Change the search method for multiple controls at the same time

If QA Wizard Pro cannot locate or distinguish between controls during playback, you may need to change the search method used. Now you can select multiple controls in the application repository and use the new Search Method shortcut menu to quickly switch them to a more accurate search method at the same time. Learn more.

Use test data from PostgreSQL and SQLite databases

You can now create external datasheets to import or link to existing data in PostgreSQL or SQLite databases for use in data-driven scripts. Learn more.

Improve the accuracy of optical character recognition

You can also improve the accuracy of text returned by optical character recognition (OCR) by setting default playback options. These new options control the contrast, image scale, grayscale conversion, and language file used to read graphical text in applications. You can also use new OCR statements to adjust these options during script playback. Learn more.

Manually add windows and controls to use in scripts

If QA Wizard Pro cannot capture windows or controls you need to test because they do not exist in the application or cannot be displayed during recording, you can now manually add them to the application repository to use them in scripts. This lets you create scripts that test new controls before they are implemented in the application, if you use a test-driven development process. Learn more.

Other enhancements

• Use the SetAllFilesReadOnly and SetFileReadOnly statements to allow or prevent scripts from modifying files.
• Use the EncryptString statement to conceal sensitive text entered in fields, such as passwords.
• Use the Err.CallStack and Err.LineText statements to generate additional output that is helpful when debugging scripts.
• Right-click a file in the workspace and choose Open Containing Folder to quickly locate the source file on your computer.

Want to know more?

Check out the release notes and help to learn more about QA Wizard Pro 2017.1.

More options for reviewing files in code reviews

You now have more flexibility to see the exact changes you’re interested in and how changes look when reviewing files in code reviews. You can show differences for versions not included in a review, for more information. You can also ignore case and white-space differences, change the differences output, and change the font and tab width. Learn more.

Get files with historical filenames

When getting files by label or timestamp, you can now retrieve them using the name they had when they were labeled or at the time specified by the get. Learn more.

More flexible text end-of-line formatting

Surround now supports additional file types when adding files, setting file properties, and setting server options to auto-detect or ignore files based on filename or extension:  Text (CR/LF), Text (LF), UTF-8 Text (CR/LF), and UTF-8 Text (LF).

When getting text files using the Surround SCM CLI, you can now override the default end-of-line format set in the user options. This is helpful when build scripts that run on one operating system get files used exclusively in builds for another operating system. Learn more.

And more!

This release also includes other enhancements, such as:

• Support for the Jenkins Pipeline feature from the Surround SCM Jenkins plug-in
• Better performance when switching branches because information is loaded in the background, allowing you to continue working
• More options for administrators when analyzing and repairing issues in Surround SCM databases

Ready to check out Surround SCM 2017.1? If you have a current support and maintenance plan, upgrades are free. If you’re not already using Surround SCM, try it out today.

Now, don’t despair! I haven’t, and if anyone has emotional equity in TestTrack, it’s me, the father of TestTrack! But the TestTrack (er, Helix ALM) of today is not the same product I released in 1996, and I’ve always been a big proponent of renaming it to something less “Test” focused. Over the years, the descriptive name of the original product had become a detriment to marketing its other capabilities; e.g., requirements management is not “tracking testing.” Also, do you know how many people in education have thought TestTrack was a product they could use to track test scores?

Helix ALM is part of the broader Perforce product portfolio. Those of you who were Seapine customers have told us how much you appreciate the seamless integration and consistent look-and-feel across the product line. We share those ideals at Perforce, so getting our brands aligned is one important step on the road to seamlessness. Over time, you will see that the products share more and more of the traits that have made them individually great. Many companies don’t take the time to make their portfolio homogenous. We do.

Logos, like people, evolve.

Products often have an unscripted life of their own. It’s interesting to watch their evolution as they go from baby, to toddler, to awkward teen, and then to become the mature person (or application) you hoped for.

