We are creating a new website for software developers and QA professionals to read and share their thoughts about software quality, programming, development processes and life in the software business. The site will provide a platform for software developers and QA professionals in the trenches to read about the latest trends and issues in their field, learn, laugh, voice their opinion and interact with each other.
We are looking for a cool name for the site. Help us find a name for a chance to win* a Flip UltraHD Video Camera before the Holidays! All you need to do is vote on the ones provided to be eligible, but if you have a suggestion for another, we're happy to accept it.
It has to be a name that is easy to remember, works for... well let's be honest - software geeks like us, and of course passes legal muster (no trademark issues, .com domain available, etc.). And note, that this site will be independent and not about SmartBear products, so the name does not have to be connected with the SmartBear brand.
Now have fun with the name. For the prize drawing we'll need all submissions by next Monday, Dec. 13th 2010, 4pm EST.
SmartBear will host a live Webinar with editors and contributors from the book, “Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It.”
When: Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 1:00 PM EST.
Experts: In this Webinar, Making Software editors Greg Wilson and Andy Oram, along with contributors Hakan Erdogmus, Diomidis Spinellis, Jason Cohen and Marian Petre, willuncover some truths and unmask myths commonly held among the software development community.
Takeaways: Gain a number of innovative ideas and practical tips from recognized software development thought leaders as they share their experience and field your questions live. Attendees will also learn about tools, technologies and practices that can help improve and develop better quality software.
As an added bonus, SmartBear is giving away 100 free copies of Making Software. You could be one of the first to own a book that is sure to become a mandatory read for every software developer, not just a book shelf trophy. Enter here and Tweet about the event (example Tweet included) using hash tag #ASQBear before or during the event to be included in the drawing. Good luck!
One high priority for us here in the Bear Cave is excellent support for SCM tools. As IBM announces Rational Team Concert V3 today, we’re happy to report that we’re already Ready for Rational Software-validated for the new version 3, in addition to our existing validations for RTC V2 and for IBM Rational ClearCase and Synergy.
With CodeCollaborator v6.0, we introduced the ability to do code review without ever leaving the RTC environment. In fact, CodeCollaborator is the only code review tool that’s integrated directly into the RTC workflow for pain-free, efficient code review.
The CodeCollaborator and IBM Rational Team Concert integrated solution:
Seamlessly submits code to CodeCollaborator using the Work Item capability in RTC (such as changing the state of Work Items to a state that automatically initiates code review in CodeCollaborator).
Enables customers to augment the development process with CodeCollaborator's review tool, making it easy for appropriate reviewers to approve Change Sets associated with Work Items before approval.
Is easy to deploy – simply install on the IBM Rational Team Concert server.
Helps teams review code in 1/5th the time needed for formal code reviews.
Provides the ability to automatically assign reviewers in CodeCollaborator based on the Approvers listed in the Work Item.
IBM is thrilled to be able to offer RTC users the ability to review code within the IDE. “CodeCollaborator provides significant value by leveraging the unique workflow in Rational Team Concert. This level of integration is what customers will look for and will make SmartBear one of the leading Rational Team Concert integrations. We expect CodeCollaborator to become an organic part of the way customers use Rational Team Concert,” volunteered Michael Loria, Vice President for IBM Rational Business Development.
At SmartBear we enjoy having a good time. Water balloons? Check. Giant donuts? Check. We were at it again today. This time we filled Eric's office with balloons. Why, you ask? Because we can. Well, there's a little more to it.
Eric's not much for celebrations, so when he saw his birthday on the SmartBear calendar he surreptitiously removed it. No matter. Hannah was on the case and caught him. Rather than just put the date back on the calendar, she plotted revenge. Yesterday afternoon she went on a mission to purchase balloons. Hannah and several other bears stayed late last night to fill the balloons and Eric's office.
Lucky for us, Eric had an appointment this morning and was the last to arrive. Everyone got to enjoy his arrival! Eric has been a good sport and has spent the day happily coding in an office full of balloons.
SmartBear has teamed up with some familiar names and faces in the software development, agile, testing, SCM and release management realms for an expert panel Webinar. We invite you to hear from the experts some ways to help you improve software quality from a few different perspectives.
