something cooked by me might at first be surprised (and a little alarmed) that I was exploring a cooking site.

Guest: Mmmm…, er, what is it?

Me: It’s an experiment. It’s something new!

Guest: There’s a lot of it, isn’t there?

Me: Fine. I’ll order pizza.

But Cooking for Engineers does a good job of summing up its appeal.

“Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!”

If you appreciate a well-written, reproducible bug report or delight in a tester independent test case, then I strongly suspect you will enjoy this site. Check out the recipes for English Toffee, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Barbecue Pork Ribs. There’s hope for me yet!

Make sure you scroll all the way to the bottom of the recipes. That’s where you’ll find a novel way of representing a recipe’s steps and ingredients. You won’t want to go back to a normal recipe format again! (BTW, let me know if you explore using this format to model process oriented test cases.)

Thanks to Jeff for introducing me to Cooking for Engineers. Don’t worry. I won’t bring anything I cook into the office.

Did you know that you can use folders to bookmark items in TestTrack ?

Just like you can bookmark a favorite page in your web browser, TestTrack’s folders let you keep track of your favorite issues, defects, test cases, and test runs. OK, so maybe favorite isn’t the word you would use to describe these types of items, but the fact remains that it’s awfully darn convenient to be able to quickly file away special items so they are easy to find later.

There are lots of situations where this can come in handy.

• Say you are in the middle of prioritizing newly entered bugs and there are one or two that you want to come back to after you’ve done a little research.

• It’s time to do some release planning and you want to tag items for the next maintenance release.

• The defect you are reviewing seems familiar to you, but your next meeting is about to start. Bookmark the issue so you can do a search for similar items when you get back from the meeting. Maybe you will want to merge or link the related issues.

Since TestTrack lets you file an item in more than one folder, you have lots of flexibility to organize issues in ways that make sense to you.

What do I have to do?

Create a folder (or multiple folders if you want to get fancy) that will contain your bookmarked items. Check out this Folders Wiki article for more details.

That’s it. Now you are ready to use the Add to Folder… command when you want to add items to your bookmark folder!

Thanks to one of our great TestTrack customers, Dave Kellogg, CSDP, Software Engineer, The Raymond Corporation, for suggesting I do a blog entry on this topic!

This is a gentle reminder to all of you Software Test & Performance subscribers that the deadline to vote for TestTrack Pro and TestTrack TCM in the 2008 Testers Choice Awards is rapidly approaching.

Voting closes on July 30. You should have already received your online ballot from ST&P. Only current subscribers are eligible to vote.

The winners will be announced at the Fall 2008 Software Test & Performance Conference, September 24 - 26, 2008, in Boston.

Fernando Cremer, one of the terrific Solution Consultants in our Services group, has created a very interesting sample application that can answer this question. It shows the changes in the source files associated with a list of issues. Notice I said changes in the source files, not just the list of files that have changed.

You might find Fernando’s application handy when you are getting ready to promote changes to production, or you want to do a quick review of what went into the latest build, or when you want to satisfy your curiosity about which code review “suggestions” were actually followed.

Sample report output

The SCC_File_Diff_Report_Utility takes advantage of the integration between TestTrack Pro and Surround SCM. It uses TestTrack’s SOAP interface and Surround SCM’s Command Line Interface (CLI) to do its magic. If you are so inclined, Fernando has kindly made the SCC_File_Diff_Report_Utility source code available on the Seapine Labs site so you can make this report look however you want.

Seapine Labs

Speaking of which, Seapine Labs at http://labs.seapine.com/ is a very useful site to bookmark. It has lots of interesting tips and ideas that can expand your usage of Seapine products. It’s an incubation site that lets us share our experiments and works in progress with users. One warning. This is not production code! Use what you find, learn from it, but please don’t get upset if you find bugs.

I’ll be covering other interesting stuff from the TestTrack section of Seapine Labs in future posts. Surround SCM users should check out Life on Mars, courtesy of Jeff Amfahr, Surround SCM’s product manager, for additional Seapine Labs goodness for Surround SCM users.

Hey, have you created an interesting TestTrack SOAP application? Even if you can’t share your source code, we’d love to hear about what you’ve done!

So you are using an industrial grade defect tracker and you’ve been following the good practice advice of writing up all issues reported about your software. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, “a bug’s a bug, no matter how small.”

Congratulations!

You know that all of the issues that could potentially hurt your project are safely stored in one place. Pat yourself on the back and take a moment to enjoy the peace of mind that following this good practice can bring.

You have removed a non-trivial source of anxiety related to your efforts to deliver high quality software. The fear that bugs are lurking, waiting to appear right after you ship can be a big source of stress. And while worrying about bugs that haven’t been discovered yet is bad enough, it’s particularly galling to have a project schedule slip at the last minute or have an embarrassing (and costly) glitch at a customer site due to a bug that someone had already identified — but failed to mention.

You know the scenario. Your team is gathered at one end of the table in the big conference room with the sales guy and executive managers at the other end.