TestTrack has followed this arc. When I was writing the original TestTrack back in 1995, I never imagined how much it might evolve over the years. How could I? At the time, the internet was young, browsers were limited, and software development wasn’t very global. True, we considered software complex at that time, but that complexity was as much a function of the languages and technologies of the time as the problems being solved.

Today, products are more complex and software may only be one part. Plus, development is distributed across cities, countries, and continents. While I dreamed of building a company around a product that could make a significant impact on software quality, how that product would evolve and the forces that would shape it were unknown.

First logo: 1996

While I was well versed in the popular operating systems of the time when I wrote TestTrack, I was always a Mac guy at heart (a Commodore guy, if we’re talking 6502-based systems). So TestTrack was born on the Mac, and it was “Bug Tracking the Macintosh Way.”

The Mac developer market being what it was in 1996 (not so great), I quickly created Windows and web-browser versions of TestTrack. This unique cross-platform market position fueled TestTrack sales, Seapine’s growth, and the evolution of TestTrack. Yes, the logo was primitive at that time, but it was also fun. That bug seemed happy to be tracked by TestTrack.

In between the first and second logos, which were used for the application icons, we created more realistic bugs for the marketing material and CD-ROM cases. A few large plastic toy bugs, property of my toddler son, served as the design inspiration.

Second logo: 2001

In 2001, we retired the little green guy, refreshing the bug logo with a more high-tech look based on the red bug. It was the “digital bug” and it remained TestTrack’s logo until 2006, when we introduced the first new module in the TestTrack product family, TestTrack TCM (test case management).With a strong following by quality assurance teams, defining and managing test cases that could result in bugs being found was a natural next step for TestTrack. It also expanded our traceability story beyond change management (work items related to source code changes) to knowing where bugs came from and where the weak points were in an application.

Third logo: 2006

The release of TestTrack TCM required us to rethink the TestTrack logo. We were now building a family of products, and bug tracking was just a part of it. In 2006, the Seapine portfolio also included Surround SCM and QA Wizard Pro, so our rebranding would encompass those products as well. For its part, TestTrack received a slightly abstract treatment leveraging the two capital Ts in the name.

Third logo expansion: 2009

With TestTrack managing testing, bug fixes, feature requests, and code changes, we offered a lot of visibility in middle and end of the development process. However, we couldn’t tell you “why” something was being implemented, whether the testing was truly complete, or whether risks were mitigated. Those were attributes of requirements. If we wanted to offer complete visibility and traceability, we needed to start at the beginning.

So in 2009, we added requirements management (RM) to TestTrack, giving us three distinct but fully integrated modules for one complete ALM solution. We created a new logo to market the TestTrack family, using the main TestTrack logo supported by individual logos for requirements management, issue management (bug tracking), and test case management. (Why did we choose the atomic model as the symbol for RM? I’m going to have to research the answer to that question!)

We never used the mini logos for the application icons, because TestTrack has always been a single executable with modules enabled by license keys. In other words, you could never just install TestTrack RM and see the weird atom icon.

Fourth logo: 2010

Not much changed with the next logo iteration in 2010. We were launching a new web site and it was high time for a rebrand across the product line. Orange had played itself out as a popular color so it was blue’s turn.

Fifth logo (Helix ALM): 2017

Which brings us to this year. Seapine is now Perforce and TestTrack ALM is now Helix ALM. The new logo appropriately reflects the concept of a life cycle, and the colors are fresh and modern.

The clean design of the new branding also fits neatly into the Perforce portfolio. And, as I noted earlier, the changes to Helix ALM are not just cosmetic. You’ll find it works more seamlessly than ever with the Helix Versioning Engine.

The evolution of what started as “Bug Tracking the Macintosh Way”  continues …

• TestTrack Pro is now Helix Issue Management (IM)
• TestTrack RM is now Helix Requirements Management (RM)
• TestTrack TCM is now Helix Test Case Management (TCM)

What’s new?

