Editor’s Pick: Product Development Management Suite Updated

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Today’s Pick of the Week comes from Seapine Software, an outfit that has intrigued me for a while. Seapine Software makes process-centric software that helps you manage product development and user service. We’ll take a gander at the 2014 version of its TestTrack software product development management suite.

What Seapine does is help you make and release high-quality software consistently by giving you management, control, metrics and so forth for every artifact and phase that goes into developing a product. Keywords from their wheelhouse include defect and issue tracking, traceability, compliance, configuration management, testing and requirements management. If you’re in the business of developing embedded systems, medical devices, product for industries like utilities and government stuff that plain folk are not supposed to know about, then Seapine Software should interest you too.

TestTrack provides a centralized suite of capabilities for managing requirements, defects/issues and testing throughout your development cycle. It’s part of a greater whole that includes toolsets for software change and configuration management, ALM (applications lifecycle management), automated functional and load testing, customer feedback and similar phases of development.

TestTrack is fully configurable and has multi-level security. Its features include functionality to capture and track planning, workflows, reviews, reporting and changes. It seems to track, organize and provide insight into everything that defines a requirement from its description and details to email threads and from versions to documents and links to other requirements. TestTrack also offers full traceability, the importance of which cannot be overstated.

It does much the same sort of yeoman’s work when tracking defects and issues details, but here TestTrack extends tracking to items like known workarounds and related source code changes. You can also track multiple reports of an issue as a single unit, monitor an email account for incoming support issues, set up time-based escalation rules and have per-issue email notifications sent to your customers so that they know you’re doing something about solving their problem.

For centralized test case management, TestTrack provides tools for creating, organizing, executing, measuring and reporting on both manual and automated product testing. Again, it can track everything relevant to a test, such as test case details, test steps, variants and emails.

The new 2014 version of TestTrack brings a couple of new features that will interest new and existing users. Current users will be interested to know that version 2014 replaces the three previous web clients with a single interface and it has new search filtering capabilities. Usability improvements are a big focus in this release.

Existing and potential users will also be interested in the new Seapine Cloud service, a cloud-based hosting solution optimized for TestTrack 2014. Since Seapine handles any upgrades and the servers, IT overhead like installation, configuration, database administration, data backups, firewall fiddling and maintenance go away. It’s charged on a per user/per month basis, so you can keep costs down while having anywhere/anytime access to your development data.

Potential users now have the option of an on-premise subscription-licensing plan. Basically, this is for sites with tight budgets as well as for companies needing short-term help with a complicated project. The proposition here is that you subscribe to TestTrack for a limited time rather than buy it. You can add more licenses and extend your subscription if needed. Your subscription includes tech support and upgrades.

There’s a ton to learn about TestTrack and all of Seapine’s wares. You can start with today’s Pick of the Week write-up to find out more about TestTrack 2014. Links at the end take you to a video demo of TestTrack, a guide to both live and on-demand webinars and a library of white papers. You can also sign up for a private demo or an evaluation unit.

A quick glance at Seapine’s customer list shows that some of the biggest names in high tech use its software. They must know something. Between the personal and hands-on demos, the videos, webinars and reading, you can build up your knowledgebase. TestTrack 2014 seems an intriguing set of tools from a company that makes a lot of intriguing tools.

Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s pick of the week write-up.

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