Electric Cloud (now known as CloudBees CD) has released an open-source tool called ec-testing for unit testing Electric Commander procedures. In this video below, David Hubbell demonstrates how to download the tool, set it up, and run example test cases....
Engineering Operations
Electric Commander: Configuring an Alternate Plugins Directory
Electric Commander, now known as CloudBees CD, allows you to set up an alternate location for your plugins directory. This is a two step process and it's easy to forget the second step. If the second step is not done, the system can appear to still be functioning...
3 Top Trends in Product Lifecycle Engineering Tools
Overview In 2015, SPK and Associates co-founder Chris McHale spoke with Peter Thorne, Director at Cambashi, a Cambridge, England-based independent industry analyst firm. With his over 30 years of experience as a software engineer user, vendor, and now analyst, Peter’s...
PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager – Branch Extended Demo
SPK's Vice President of Engineering, Carlos Almeida presents a very short demo of the Branch Extended Plugin in PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager. Transcript: Carlos: Hi, this is Carlos Almeida of SPK and Associates. Today, I'm going to do a very short demo of the PTC...
PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager – Subversion Integration
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PTC Integrity – Risk Management Demo (out of the box)
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How to monitor Windows servers using Nagios and NSClient
One of the best monitoring software packages available for system administrators is Nagios. It's free, open source, has a large community of developers and users for support and can be relied upon to provide outstanding monitoring for mission critical devices. As part...
Continuous Integration in 8 Easy Steps with Buildbot
Several weeks ago, Ron provided some great insight regarding how to install the Hudson continuous integration tool on Windows. This week, I'll be discussing a different tool: Buildbot. My initial exposure to continuous integration tools in general was only a few years...
Continuous Integration Best Practices—Part 2
As I noted in "Continuous Integration Best Practices—Part 1" there are 10 best practice principles associated with Continuous Integration and in this previous article, we looked at the first three. For part 2, we pick up where we left off and talk about principles...
Three Monotonous Tasks That Are Killing Morale In Your Software Engineering Team
In the engineering world, there’s no underestimating how hard it is to attract and retain top talent. Finding qualified candidates is hard enough. But you want to go one better than that. You want to attract talent that gives your organization a competitive edge. Once...
Reverse Proxy Configurations
Now it's time to look at some of the server side configurations. The first step is to configure reverse proxy for the HTTP services. These services live on hosts that sit in the DMZ. A proxy is very simple to configure and allows a lot of flexibility to grow over time...
Five Reasons to Outsource Compute Farm and Server Management
The paradigm of computing resource configurations have changed several times of the last 40 years. From mainframes to mini computers, through desktops and file servers to server farms, software as a service and the cloud. Any company that uses server farms or...