Helix ALM 2017.1 features improved integration with Helix Versioning Engine. You’ll enjoy more functionality, more flexibility, and better performance. In addition to the existing features to attach source files and work with them from Helix ALM, you can now:

• Add Helix Versioning Engine as a source control provider.
• Attach changelists to Helix ALM items and click hyperlinks in items to view attached changelists in Helix Swarm.
• Attach changelists to Helix ALM items when submitting them from Helix VCS clients, which requires configuring Helix Versioning Engine triggers.

We also streamlined the process to integrate with other source control applications to get you up and running more quickly.

In the last release, we introduced integration with JIRA, which lets you attach JIRA issues to Helix ALM items. Starting with 2017.1, we’re also making available the Helix ALM for JIRA add-on in the Atlassian Marketplace. With the add-on, you can see the current status of your Helix ALM tests, requirements, user stories, and issues without leaving JIRA.

See Helix ALM in action

Watch the on-demand webinar, “What’s New in Helix ALM 2017.1,” to learn more about the new features and upgrades in this release.

Can’t wait? If you have a current support and maintenance plan, upgrades are free.

And if you’re not already using Helix ALM, try it out today.

So for regulated industries, traceability isn’t just “nice to have” — it’s actually a regulatory requirement.

Despite this fact, many companies treat it as just another item on the auditor’s checklist. A large percentage put off traceability tasks until the end of the process, and then go through the tedious, manual process of connecting all of the product artifacts and assembling a traceability matrix. They know they may have missed a few (or more), so come audit time, they cross their fingers and hope for the best.

If they’re “lucky,” the auditor picks the artifacts that are traced — but then they end up crossing their fingers again, hoping no undiscovered hazards are hiding in the final product.

If they’re not lucky, they get slapped with warning letters, delays, and the potential of some very steep fines.

Building the trace matrix at the end of the development process defeats the whole goal of traceability — ensuring product quality and safety by effectively managing change. What’s more, putting it off could be costing significant amounts of time and money.

If these companies implemented integrated traceability, however, they could improve product quality, cut costs, and spend far less time and effort assembling the reports auditors require.

What Is Integrated Traceability?

Integrated traceability is the ability to attain to-the-minute status information on every aspect of the product development lifecycle. Traceability links all artifacts contributing to the development of your product. It makes it easy to analyze data, generate traceability reports, and keep a weather eye on the project’s status.

To be effective, integrated traceability requires the implementation of a good traceability strategy, along with a software tool like TestTrack to provide a live stream of information.

Benefits

Because integrated traceability begins when the project begins, it offers a host of benefits throughout the development process — from design reviews to risk analysis, gap analysis to verification and validation.

Design Review

Integrated traceability aids in design reviews by making it easy to understand requirements decomposition through linking. For example, marketing requirements link to product requirements, which link to system specifications.

Risk Analysis

By the same measure, integrated traceability can also aid in identifying risk-based and safety-based requirements by including risk and hazard analysis within the traceability implementation. Development teams can also identify the software code that ties to each design, technical, or software specification, making it much easier to identify high-risk code and where each requirement is implemented in the code.

Gap Analysis

Traceability also helps you identify gaps in documentation, testing, and risk analysis. Seeing these gaps enables teams to ensure they’re filled by the time an auditor comes knocking at the door. By having this information at their fingertips, they now have an easy way to provide evidence for any audits that pop up unexpectedly.

This was particularly helpful for a Seapine client who arrived at his office to find he was having a surprise audit that day. Because of the confidence he had in the company’s implementation of integrated traceability, he was able to deliver information to the auditor faster, which in turn reduced the time it took for the audit. He said it was the fastest that he ever had an auditor in and out of the building.

Verification and Validation

Finally, integrated traceability helps to ensure that requirements are implemented correctly both from a verification and validation point of view. Teams can quickly make sure the requirement has been implemented correctly and the product functions for the user as intended.

Solve Problems Early

As the General Principles of Software Validation state, the vast majority of software problems can be traced to errors made during the design and development process. Integrated traceability gives development teams the power to spot problems early, so they can correct them while the cost and effort to do so is low.

