The Seapine View

Automation in your process is key to reducing human error and delays. While automation also includes things like automatically assigning bugs to developers and setting fields to specific values based on certain conditions, I’ll talk about email notifications in this post.

Seapine ALM can send automatic notifications. Surround SCM and TestTrack can notify users when something happens under specific circumstances. In fact, Surround SCM 2011.1 introduces enhancements that provide more dynamic notifications, such as notifying the last user that checked in files, the user selected in a custom field, and more.

If notifications are not set up properly, you risk spamming your users with emails that are not of interest and just make noise. Before you know it, users set up a rule to route emails sent from Seapine ALM to a folder that will rarely be reviewed.

While the mechanics of notifications in TestTrack and Surround SCM are different, the following high-level best practices apply to both.

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I was recently on-site with a customer. Aside from the usual tasks, like conducting training classes and configuring workflows, there was one interesting challenge. The customer wanted to integrate TestTrack RM and TestTrack TCM with ClearQuest. The customer did not want to use the ClearQuest API because they were using a very old version of ClearQuest and were planning on upgrading. The risk of changes in the API between the versions was high.

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If you frequently copy and paste emails into TestTrack, you may want to use the TestTrack Outlook add-in to save yourself some extra work. The add-in allows you to create new defects, requirements, requirement documents, and test cases directly from a TestTrack menu in Outlook.
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