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| Solution Summary | Elsinore Technologies and VBA Help Get the Bugs Out of the Class |
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Industry
Software development for the leisure, municipal, and education industries Situation As business expanded, the need for a robust, cost-efecteive, and expandable Windows-based bug tracking system became critcle to assist the company in keeping their competitive advantage. Solution With Visual Intercept from Elsinore Technologies, including VBA, CSS was able to create custom solutions, interfaces, and business logic easily and quickly, providing detailed information on source code errors to developers. Products Microsoft Visual SourceSafe Benefits Better data control yields consistent results and lower cost. |
Class Software Solutions (CSS) is a leading producer of Microsoft® Windows® and Web-based database and electronic commerce solutions to assist members of the municipal, recreation, leisure, and education industries cultivate customer relationships and enhance revenue opportunities. Since its introduction in 1985, CSS’ products have been installed in over 500 sites with more than 10,000 licensed worldwide. As their business expanded, CSS realized they needed a more robust Quality Assurance process. They began searching for tools to facilitate that process. In particular, they wanted a software solution to integrate better with the developer’s desktop applications and development tools. After exploring the idea of building their own system, they settled on Visual Intercept from Elsinore Technologies, which is designed to integrate closely with Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafeTM version control software. Visual Intercept’s integration with Microsoft’s Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) allows CSS to add the unique functionality of a home-developed system, while reaping the time saving benefit of a third party software application. The Products CSS produces two main products. CSS Class is an integrated suite of software products delivering a combination of functionality, usability, support, and ease of installation and training for the recreation, leisure, cultural, education, sport, health and wellness industries. To meet the needs of smaller municipalities, parks and recreation departments, and school boards, CSS developed a second product bundle, CSS Class Express, which is more cost-effective for smaller installations. Helping QA Keep Pace with Business Growth As the recreation and education industries increasingly turn to software for help manage their businesses, CSS has grown considerably, adding several new members to the development team in 1999 and early 2000. The management team needed to expand the Product Development program, and focused on improving the QA process, based on an Onyx bug-tracking software system. "The old QA paradigm was one of functionality," said Paul Adamson, Vice President of Development at CSS. "Bugs were recorded in terms of what the system was doing at the time of the error. We wanted something that would take a more back-end approach. We wanted to switch to a source code paradigm, where bugs would be graphed according to where in the source code they were most likely to occur. We felt the source-code paradigm would be more helpful to the developers as they fixed the errors." Clearly, software would play a major role in updating the QA process. The CSS team quickly rejected the idea of simply adding licenses for their Onyx bug tracking as too expensive. Then they investigated developing their own system, but didn’t want to take developers’ focus away from the rapidly growing core business. After more research and testing, they decided on the Visual Intercept from Elsinore Technologies, a robust, customizable system that is cost-efficient to adopt and maintain. |
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Visual Intercept Visual Intercept is the only bug tracking system designed from the ground up to integrate with Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and other Windows products. Using a three-tier, 32-bit architecture, Visual Intercept is enterprise-ready, scaleable, and ODBC-compliant. In addition, the Visual Intercept Developer’s Kit provides direct access to the Visual Intercept Engine, allowing the user to create custom solutions, interfaces, and business logic. "Visual Intercept is an incredibly robust system that let’s us develop very complicated queries and metrics. It also lets us provide more information about source code errors to developers very efficiently," said Adamson. Microsoft VBA A major factor in CSS’s decision was the incorporation of Microsoft VBA in Visual Intercept. VBA is the embeddable version of Visual Basic, placing the development environment right inside the product. Key product functions can be exposed to VBA, allowing them to be manipulated and customized without accessing and changing the product’s source code. "VBA let’s us provide the functionality each of our very different customers require, without going to the expense of building that functionality into the product. It expands our options, while keeping costs low" said Scott Baker, Project Manager for Visual Intercept Enterprise at Elsinore. Another benefit of VBA is that each VBA-enabled component interpolates seamlessly with VBA-enabled components in other applications, such as Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft Office applications, and numerous third party applications. For example, the CSS team used VBA to develop a unique integration with the Onyx system, which allowed Visual Intercept to replicate issues in Onyx. Developers used this feature to maintain the Onyx system during the transition to Visual Intercept. "VBA was absolutely critical for us," said Adamson. "It lets us develop our own custom forms, which means our developers get more complete information when they are ready to start debugging. VBA is also a link between Visual Intercept and SourceSafe, where we do our version control. This integration allows us to implement the source code paradigm, where we can keep detailed metrics on exactly where in the code the bugs are likely to occur." Implementaion Visual Intercept was up, customized, and running at CSS in only two weeks. CSS is already at work on additional enhancements including a project to add more issues to the system, implementation of a new bug notification service, creating additional reports and developing a Web front end. Results The new system lets CSS developers bring their product to market quickly and cheaply, helping the company outsell its competitors. Specific benefits include:
The next time you take a course or go on a cruise, you may just have a more enjoyable time because of the cost savings and better record-keeping from the Elsinore/CSS software solution. About Elsinore Technologies Elsinore Technologies, a software company based in Raleigh, NC, was founded by August F. Turak, Ray Allen and Mark Uland in 1996. Turak correctly anticipated the growing need for teams of programmers to have a centralized system for tracking defects found during software development. Seeing that Microsoft had yet to fill that niche, Turak recruited Ray Allen and Mark Uland on a joint venture to build and market a defect tracking system tailored to the needs of Windows developers. Elsinore developed Visual Intercept, a suite of "bug tracking" tools, in 1996 and quickly captured the industry-leader position for defect management. Elsinore forged a strong relationship with Microsoft, and tailored both its product design and market position to leverage Microsoft’s huge installed base of developer’s tools. Elsinore’s rapid growth has won its recognition as one of the world’s top 75 fastest-growing Window’s Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s), an award which was announced at the Windows World show in Chicago on April 18th, and featured in Information Week. |
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Microsoft, Windows, Visual SourceSafe, Visual InterDev, ActiveX, Access, SQL Server, Excel are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. PointCast is a registered trademark of PointCast Inc. |
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