Twitter: Follow the session live on Twitter at hashtag #ASQBear
Come away with some insightful and actionable things you can do today to improve the quality of your software and have an opportunity to ask questions during the Q&A.
How do you define software quality? Perhaps this Webinar will change your mind.
Software gurus from all over the world descended upon Boston last week for the Business of Software 2010 conference. Engaging and inspiring for any businessperson, #BOS2010 is custom-made for technology entrepreneurs, specifically software company founders and core team members. It's run by software blog superstar Joel Spolsky and Red Gate joint-CEO Neil Davidson -- both bootstrappers of their own successful companies -- and powered by Who's Who in the Software Industryspeakers like Seth Godin and Dan Bricklin. If you write software, chances are you idolize at least some of these guys.
I am in awe. I am humbled. I feel deficient. I'm told I can spin a good story, but I struggled for two days to write a word about Business of Software. Humanity, transparency, and humility pervaded the conference in refreshing and unexpected ways, but I still feel overwhelmed by the genius of my fellow attendees, and let's not even get started about those presenting.
Eventually I took a deep breath, dove in, and started highlighting favorite nuggets in my notes. Trawling through 36 typewritten pages of brilliant observations and poignant experiences, I was struck by how many of the speakers brought up the same points. I'll take this consistency both as a sign of a strong tribe and as reinforcement of the concepts' validity. So rather than offer a detailed conference summary, I'll share my short and sweet version of the most pervasive advice.
Sound Bytes and Highlights
Instill passion! Having and cultivating passion is critical: it begets a cycle of passion. Suddenly you have a culture of passion! There's no better place to work than one characterized by a culture of passion. Fall in love with the problem and believe in your product. People like to follow people, and the market for something to believe in is infinite. -- Seth Godin, Peldi Guilizzoni, Youngme Moon, Derek Sivers
Be a good egg: Follow the path of truth and justice. The path of truth is paved with profits. “Commitment” culture models are fastest to go public, surprisingly financially successful, and least likely to fail. Leave the world better than you found it. -- Dharmesh Shah, David Russo, Joel Spolsky
Draw people in: Be a company others are proud to do business with. -- David Russo, Peldi Guilizzoni, Paul Kenny
Build trust: Returning website visitors [and returning customers] buy more. The goal of your website should not be to sell, but to get people to come back. -- Rob Walling
Tell stories and listen: Tell good stories that people relate to -- stories they see solve their problem. Engage your customers with dialog. Ask good questions and listen carefully to the responses. -- Paul Kenny, Eric Sink*
Focus: You can't do everything. Pick a few key areas in which you want your company to excel and focus on them. The hardest part of feature design? Knowing what to leave out. -- Peldi Guilizzoni, Youngme Moon, Dan Bricklin
Be different: If you want to stand out, do what others aren't doing. In our world of increasing choices, everything is becoming increasingly the same, so to differentiate you need to take risks and go where no one has yet gone. Keep in mind that different and crazy often look the same at first. -- Youngme Moon, Scott Farquhar, Paul Kenny
Be irreplaceable: Do something that leverages your inherent creativity. In a virtual world of infinite abundance, only creativity can ever be in short supply. -- Seth Godin, Mark Stephens
Be yourself: Culture is important; let who you are shine through authentically and honestly. -- Eric Sink*
Break the rules: Advice comes from everywhere, but you have to take what works for your situation. Sometimes you have to break the rules! -- Jason Cohen, Peldi Guilizzoni
Failure is the path to success: If you don’t fail, you can’t learn. Even if you build the wrong thing, it's still time well spent. Test often and fail as fast as you can. -- Eric Ries, Sanjay Singhal, Scott Farquar
Of coures, many speakers not credited above touched on these themes as well. And alas, I didn't have space to list every concept that resonated (please leave a comment with your favorites!). If you want more detail and some context, read Mark Littlewood's outstanding real-time summary of each session, complete with photos. You'll even find some interesting history about how SmartBear clawed its way out of obscurity.
To everyone who shared their experiences at the conference -- both on and off stage -- I want to express a heartfelt thank-you for your brilliance, humor and openness, and for reminding me that the answer really is 42. Until next year, so long, and thanks for all the fish.
