Pragmatic Software is Now SmartBear Software

Pragmatic Software is Now SmartBear Software

You may have heard of the other sister company, the original Smart Bear Software, the peer code review company that created CodeCollaborator. The new SmartBear now includes the old Smart Bear and of course AutomatedQA, which is well known for its TestComplete automated testing and AQtime performance profiling tools. (You may also know that TestComplete works exceptionally well with SoftwarePlanner for test case management).

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. Also, 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. So we and our sister companies chose the name of one of our very successful existing brands to represent us all going forward. We also think the name is a lot more fun and interesting than using two or three letter acronyms. We hope you like our decision!

Here’s the new logo:

What do you think? Just a few minor adjustments of the original Smart Bear logo, which we thought was pretty cool to begin with as well.

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 part of the SmartBear family? Ever needed to increase your test coverage or find those annoying performance issues or memory leaks? Or even find issues before they become bugs through fast and pain-free code review?

Tell your friends, give them a try and check out any of our tools for free:

• TestComplete automated testing tool
• AQtime performance profiling tool
• CodeCollaborator peer code review tool
• SoftwarePlanner development and test management tool

What’s your take on the New SmartBear? Let us know, leave us a comment, Tweet us or drop us a line.

Best Practices for Planning your Manual Test Effort

This month's newsletter is delivered as an On-Demand webinar. It is the 2nd in a 5 part series entitled "Uniting your Automated and Manual Test Efforts" and focuses on best practices for planning your manual test effort.

Best Practices for Planning your Manual Test Effort

Click on the URL: http://www.softwareplanner.com/guidedtours/edgeui/Camtasia.asp?filename=UnitingPart02 to begin the presentation. You will learn:

1. How to improve the effectiveness of your requirements definition
2. Best practices for creating manual test cases for each requirement
3. How to ensure you have good test coverage for traceability for each requirement
4. How to best organize your manual tests

Best Practices for Planning your Automated Test Effort

This month's newsletter is delivered as an On-Demand webinar. It is the 1st in a 5 part series entitled "Uniting your Automated and Manual Test Efforts" and focuses on best practices for planning your automated test effort.

Best Practices for Planning your Automated Test Effort
Click on this link (http://www.softwareplanner.com/guidedtours/edgeui/Camtasia.asp?filename=UnitingPart01) to begin the presentation. You will learn:

1. How to identify what test cases should be automated
2. How to best organize your automated test cases
3. How to version and protect your automated test cases
4. How to schedule your automated test cases to run periodically

5 Benefits of Daily Builds

This month's newsletter describes the major benefits of doing daily builds and how it can improve your software quality. A daily build is the process of compiling your software daily so that tests can be run against it to identify any major coding issues introduced since the last build. Daily builds have become common place with Agile development, but it is not limited to just Agile teams. Teams practicing Waterfall development can also get enormous benefit from this approach.

To see the full article, click here: http://www.softwareplanner.com/newsletters/Newsletter_2010_05_SP.htm

Uniting your Automated and Manual Test Efforts

This month's newsletter describes how to determine what test cases are best for automation and how to plan new releases with a mix of both automated and manual tests.

To see the full article, click here:
http://www.softwareplanner.com/Newsletters/newsletter_2010_04_SP.htm

8 Best Practices for Managing Software Releases

Many software releases extend longer than expected and while sometimes project slippage is unavoidable, there are some clear cut best practice fundamentals that you can employ to reduce the chance of slippage.

See the full article here: http://www.softwareplanner.com/Newsletters/newsletter_2010_03_SP.htm.

Powerful Metrics for Developers

Insanity is defined as "doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result". As a developer, it is easy to get into a rut of doing the same thing over and over again but never really improving your development process or identifying things that can aid in bringing real success to your job. To improve, we need to understand our goals and measure our progress towards them. This article discusses how to develop metrics that aid you in achieving specific goals.

What are Powerful Metrics?
Metrics are simply a way to measure specific things you are doing, but you could create hundreds of irrelevant metrics that really don't move you any closer to solving your everyday problems. Powerful metrics are a small set of indicators that are targeted to help you accomplish a specific set of goals.

