The Seapine View

A week or so ago I was working on “owner code reviews” for changes made during the Surround SCM 2011.0 development process. Part of our code review process is that every source code file is “owned” by a developer and, when another developer makes a change to a file you own, you review it. While I was reviewing files it occurred to me that it would be really nice if the Surround SCM GUI Client had an “Open with Finder” or “Open with Explorer” option that made it easy to open a file with the default application configured for that the particular file extension. For example, Qt UI files would open with “Qt Designer”, header and source files (.h, .c, .cpp) would open with Xcode, etc.
Continue reading…

Custom fields allow you to define metadata you want to capture about a file beyond the normal information (like last date modified) that Surround SCM inherently tracks. Each field can be typed as text, integer, float, list, SCM users, date/time or check box. You can also set default values for any of these.

By themselves, custom fields let you do some useful things. For example, Surround ships with a custom field called Owner, which is a drop-down list of your users. As a team lead you can grab groups of design specifications and, with one click, assign those files to an engineer to manage.

Continue reading…

For performing peer code reviews, there isn’t a better tool than Smart Bear Software’s Code Collaborator. Even if you already have a working solution, their free book “Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review“ is a great read.

Code Collaborator 5.0 is in beta and SmartBear has added direct support for our version control tool, Surround SCM. You can learn about Code Collaborator 5.0′s new features and download the beta at their web site. If you don’t already use Surround SCM, you can get a free single-user license.

SmartBear’s CodeCollaborator is becoming a popular tool used by developers to do code reviews.

CodeCollaborator offers a way to integrate with Defect tracking tools and the question has been asked if it can be integrated with TestTrack Pro.

This article shows some of the integration you can set up between CodeCollaborator and TestTrack Pro.

Note: This article may not cover every possible way to integrate the two applications.
Continue reading…

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!