And as for the tedious process of assembling the trace matrix? Because they’re maintaining traceability throughout the process, they can generate a matrix on demand, at any point. In TestTrack, it takes just a couple of clicks.

Learn More

An integrated traceability solution can help companies bring quality products to market more quickly, safely, and profitably. To learn how, download our white paper, 5 Ways to Bring Quality Software Products to Market Faster.

What is Predictability At Scale?

Predictability at scale is about achieving a better idea of the outcome due to the processes put in place and the tools used to drive those processes.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how a modern ALM solution, such as Helix ALM, can help you achieve predictability at scale while gaining:

• Real quality improvements
• Increased development efficiency and faster time to market
• Instant, auditable evidence of work performed

For more information or to sign up for this webinar, please visit perforce.com.

Note: Links to both TestTrack desktop and web client help are provided where applicable.

JIRA integration

If some teams in your organization use TestTrack and others use JIRA, you can integrate TestTrack with JIRA to improve collaboration. For example, the QA team may use TestTrack for test case management and the development team may use JIRA for bug tracking. When a test fails, a tester can create a new JIRA issue from the TestTrack test run. A developer can then view the issue in JIRA and fix it. Teams may also attach JIRA tasks to TestTrack requirements to show that the items are related across the applications.

Here are some help topics about the TestTrack JIRA integration.

Integrating with JIRA

Learn what the TestTrack JIRA integration is and high-level steps to configure and use it. This is a good starting point for everyone.

Desktop client | Web client

Configuring JIRA integration

Learn how to configure the TestTrack JIRA integration for your team. For administrative users who configure TestTrack or JIRA.

Desktop

Working with JIRA issues

Find out what actions you can perform related to JIRA when working in TestTrack.

Desktop | Web

Attaching JIRA issues to TestTrack items

Learn how to attach one or more JIRA issues to a TestTrack item to show they are related.

Desktop | Web

Creating JIRA issues from TestTrack items

Learn how to create a new JIRA issue from a TestTrack item and automatically attach it to the item it is created from…all without leaving TestTrack.

Desktop | Web

Viewing JIRA issues attached to TestTrack items

See how to open JIRA issues attached to a specific TestTrack item to view the details.

Desktop | Web

Rich text editing improvements

Working with multi-line text fields is now easier and more features are available. The following help topics provide more information.

Formatting text fields

Learn how to change the appearance of text, and insert links, images, tables, and more in multi-line text fields.

Desktop | Web

Inserting images

Learn how to add images to multi-line text fields. It is now easier to edit and resize images in these fields.

Desktop | Web

Other enhancements

TestTrack Web refresh

TestTrack Web introduces a more modern, cleaner user interface that provides a better user experience. See the TestTrack Web help for information about using the web client.

Searching for items by number

Learn how you can now search by item number in the Find dialog box.

Desktop

ERD improvements

If you work with TestTrack databases, you’ll be happy to know that TestTrack Server and project database ERDs are now provided in HTML format, making them easy to work with and navigate. See the TestTrack ERDs knowledgebase article for links to the ERDs.

Remember, you can always find help on our web site. If you have documentation suggestions, please let us know.

TestTrack 2016.1 also includes improved rich text editing, an upgraded modern web client, and more.

Don’t have TestTrack 2016.1 yet?

Upgrades are free if you have a current TestTrack support and maintenance plan. If you’re not already using TestTrack, try it out today.

If you’re a customer who has followed us for a while, last month’s acquisition announcement was probably a complete surprise. Rest assured, you’ll find it was a wonderful surprise.

The ink was barely dry on the acquisition agreement, announcing Seapine Software, Inc. would join Perforce, LLC, when customer inquiries began to arrive. “What is going to happen to the Seapine products?” “Are you going to continue to provide the same great level of support?” And so on. Reading these, I couldn’t be prouder of what Seapine meant to our customers. It was clear we succeeded in what we set out to do when Kelly and I founded Seapine 21 years ago—create products that positively impact how people build quality software and create a company that sets a high standard for friendly, responsive customer interaction. It also reinforced the benefits of the acquisition.

