Because many users are fed up with vendors that don’t even list the product prices on their website, they end up looking for open source tools that don’t require them to jump through dozens of hoops to learn more about the software. What a lot of users don’t know is that there are professional test management tools out there that are affordable, have readily-available trial versions and that can be purchased without discussing endless pricing options in conference calls.

On the other hand, there are definitely cases where open source test management tools come in handy, be it for testing other free software products, in educational settings or if you have a very tight budget. To make it both easier for users to learn about all the available open source tools and to educate users about our test management tool as a possible alternative, we have created a new micro site in the same spirit as our .NET Logging and Java Logging sites.

So without further ado, welcome to our new Open Source Test Management micro site. We hope this site will be a useful reference to learn more about available open source tools and at the same time also help us get some publicity for our own product. If you have any suggestions about additional tools that should be listed on the site, just let us know! We of course also appreciate links to our new website if you find it useful.

So instead of publishing all the different things here on this blog, we’ve just launched No bug left behind, our new blog with the stupid name about software quality, testing and related topics. We have quite a few plans for the new blog and are also looking for guest postings, relevant links and articles. So if you have something interesting to share, please let us know!

If you are interested in software quality, usability, testing and other related topics, make sure to subscribe to our new feed.

No bug left behind »

Buy a T-shirt
You can help by buying a T-shirt from the shop or by forwarding Andy’s posting to friends and colleagues. Andy has set up different shops for North America and Europe (for faster and cheaper shipping):

• North American shop
• European shop

Design a Delphi programming T-shirt
You can also help by designing a Delphi-related programming T-shirt or by suggesting T-shirt ideas. Either comment on this blog (and I will forward any ideas) or directly contact Andy.

We value Joe’s feedback and want to clarify some of his points (we also tried to post a clarification as a comment on his blog, but Joe hasn’t yet approved the comment, that’s why we are also posting it here). Joe highlights the following paragraph of our license agreement:

“6.1 When using the licensed programs, in order to avoid damage that may be caused to other programs or stored data being used simultaneously, the Customers shall in good time before using/utilising the licensed programs back up the programs and data involved, and not use programs of this kind in actual operation before he has verified the flawless quality of these programs by a test routine.”

Joe wrote that this paragraph, which is designed to ensure that customers backup critical data and test program interoperability before deploying our products, suggests that our software is not well tested and that our liability limitations are over the top. The contrary is actually the case; please read on.

If you carefully read typical license agreements, be it from Microsoft, Intel or most other software companies, you will find paragraphs such as the following (which is quoted from an Intel license agreement for some of their dev tools):

“LIMITATION OF LIABILITY: THE ABOVE REPLACEMENT PROVISION IS THE ONLY WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. INTEL OFFERS NO OTHER WARRANTY EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED INCLUDING THOSE OF MERCHANTABILITY, NONINFRINGEMENT OF THIRD- PARTY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NEITHER INTEL NOR ITS SUPPLIERS SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, LOSS OF BUSINESS INFORMATION, OR OTHER LOSS) ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE SOFTWARE, EVEN IF INTEL HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. BECAUSE SOME JURISDICTIONS PROHIBIT THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF LIABILITY FOR CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, THE ABOVE LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.”

This paragraph basically states that the vendor isn’t liable for ANY kind of damage whatsoever. Our license doesn’t contain such limitations, as limiting the liability to this degree is not possible in Germany (and probably shouldn’t be, I might add). That’s why our license actually contains LESS RESTRICTIVE limitations. In the quoted paragraph, we merely ask our customers to test SmartInspect in combination with their software before deployment (which we believe is pretty standard anyway). This does of course not mean that we are not testing the software ourselves (in fact, we use more than 5000 unit tests to ensure the quality of the SmartInspect libraries, have a test plan for the Console consisting of more than 100 pages which we execute regularly, offer beta releases for new major versions and take great care in general to make SmartInspect as robust and reliable as possible).

I’m not a lawyer, but formulating international license agreements and contracts is probably a lot harder than one would think. We really tried to come up with a license agreement that’s not too restrictive and is hopefully fair for both parties. For example, we explicitly state in the license agreement that our software can be installed on up to 3 machines per licensed user, a phrase that should probably be included in all dev tools EULAs, but is sadly missing from most.

One could probably argue that software licenses in general try to limit the liability of vendors too much, and this is definitely an important topic. However, I believe that our license is actually one of the better licenses in this regard. Again, we value Joe’s feedback and we are sorry to hear that our license sent a wrong signal, but I hope we could clarify some of Joe’s concerns. I also hope that our transparency on this issue is valued, too, as I’m not sure if any of our competitors would link to a negative product comment and even promote it on their community website.

We would love to read your comments on this topic!

In case you haven’t heard about Google Chrome yet, read this clever comic that introduces Chrome’s innovative features. Oh and in case you wonder, the Google Chrome user agent string looks like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

The SmartInspect Router is a Windows service application which can receive SmartInspect log packets via TCP/IP or named pipes and routes them to different log destinations. The supported log destinations are the same as those from the SmartInspect libraries, namely log files, TCP/IP or named pipes. Two typical uses of the SmartInspect Router are to combine multiple client logs into a single log file and to collect logs in a central location. The SmartInspect Router is intended to provide a common logging infrastructure for distributed systems, multi-process applications and web applications.

Since SmartInspect is used more and more for web applications and distributed systems it became clear that we needed a server application that can receive logs via TCP/IP or named pipes and stores them in a central location. Many customers have expressed their need for such a solution.

We began work on the SmartInspect Router a few months ago and are happy to finally release the first version in this EAP. After installing the new EAP version, you can find the setup of the SmartInspect Router in the deploy directory of your SmartInspect EAP installation. The SmartInspect Router can be configured with a simple XML configuration file (please see the included help for details).

Releasing a completely new application is always a challenge and there might be a few things that don’t work correctly. If you encounter a problem with the SmartInspect Router, we would appreciate a comment in our SmartInspect EAP forum.

» Follow me on Twitter

I would also love to hear from other MicroISVs or Delphi developers who are twittering. Just leave a comment, follow me on twitter or email me. Thanks!

After working from a home office for some years now, we found it has many advantages on one hand and some serious drawbacks on the other hand. On the negative side, we found it quite stressful because we were basically working at all times. Although a proper office has other nice advantages like the possibility to grow, to invite partners, vendors and customers, we decided to get a proper office mainly for life and work separation. That’s why we have been looking for an office in the past few weeks and finally found one we like in the TechnologiePark Paderborn, where we will sign the lease in the coming week.

You have to decide for yourself if getting a proper office makes sense for you. We are sure that it’s the right thing for us and we are really looking forward to our new office in the coming year!

We recently had the need for a Delphi parser for our SmartInspect Delphi plugin. Because we couldn’t find one that suited our needs, we had to write our own one (an incomplete one with just the things we needed). A complete Delphi parser could be used for things like refactoring, extracting documentation, code formatters or code navigation add-ons for the Delphi IDE. So keep up the good work Joe and I’m looking forward to see the final results!

New Forum: http://www.gurock.com/support/forum/