As Senior Systems Integrator for SPK and Associates, a California based IT services company specializing in infrastructure management services, I recently completed an interesting project. The goal was to create an ESX cluster for a small engineering group...
Requirements/Test Management
How to Monitor Your APC UPS Units – Part 1
Picture your ideal company technological infrastructure. Servers to handle day to day tasks, servers to do engineering simulations, network equipment to handle communication, network-attached storage for your company critical data, and last but not least,...
The Project Management Skills Gap
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...
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 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...
Creating “Custom” Facts in Puppet
The servers that I’m managing can be divided into two groups, colo and local servers. While most of the configuration has been similar between these two, there have been a growing number of things which I’ve had to configure differently through Puppet. The latest...
Electric Flow 8.0 New Feature: Manual and Automated Retry on Error
Electric Cloud recently released version 8.0 of their build and deployment orchestration tool, Electric Flow. This latest release includes many new features, but the focus of this article will be the ability to retry tasks and stages from a failed pipeline and why...
DIACAP Testing with Retina Network Scanner
Recently I took over DIACAP testing on a few machines. The task of starting DIACAP testing may seem overwhelming when presented with the number of tests and findings you will need to complete. Thankfully, there have been some automated tools released to help aid the...