Metrics Driven by Specific Goals
Before defining your metrics, ask yourself "What goal(s) am I trying to accomplish?", then write your goals down. For example, typical goals for a developer might be to:

• Improve my estimating skills
• Reduce defect re-work
• Ensure that my code is tight and re-usable

Now that we have our goals defined, let's figure out how we can create a set of metrics to help us accomplish them.

“Improve my estimating skills"
To do this, you first need to record the actual time you work on assigned tasks as compared to the original estimates. The difference between the estimate and actual is the "variance". At the end of a project, determine your overall variances to determine how well you track against estimated hours. If you find that your variances are over 10%, consider buffering your estimates on the next project by the variance amount. For example, take the example below:



In the example above, buffering your estimates allow you to become a better estimator. After tracking this for a few releases and buffering your estimates, you will begin providing more accurate estimates. If your team is using Software Planner, you can run variance reports that automatically calculate the information above, below is an example report:


“Reduce defect re-work”
Software releases often take much longer than needed because defects are not resolved on the first round and it adds time to the release timeline when developers have to fix the same issue multiple times and testers have to regress those changes over and over again. Many times defects are re-worked 5 or more times before they are correctly fixed.

To resolve this issue, you must first have an appreciation for how often this is happening. One strategy for this is to add a field to your defect tracking solution that indicates that a defect is being re-worked. If your defect tracking solution has auditing capabilities, it should be easy to produce a report or dashboard that counts the number of times defects are re-worked. Below is a dashboard generated from Software Planner that shows defect re-work:



By knowing this, you can work on reducing re-work by employing these techniques:

• Better steps-to-reproduce - Many times re-work happens because the tester has not provided enough steps to reproduce the issue consistently. Work with your QA team on providing really great reproducible steps. Even better, have them record the steps into a movie that show how to reproduce the issue. This can quickly be done by using Jing (http://www.jingproject.com/), a free utility that allows you to record an issue and it creates a link so that the developer can see it in action.
• Better Unit Testing - Sometimes developers rush through the development and do not fully test it before sending it back to QA. This takes discipline, but if you take the time to fully test it before sending it back to your QA team, it will save you time in the long run.
• Peer Code Review - Another set of eyes on your code can help you reduce re-work. Consider asking a peer to review your code before compiling it and sending it to your QA team. You can speed up code reviews by using tools like Code Collaborator.

“Ensure that my code is tight and reusable”
To do this, you must do peer code reviews. By having others inspect your code, you will begin to write tighter and more reusable code. To measure the effectiveness of this, measure the number of defects found during code review versus defects found during quality assurance. This will quickly identify how code review leads to a reduction in defects found during QA, which is more costly to fix than during development. Keep track of code reviews and defect statistics, below is an example:



You can speed up code reviews by using tools like Code Collaborator.

Summary
Dedicate yourself to improving your job by identifying your goals and tracking metrics that help you determine how you are trending towards your goals. The metrics listed above work fine for my team but I would like to hear what metrics you find are helpful in your organization. To communicate that to me, please fill out this survey.
If we get great feedback from this, we will publish the results in our next month's article so that we can all learn from each other.

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Want a FREE BOOK of code review tips from Smart Bear Software?
You may not realize it, but Software Planner has a sister - it's Smart Bear Software. Both companies are owned by AutomatedQA and our teams relish helping developers deliver software reliably and with high quality. Smart Bear’s Code Collaborator tool helps development teams review code from anywhere, without the usual grunt-work and pain that often accompany peer code review.

Bugs cost 8-12 times less to fix if found in development rather than QA (and 30-100 times less if found in development rather than after release). And of course bugs found in development mean less time spent chasing them down for QA folks! Smart Bear believes so strongly in code review that they will send you a free book of code review tips. They conducted the world’s largest case study of peer code review with Cisco Systems, spanning 2500 code reviews, and the book presents these findings along with other peer review best practices.

If you know anyone who might be interested, please pass this information on to them -they can visit http://www.codereviewbook.com/?SWPnews to request a copy of their own!

Helpful Software Testing Tools and Templates
Below are some helpful software testing resources and templates to aid you in developing software solutions:

• Software Planner
• AutomatedQA TestComplete (Automated Testing Tool)
• Code Collaborator (Peer Code Review Tool)
• Software Development and QA Templates
• Test Case Training
• Pragmatic Agile Development