The Seapine View

TestTrack’s built-in time tracking features make it easy to manage estimates, get updates on actual and remaining effort, and gain insight from the data about project status. You can track and report on time for specific items or across all items in a project—all directly in TestTrack. For a quick introduction to time tracking, see How TestTrack Time Tracking Works.

Use the following tips to make configuring time tracking easier. After completing some pre-work, you can easily modify projects to implement time tracking the way you want to use it and test the configuration before users start entering time.

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TestTrack includes built-in time tracking features that make it easy to manage estimates, get updates on actual and remaining effort, and gain insight from the data about project status. You can track and report on time for specific items or across all items in a project—all directly in TestTrack.

Before you configure time tracking, it is important to have a basic understanding of how it works, including the available data, how values are captured and calculated, and where you can view the data.

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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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As a consultant, I have been exposed to many different development methodologies and processes. In most cases, assignments are performed by a person that is aware of staff resources and distributes tasks according to the availability of these resources.
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The list report grouping stylesheets, introduced in TestTrack 2009, have been tremendously helpful to customers looking to slice data by various attributes, such as hours worked by product/component.

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A common question I hear from TestTrack users is how to display a value that was entered as part of a workflow event on the main issue/test case/requirement window.  As some of you may know, this is not “out of the box” functionality. However, this can be configured rather easily using automation rules and custom fields.

The only requirement is that the field on the main window has to be of type “String”.
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I posted a simple TestTrack workflow tutorial in the Seapine Labs on setting up the workflow in TestTrack. The tutorial shows how to implement a TestTrack Pro workflow from scratch and explains the various components of the workflow and how they work together. Plenty of screenshots are attached, including several workflow diagrams that show how the workflow evolves as states and event are added.

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to leave a comment.

This feature I’m about to show you is so top-secret it doesn’t even appear in the release notes for TestTrack 2010. We added the ability to update text fields via field codes, as part of an automation trigger. This is a small change, with limited functionality for now, but something that the Services team was very excited to see included in the 2010 release.

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The developers at Seapine have been using the Surround SCM workflow to manage code reviews ever since that feature was released in version 5 (back in 2006). Earlier this year, I decided to start using the Surround workflow to manage documentation file reviews, instead of using TestTrack. Why? A couple reasons, but the biggest one being that we store our source files in Surround SCM. Since the technical writers are used to checking their work in/out of Surround, using the workflow seemed like the logical next step.

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