We will be exhibiting at the SSTC conference in Las Vegas, NV today and tomorrow.

Hope to see you there!

Ken N.

Of all the changes made last week – 3261 lines added, 934 removed, and 742 removed, just one enum changed…

I was curious…. What was it?  Well, that is pretty easy to find out.

(more…)

Welcome to my first post using our own toolset to publish build metrics about our most recent weekly build.

 I’d intended to use Measure, a tool we are about to release in alpha form, for this post…. but alas I hit a problem with it that that will have to be resolved tomorrow by the engineers working on it. 

So instead, this Build Metrics post will be done using the Change tool built in to Understand 2.0.  Later, I hope tomorrow, when the issue with Measure has been resolved, I’ll update this post with charts and reports made from it.

First some procedures….. I have an Understand 2.0 project. It was synced to current source, but using fancy SVN magic I set it to April 20 for B442, then I reparsed, made a snapshot labeled B442. Then I restored the source to April 27 for B443, reparsed, and made a snapshot labeled B443.   Then I asked Change to compare B443 versus B442:

All changes checked in to form B443:

(more…)

Earlier, I showed you the Functional Decomposition architecture and used it and an about to be alpha tested tool called “Measure” to present measurements of the various parts of our source tree.  This was as a pre-cursor to doing weekly build size, complexity and change metrics reporting.

Today, I’ll show you the other architecure I’ll be using – Staff.  Using the Functional Decomposition architecture developed in about 45 minutes, I was able to create “Staff”, or who owns what, in about 15 minutes. This is what it looks like when seen in the Architect->Browse Architectures window:

(more…)

Our engineers all use Understand 2.0 all day every day as they maintain it and also develop new features and tools.

Rob G. recently joined us from Utah State University. Because we already had a Rob, we call him [new]Rob. So far he has added the Contextual Information Sidebar, re-worked the Architecture mapper, and also helped in work on a new tool for software maintenance estimation (change scoping) that we intend to  incorporate into Understand 2.0. 

[new]Rob works with two monitors. The right monitor is flipped vertically, the left is the typical landscape (horizontal layout).

He writes:

I like the dock layout on my left monitor because it has everything that I use the most in one location.  I spend most of my time in the selector, especially when I have many editors open,  and the entity filter.  And having the docks on my other monitor gives me the most room to work in Understand.  I also keep the CIS sidebar located on the bottom of my editor, which can be moved around by right-clicking on the editor’s tab or title bar, because of the limited horizontal room that I have on that monitor.

Click on the pic below to see [new]Rob’s

Understand’s Information Browser provides a one stop source for virtually all available information about a given piece of source code (entity).

So where is our new Architecture information in the Information Browser?

Well, one obvious place is the Architectures field, which tells you what part of a given architecture the entity is in. 

Here we can learn, quite quickly, that the class “GenericTree” is in the “guitrees” directory, was developed by Mark F., is part of the Scitools Specific Qt Enhancements, and was modified this month:

Hmmm… we learned a lot in just four lines… maybe this Architecture stuff could be useful (-:

(more…)

We believe that if we use our own tools they will be better.

Hence, in the coming weeks, using just tools we sell or are about to introduce, I will be posting build metrics about each build we release. I will give static views of the size and scope of our various development efforts and on week two I’ll start showing change metrics describing what is new, changed and removed.

Today, I’ll start that off by showing you “Functional Decomposition”,  the first Architecture I will be using to organize future reports.

First off, Understand provides automatically a Filesystem architecture that is automatically derived from the directory structure of the project.

Understand’s Assistant, also suggests three that you can do by hand that will take you a long way.  They are “Functional Decomposition”, “Staff”, and “Requirements”.   Since we don’t deal with formal requirements here at Scitools, I’ll just be doing “Functional Decomposition” today and “Staff” tomorrow.

On the left is the basic Filesystem architecture I started with, and on the right one I whipped up in about 45 minutes:

(more…)

I’m experimenting with Understand 2.0 to see how it behaves when references are limited to a particular kind.

I had Jason Madrid, one of our Understand database gurus, patch in a filter in a central spot that would limit all database references to just declares and defines.

He gave me a file, which didn’t work. So before I go bug him again, I’m going to try and sort this out on my own.

First off… what did he change?
Well, here TrackBack helps quite a bit. I just load it up in the TrackBack history by hitting the  icon.

This pops up the most recent current file and compares it to TrackBack’s last automatic backup made when I copied the new file in:

(more…)

I was playing around with fonts while testing an issue, and ended up with a very hard to read cursive script. I could have went in and tried to find the original font, but I figured it would be easier to just revert Understand back to its initial settings.

There can be several good reasons for resetting any application to the default, freshly-installed settings. It could be you simply want to go back to the initial windows layout, or it may be something as ugly as a bad setting that causes the application to crash on startup. Whatever the reason, you can quickly clear your settings with these steps:

1. Close the application if it is running.

2. Navigate to where the settings files are stored.

• On Windows you may have to enable “Show Hidden Files and Folders”
• Windows 2000/XP – C:\Documents and Settings\USERID\Application Data\Scientific Toolworks, Inc
• Windows Vista –  C:\Users\USERID\AppData\Roaming\Scientific Toolworks, Inc
• On Linux/Unix – ~/.config/Scientific Toolworks, Inc.
• On Mac OS X – ~/Library/Preferences/com.scitools.Understand.plist

3. Rename/Delete the settings file.
There is a settings file for each of our installed products.e.g understand.conf, trackback.ini. Rename the file if there is any chance you want to revert to these settings again, otherwise delete the file associated with the application

4. Restart the application.
It should now be restored to it’s pristine, freshly-installed state.

I usually don’t pay much attention to the parse log that comes up after I analyze changed files. I generally just hit close without looking at it.

But I noticed an oddity as I worked in some of our source code with Understand, and I though, hmmm what happened???

Fortunately, using   I can easily pull up the parse log from the last parsing and see what happened:

And sure enough…. ui_ExternalEditorDlg.h wasn’t found. “ui_” files are automatically generated files that Qt’s build system generates. We recently added a system that cleans them up. Now I’m wondering if that system is over doing it a bit. Anyway, I’m now off to Jim’s office to see about that (-: