The Seapine View

Every once in a while we get feature requests for new columns in the Surround SCM Source View window. Some of the most popular column requests are for the comments that were part of the last check in of a file, the last user who performed a check in, and the last defect number the file was attached to. (By the way, make sure you are submitting your feature requests. That’s the only way we’ll know about them.)

While all feature requests are reviewed, and may be implemented in a future release, we haven’t yet added new columns to the Source View. So, I’m going to show you how to use Surround SCM’s customer fields and triggers to create your own Source View columns.

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While planning the TestTrack 2010.1 release, we talked to a variety of customers and soon realized that every team uses story points slightly differently. Most commonly, the teams use story points as a high-level estimate of the difficulty of a specific task or work item. TestTrack is flexible in allowing you to manage stories in a variety of ways, we’ve outlined a straight-forward process here to get you started. As you become familiar with using story points, feel free to tweak your TestTrack configuration to better meet the need of your team.

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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.

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One of the most extensible features of the TestTrack triggers functionality is the ability to execute scripts when a trigger activates. From within the executing script, you can pull pretty much any piece of information from the object that triggered the script, via environment variables.

Problem is, your defect object isn’t the same as my defect object or another user’s defect object. This makes it impossible for Seapine to provide a standard answer when you’re wondering how to get the value of a custom field, specific event or some other field in the object.

Some of the standard fields are covered in the next sections, or you can create a trigger in TestTrack to provide you with that information for your installation.

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The following article illustrates how to use the TestTrack Integration, along with custom fields and triggers, and be able to easily identify the defect number that files are attached to.

Surround SCM already provides ways to filter and use the defect number that a file is attached to. This article simply extends this functionality to display the defect number in the source file list pane in the Surround SCM client.
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