When it comes to product innovation and project development, the role of the project manager cannot be underestimated. That's why it's important to take an objective look at the skills and resources available in your organization and determine if a skills gap exists...
Requirements/Test Management
Avoid Budget Overruns and Unhappy Customers with Better QA and Testing
Any project can be divided into different parts including requirements gathering, design, implementation, documentation and so on. One key aspect of the project lifecycle is quality assurance (QA), but it's often overlooked. Although almost all project managers...
How to Create a Silent Installer for ANSYS 14
I'm a huge fan of automation, especially when it comes to installing software. With a simple one-click solution, you can setup software on a user's workstation with little or no impact on your work load. In fact, you don't even need to do the installation -- users can...
ElectricCommander Custom Dashboards: How to Visualize Your Build Data
Whenever I get a chance to see any kind of motor racing I am amazed at how many displays the engineers use to watch and monitor all the data coming from the cars. Modern performance racing cars produce a lot of data about the engine, tires, fuel consumption,...
Improve your build, test and deployment with ElectricCommander
Repeatability is a intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it must come down. If you throw it twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down. When repeatability doesn't occur we get anxious. Repeatability is equally an essential quality in...
How to Ramp Up Your New Product Development While Servicing Your Existing Customers
To succeed in any market, a company needs to innovate, pioneer and push out the borders. The recent one-year anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs reminds of one of the tech industries greatest comeback stories. Apple's key to success, other than the charisma of Jobs...
7 Ways to Fight Feature Creep
I was recently involved in a project in which the goal was to streamline and automate a manual software deployment process using Electric Cloud's product ElectricCommander. The Scope of Work was laid out, development was underway, and my coworker and I felt very...
How-to Run Android 4.4 (KitKat) using VMWare Player
Did you see our guide for running Android 4.0 in VMWare from two years ago? We've updated the instructions, below, to help you get the newest version of Android running to use as a product development tool. Download and setup VMWare Player 6 (note that you will need...
How to lock down users on your PTC Integrity Server
Recently I was doing some work for a customer, experimenting with allowing limited access to non-Administrator class users using the PTC Integrity Administration client. I discovered that once a standard user gained access to the PTC Integrity Administration client,...
How to rename column headers in your PTC Integrity Custom Reports
In the Metrics, Metrics, Metrics series of articles I wrote about PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager, I talked about how you can use metrics information gathered from fields on your report to build custom reports, charts and dashboards. Now that the main series is...
Improving CI Build/Test Execution Times Through Improved Build Specifications
It may come as no surprise that Google has a very large code base. With over 15,000 developers sending new code changes to their continuous Integration (CI) system every second, Google is constantly seeking methods to optimize both the size of their code base and the...
Allowing Custom API Applications in your PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager Environment
Recently, I was working on a custom API program for a customer, when I came across something that could be a sticky little problem for someone trying to add custom API programs to their PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager Environment. The problem was first manifested...