21 years is a long time to sustain a company in our industry. And while capital constraints often dictate a carefully measured path, I’ve always wanted to do more and do it faster. So this year, I decided it was time to enter the capital market. And a wonderful thing happened, I met the new management team at Perforce LLC, a long-time partner (since 2001). It was clear from the first meeting that Perforce and Seapine were a perfect fit. From the similar histories of our founding and growth, to the “customer first” emphasis we place on high quality support, to the focus on helping companies innovate faster with higher quality, our two companies were meant to be one. So it became.

The team at Perforce shares our vision for tackling the difficult development challenges you face. Now, as partners with Perforce, Seapine has access to the resources to accelerate our product development. If you like what you’ve seen from Seapine over the years, prepare to be amazed.

I am excited to be joining the Perforce team as CTO, ALM Solutions, where I will be leading the ALM product strategy and direction. I’ll be working closely with Tim Russell, CPO and Janet Dryer, CEO of Perforce. We’ve just begun this journey together and will start firming up the long-term product roadmaps over the next month or so. We’ll communicate with you as the plan develops and, as always, your input is welcome.

So stay tuned. I’m excited about Perforce + Seapine and I think you will be too.

The Importance of Effective Traceability

Effective traceability allows teams to document the life of the product development process, so that every artifact can be easily traced all the way back to the originator of the initial request.

By creating relationships and links between development artifacts, effective traceability allows stakeholders, managers, and regulators to quickly review, from a high level, every action and decision within the product development lifecycle—or drill down to detailed information, as needed. Every relationship and artifact change can be traced all the way back to the original requirement, providing instant visibility into product data.

From a compliance standpoint, traceability tracks, relates, and verifies each step and activity within the development process. It helps life sciences organizations better monitor and analyze:

• Product development projects
• Verification and validation activities
• Internally validated IT systems
• Product approvals

From a business-value standpoint, an integrated product development solution:

• Improves visibility and collaboration among stakeholders, reducing errors and duplication of effort.
• Provides managers with timely and accurate information they need to make informed business decisions and keep the development process moving.
• More quickly defines and mitigates issues and challenges to speed product development.
• Boosts performance and eliminates wasteful costs by improving efficiency in every area of the development process.

In addition to meeting regulatory compliance, traceability can help companies bring quality products to market more quickly, safely, and profitably. Nearly half of survey respondents (46%) said they are able to leverage traceability to help manage risk, make better decisions, and identify validation coverage, among other key areas.

Barriers to Leveraging Traceability

With such significant benefits available, what prevents companies from taking full advantage of traceability? Why are some only using it to check off an item on a compliance list?

The 54% of survey respondents who have been unsuccessful in leveraging traceability identified some common barriers, including:

• It takes too long to find the report. (21%)
• They have no visibility into relevant data. (18%)
• The information is often inaccurate. (16%)

The most common barrier they identified, however, was a lack of the right tools and technology (36%). Only 14% of respondents reported using dedicated traceability management tools.

So what are the rest using? Most seem to be assembling traceability reports and matrices manually, using Microsoft Word and Excel. More than two-thirds (67%) said their development process is heavily centered on documents, rather than artifacts; of this group, 85% said they use Word and Excel.

Manually performing traceability, however, can be time-consuming and costly, which may explain why these respondents are unable to get more use out of their traceable data.

Improving Traceability Tools

Survey respondents who use dedicated traceability management tools are mostly satisfied with the compliance enforcement, accuracy of information, and access to relevant information their tools provide. The three top areas respondents are dissatisfied with include:

1. Communication and collaboration (35%)
2. Automatic change notifications (35%)
3. Bi-directional linking and traceability (33%)

When asked for their recommendations for improving their traceability management, the leading answer was “better tools.”

Learn More

The 2016 Life Sciences Product Development Survey Report is now available. Download your free copy here.

To learn more about traceability’s benefits, as well as how to improve your traceability, explore our library of white papers and guides.