Exec (wearing a suit and a frown): “How could we ship and not know about this bug?”

Someone from your end of the table: “But we did know about it. I saw the problem on my machine two months ago. I was sure someone would fix it.”

Grrrrr…

I believe there is a special place reserved for people who discover bugs and don’t write them up. And that place is really, really hot, has no central air, internet access, or pizza delivery service.

Talk to your team at the next project meeting. Send out a reminder in a Project_All email. Make it a game (award bonus points and chocolate for reporting defects — double points for the most critical bug found this week). However you do it, make sure your project culture values identifying and documenting issues.

You know your team has embraced this good practice when you overhear one of the developers say to the tester who wrote up the bug report, “Hey, thanks for finding this one before a customer did.”

Did you know that you can hide the Workaround tab on the Edit Defect window in TestTrack Pro if it’s not part of your issue tracking process?

The Workaround tab hides itself if the only field on the tab, the Workaround field, is hidden.

All you have to do is set the field security privileges for the Workaround field to Hidden for each security group that doesn’t need to see the Workaround tab.


Steps
1. Select View > Security Groups… .
2. Edit… a security group to hide the Workaround field.
3. Don’t forget to reload the project by selecting File > Switch Project… to see the results!

One of the strategies I’ve used to reduce stress when wearing my project manager hat has been to try to control all changes to the project. I bet more than a few project managers out there are nodding their heads in agreement.

Change control = good = normal levels of stomach acid

But I’ve recently come to wonder (after some great customer conversations) if sometimes in my zeal for control of that holy project manager triangle of time, money, and features, that I took things a little too far.

I’m not talking here about ignoring valid scope changes that are driven by real business needs (and signed off customer requests).

I’m talking about spurning opportunities to increase productivity on long running projects by not taking advantage of the latest version of your software development tools.

Me: “Talk to the hand, girlfriend, ‘cause until we ship, nobody is touching that bug tracker server.”

In real life, I’m not that cool. When faced with this situation, I’m sure I rattled off phrases like “risk management” and “not an ideal time in the schedule.” Like there is ever an ideal time in a project schedule for anything.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating throwing out good practice and common sense. There are definitely better times than others for making changes to your project processes and tools. But not all changes need to throw you into a DEFCON 1, maximum biohazard containment frenzy.

I’m arguing that upgrades to your project tools don’t all carry the same risk. Assuming you have current backups, upgrading your issue management system does not have the same potential for wrecking your project schedule as, say, upgrading your compiler version. And, since your team is using that issue management system every day, an upgrade with even small usability enhancements has the potential reward of higher productivity and improved morale.

Why am I whining about this? Because in those recent customer conversations I mentioned, I found myself saying the following multiple times.

Me (again): “Great feature request! I can see how that would save you a lot of time. We, um, added that in a recent release.”

Frustrating to me and very frustrating to the customer stuck on a version several releases back.

I know upgrading software development tools in the middle of a project can be a stressful and divisive issue for teams. I’d love to hear what factors you consider when pondering a tool upgrade.

Bottom line for TestTrack users: if you are up-to-date on your maintenance, the upgrade is free. Check out the release notes to see if your favorite TestTrack feature request has shipped without you. Still unsure if the rewards are worth the risk? Maintenance also entitles you to contact support so you can find out just what’s involved in upgrading your project.

TestTrack TCM now has a new quick start guide available! Download it from the Seapine documentation page.

Thanks to Amy Kearns, one of our wonderful technical writers, and the rest of the TestTrack team for producing this great guide.

Even if you’ve been using TestTrack TCM for a while, you owe it to yourself to take a quick look at this document to make sure you are taking full advantage of the power of TestTrack TCM.

Not a TestTrack TCM user?

If you’ve been looking for a better way to manage your test cases and your testing process (especially if you are already a TestTrack Pro user), this document can also help you get started understanding what TestTrack TCM has to offer you.

Please check out the TestTrack TCM Quick Start Guide today and let me know what you think!

I found this bit of testing humor while browsing the Software Testing Stuff site…

AGGRESSION TESTING: If this doesn’t work, I’m gonna kill somebody.

COMPRESSION TESTING: []

CONFESSION TESTING: Okay, okay, I did program that bug.

CONGRESSIONAL TESTING: Are you now, or have you ever been a bug?

DEPRESSION TESTING: If this doesn’t work, I’m gonna kill myself.

EGRESSION TESTING: Uh-oh, a bug… I’m outta here.

DIGRESSION TESTING: Well, it should work, but let me tell you about my truck…

EXPRESSION TESTING: #@%^&*!!!, a bug!

OBSESSION TESTING: I’ll find this bug if it is the last thing that I
do.

OPPRESSION TESTING: You will test this, now!

POISSION TESTING: Alors! Regardez le poission!

REPRESSION TESTING: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

SUCCESSION TESTING: The system is dead. Long live the new system!

SUGGESTION TESTING: Well, it works but wouldn’t it be better if…

PRESIDENTIAL TESTING: Using the definition of testing as defined in the affidavit…