The Seapine View

If you’re new to TestTrack TCM or already use it, and want to learn better ways to manage your testing process, check out the TestTrack TCM Best Practices. This document covers:

• How TestTrack TCM items map to items from your manual test case management process.
• Suggestions for creating test suites and test run sets for better organization and meaningful reporting.
• When to create test cases and generate test runs.
• How to rerun failed tests.
• How to prepare for testing future releases.
• Which reports and live charts can help you accurately measure the progress of your testing effort.

Additional best practices were recently added for enhancements introduced in TestTrack TCM 2011.1, including new project options that can help you ensure tests meet compliance requirements or that your testing process is followed, and the ability share test case steps to maximize reuse.

We recently released version 2010.1 of TestTrack, which contains many new exciting new features. One new feature that I would like to give some love to is Item Mapping Rules. This feature will benefit users who have more than one TestTrack applications, as it allows you to configure how field values are mapped from one application to another.

Continue reading…

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.

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.”

The following guidelines are provided to help you write test cases.
Continue reading…

File sharing in Surround SCM allows a single copy of a file to exist in multiple repository locations. Since the file is shared, if it is ever updated all locations will reflect those updates simultaneously. There are several best practice suggestions and caveats associated with file sharing. It is important to understand how the Surround SCM architecture facilitates file sharing so that best practice strategies can be devised early on to help you get the most out of file sharing with the least amount of effort.
Continue reading…