Photos Above: Seth Godin, Su-uper Gen-i-us Right: Dan Bricklin, Then and Now
*UPDATE: Oops! I've just realized an error in my notes propagated here (information overload --> data processing error). Eric did not touch on the themes attributed to him above. Although the concepts represent common sentiments at BOS both this year and last, they weren't part of Eric's highly informative talk. I'm sorry, Eric!
Eric, many apologies for putting words in your mouth!
Haven’t yet seen a demo of CodeCollaborator 6.0? In these RedMonkTV videos with industry analyst Michael Coté, we provide a quick overview of some of the most noteworthy features added to CodeCollaborator 6.0.
Visit the RedMonk site to explore the features and view a CodeCollaborator 6.0 demo (scroll to bottom). A full transcript is also provided.
The CodeCollaborator 6.0 release builds on features added last year that allow development teams to review materials other than just plain text source files, such as URLs, PDFs and image files (JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, etc.).For example, the ability to review design schematics allows embedded firmware and hardware designers to participate in reviews as well.
New features within 6.0 further increase the value across development teams, adding even broader and richer support of leading development environments, new reporting features and more. A few of these new features include:
The ability to conduct peer review of Microsoft Office documents such as Microsoft Word;
Enhanced support for Eclipse and a new Microsoft Visual Studio add-in;
The ability to redact a comment; and zoom control for documents and image files;
And much more.
Earlier this week, SmartBear publicly announced CodeCollaborator 6.0 and shared some thoughts from a few customers who were able to beta the product (thank you to GE Aviation, Synopsys and Imprivata!)
[Note: This post was made September 9, 2010. August 31 was an automated TypePad error.]
After a successful beta test period, CodeCollaborator v6.0 has been released! This is one of the biggest releases yet of our award-winningpeer code review tool, and includes features such as:
While a feature list is nice and all, you might reasonably wonder: "What's in it for me?" In other words, what sort of benefits does this release deliver? Here are just a few examples:
A key theme of this release is to help you further integrate code reviews with your everyday processes and tools, to make them even faster and easier to do. That's the idea behind features such as the support for MS Office and Visual Studio, and the enhancements that allow doing a code review in Eclipse.
The ability to redact comments improves collaboration and saves everyone time by making it clear which comments are not worth reading. This, along with other enhancements, makes the user interface friendlier, which improves productivity.
The reporting enhancements make it possible to find out review details at a very granular level. To take just one example: individual developers can now see exactly how much time they spent on each review in which they participated - making it much easier to fill out that weekly status report.
There will be a webinar on September 28, 2010 to demonstrate the new features and answer questions - click here to register. (For our complete webinar schedule, or to see a replay of a past webinar, click here.)
If you are already using CodeCollaborator you can upgrade just by downloading the new installers and running them. Of course you'll want to backup everything first. Or, make a copy of your existing installation and try v6.0 on a test machine. More details on these options is available here.
If you are not currently using CodeCollaborator, you can get a 30-day free trial.
Either way, if you have feedback, please let us know. Leave a comment on this blog, send us an email (info at smartbear dot com), or add an entry to our public feedback forum.
(This blog entry is part of a
series of entries describing some of the new features in Code
Collaborator v6.0. The series content is listed in this entry.)
When I talk to customers or prospective customers who use ClearCase the
first question I always ask them is: "Are you using base ClearCase or
ClearCase UCM?" The answer is important because it determines the features available in the integration that our peer code review tool, Code Collaborator, provides for ClearCase users.
If, on the other hand, you are using base ClearCase, the situation is a bit different because Activities aren't available to use as a change list. Our integration makes it easy to add locally modified files to a code review, but that's only useful if you want to do the review before checking in the files to ClearCase.
In an environment where code is reviewed after check in, the model we frequently see is that the check in was done on a specific branch. So what you would want to be able to do is create a code review based on the changes made since that specific branch was created. Or, another common approach is to create a review based on the differences between the contents of the specific branch and the branch into which the changes are about to be merged.
