Changelists are an extremely useful feature in Surround SCM. Although changelists were initially introduced into Surround SCM to guarantee a set of actions occur atomically, they have evolved into a great way to group a set of actions together for a variety of purposes. Over time, we’ve added a number of other features that leverage changelists as a convenient grouping mechanism.
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Features
TestTrack list windows display defects, test cases, requirements and more. Knowing what features are available will help you work more efficiently with TestTrack. In this video, I share some tips for working with TestTrack list windows.
TestTrack 2011 includes enhanced change logging that provides the ability to graphically view changes made to items. You can view the new and old values for each change made to an item on the History tab. Enhanced email change notifications can now highlight exactly what changed, even if it’s only a couple words in a long description field or a simple priority change.
Share on Technorati . del.icio.us . Digg . Reddit . Slashdot . Facebook . StumbleUponSurround SCM 2011 includes a cool new feature – Graphical Version History – that allows you to view a file’s history graphically. It is especially useful when you want to see how a change has been propagated across branches.
Watch the video for a tour of the functionality, read more for instructions to enable and use this new feature.
Share on Technorati . del.icio.us . Digg . Reddit . Slashdot . Facebook . StumbleUponOne question I get every now and then is how to implement a test sequence in TestTrack TCM. The concept of “before you test Y, you must test X first”.
There isn’t a specific feature in TestTrack to address this but there are actually several ways to implement test sequences. Following is one way.
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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.
Share on Technorati . del.icio.us . Digg . Reddit . Slashdot . Facebook . StumbleUponLabels have always been a part of Surround SCM, however, they were originally provided mainly to support conversions from legacy systems that used labels. The following is an overview of the new labels.
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One of the things I do is look at competitive products. I do this both to understand their strengths and weaknesses as well as our own. Looking at someone else’s solution to a similar problem can often give you a fresh perspective.
As I looked at several of these, a few trends showed up. The first is that security in other products seems to be left as an exercise for the customer. I’ve talked about that before. Another area where other products take a very different approach is around triggers and alerts. This is another part of an application that either isn’t shown in a demo, or if shown the trigger is already installed and working. The user sees that emails are being generated or actions are being triggered with an aside of “all this and more can be yours with just a little script writing.”
Share on Technorati . del.icio.us . Digg . Reddit . Slashdot . Facebook . StumbleUponAs a Macintosh user it’s easy to feel left out by cross platform application vendors. Microsoft is too easy a target (though I can’t miss the chance to say I use Entourage every day and it never ceases to make me angry), so I’ll pick on someone my own size. Seapine. Although we have a fully native (that means not Java, you cheaters. You know who you are) client and servers on Linux, Solaris, Mac and Windows we don’t always make them, well, native enough. Make all the command keys match common conventions on that platform. Take advantage of platform specific technology, or the latest UI craze.
Share on Technorati . del.icio.us . Digg . Reddit . Slashdot . Facebook . StumbleUponIt’s not unusual for someone to suggest a feature which, in fact, we already have. It’s not even all that unusual for that person to be using the version of the software that has that feature. So I thought I would take a few minutes to point out some features in Surround that you may have forgotten, or missed during an upgrade.
Repository differences
This was mentioned in our last newsletter but I think it’s worth pointing out again. The Repository Differences window shows the difference between the server repository and your local working directory. This includes files that are missing from your working directory as well as files in your working directory not in Surround. It can even do this recursively. Check out the newsletter or the user documentation.
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