Unfortunately, our integration does not have support for creating a code review based on the differences between two branches (or labels, or anything else) in ClearCase. The reason is that the file diff output from ClearCase's cleartool utility is, quite frankly, not very useful. There is not enough context information in it to create a useful display within our file comparison utility. (Side note: in our integrations with version control tools that do provide adequate file diff information, Code Collaborator does allow creating a review based on the differences between branches, dates, tags, etc.)
The solution we provided was support for adding specific versions of files from base ClearCase to a review. That solution existed prior to v6.0, but was limited to an addversions command in our CLI - useful, but not as user friendly as we would like.
As a result, the ability to add specific ClearCase file versions with our cross-platform GUI has frequently been at the top of the voting out on our user feedback forum. I'm happy to announce that beginning with v6.0 the feature is now available in our cross-platform GUI:
You pick the files that you want and then the cross-platform GUI displays those files followed by two columns: "After" and "Before." You have to fill in something for the After column - it's the only way Code Collaborator will know what version you want reviewed. The Before column is optional. If you don't specify anything then we'll ask cleartool for the predecessor to the After version of the file.
Filling in version strings for a large list of files can be tedious, so there are some controls that expedite the process. Under the list of files there are two Autofill controls, one for After and one for Before. In addition, the After Autofill has a predefined value that you can select: local.
We use "local" to refer to, well... the locally checked out or sync'ed version of the file. For example, if the local file hello.c is checked out from /main/9 then specifying "/main/9" as the After version is the same as specifying "local."
As an example, I created a branch called TASK_1 and I have made some changes to each of the files on that branch - as shown in the ClearCase Explorer:
To create a code review that shows the differences between the selected files on the TASK_1 branch and the versions of those files that were used to create the TASK_1 branch, I would specify "local" and "/main/TASK_1/0" :
If, however, I plan to merge TASK_1 back into /main and I want a review that shows the differences between TASK_1 and the current contents of /main I would specify "local" and "/main/LATEST" :
For me, this feature totally rocks because it makes it so much easier to demonstrate the value of Code Collaborator in a base ClearCase environment. But what matters is: how well does this work in the real world? If you have feedback, please leave a comment or drop us a line at support at smartbear dot com.
For a few years now, Smart Bear Software has officially been part of AutomatedQA (best known for TestComplete for automated testing and AQtime for performance profiling). And last fall, AutomatedQA bought Pragmatic Software, makers of SoftwarePlanner for development and test management.
Now we are truly uniting the three companies. The new company will be known as SmartBear Software. While our name has changed slightly to SmartBear Software (SmartBear being one word now), we can assure you that our commitment to providing you with powerful, easy-to-use software remains unwavering.
How will this benefit our users?
For one, our community of users has grown to more than 75,000 software developers and testers with the formation of the new company. We look forward to helping you take advantage of this much larger SmartBear community for expert advice, more support, knowledge sharing and of course improved software quality. Keep an eye out as we start to share tips and tricks, white papers, and other best practices that we hope will help you produce better software.
The combined company is also much better equipped to push product development forward. We are already working on a bunch of new ideas that will not only make it easier for our products to work together, but also put great new functionality in the hands of our users. Stay tuned – you will hear much more from us about automated testing, test management, code review, performance profiling, and development management.
Why did we change our name?
As AutomatedQA, Smart Bear Software and Pragmatic Software worked together to become one company, we had to select a name that we felt reflected our brand values: to be community-focused and offer innovative tools that are highly functional and at the same time actually affordable. Now that we have tools that support the immediate needs of both developers and testers, we needed a name that wasn’t tied to one particular type of product. And SmartBear is a great name! So we chose the name SmartBear Software to represent us all going forward. We hope you like our decision!
Here’s the new logo:
What do you think? Just a few minor adjustments to the original Smart Bear logo, which we thought was pretty cool to begin with, if we do say so ourselves.
Visit our existing Community page to learn how you can follow us and communicate and share with one another as we continue to add to our products, enhance our web site, and grow our community involvement.
If you want more details regarding the announcement, click here, and stay tuned for some exciting product news in the days and weeks ahead.
Are you curious about all the other tools that are now a part of the SmartBear family? Have you ever needed to better manage your manual tests? Or communicate in an organized way with a development team about requirements and issues? Or even find performance problems and bottlenecks within your applications without modifying the source code?
Then check out any of our tools for free (and tell your friends!):
