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Seapine Software Press Releases - Thu, 02/09/2012 - 06:00

 

Cincinnati – February 9, 2012 – Seapine Software announced today the release of Seapine ALM 2012, its quality centric application lifecycle management suite. Seapine ALM 2012 contains over 100 new features and enhancements that enhance traceability, support thorough application testing, and provide more control over managing projects.

 

The enhancements to Seapine ALM 2012 include new features for TestTrack, Surround SCM, and QA Wizard Pro. These tools will help teams deliver products faster by eliminating steps, streamlining processes, and automating repetitive tasks.

 

One of the biggest improvements in TestTrack is that it now features custom fields that calculate values, something often requested by TestTrack users. Other new features include a native relational database, as well as draft and active custom fields.

 

Enhancements to Surround SCM deliver improved offline support, more flexible mainline branches, and additional integrations.

 

QA Wizard Pro’s new functionality allows users to automate stress and boundary tests without virtual machines. It also includes Google Chrome support and integration enhancements, as do TestTrack and Surround SCM.

 

“Customers are finding TestTrack’s new calculated fields to be a huge benefit,” said Paula Rome, Senior Product Manager for Seapine. “Calculated fields allow them to analyze their workflow using custom metrics, and implement risk management and issue triage strategies using their own scoring formulas.”

 

“Customers also find a lot of value in the integration between QA Wizard Pro and TestTrack TCM,” Rome added, “because they can now simplify the process of automating existing test cases and record manual test cases.”

 

Seapine’s development tools help organizations of all sizes streamline communication, improve traceability, achieve compliance, and deliver quality products. To learn more about Seapine ALM 2012, visit www.seapine.com/almnewfeatures.html.

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Categories: Vendor

VisibleThread - Wed, 02/08/2012 - 23:56

Larry Newman of Shipley posted this example of poor writing the other day. It was part of a very active discussion thread about overused clichés on the APMP linkedin group:

“To ensure optimum delivery of services for its membership, Mini Healthcare of Elbonia will leverage the administrative and legal structure of its parent company, Maxi Healthcare, Inc. to administer a cost-effective combination of local plan operations and shared corporate resources that ensure a person-centered, outcomes-focused approach to delivering managed care services.”

It was taken from a proposal he was reviewing (actual names removed). You should take a look at the entire thread; it has a lot of good stuff around clichés. As author of the Shipley proposal guide, Larry is extremely well qualified on the subject of ‘trash talk’ in proposals.

Good writing, an on-going challenge for proposal professionals.

So, I wanted to blog on the topic of readability metrics, and how they can help eliminate this kind of rubbish.

If you work proposals as a proposal manager or team reviewer, you likely spend a lot of time editing contributions from colleagues.

Similar to Larry’s example, you will see marketing boilerplate filled with clichés and trite language, commonly in executive summary sections. You will see technical contributions from SMEs (Subject Matter Experts), often dense and hard to understand.

It is likely you are spending valuable time tidying the content, editing it out. But if you’re anything like our customers, you face these two issues:

1. Not enough time, since editing content is hard, at the end of a development cycle you don’t have enough time to sufficiently fix it. So, your company ends up submitting sloppy responses, despite your best efforts.
2. Offering feedback is emotive. If you do offer feedback to colleagues on their writing, it is by definition subjective, and a very delicate conversation. Here’s how it often goes:
   • You say: ‘I’m not sure the way you’re writing this is all that clear’
   • Your SME hears: ‘Your content sucks’.
   • Your SME is thinking: ‘I know what I’m talking about; you’re just glorified window dressing. I’ve done the hard work!’

We work with many proposal managers who privately admit frustration with this status quo. Some of these same people use VisibleThread scans to help unblock the emotive dynamic in 2 above.

Here’s how. Imagine we change the conversation to: “32% of the sentences in your content are longer than 25 words, whereas winning proposals tend to have 5% or less”. Then, metrics become a tool to drive way better quality in an objective way. Indeed, metrics are especially useful when dealing with technical SMEs. They respect metrics way more than opinion.

What are these readability metrics and how to apply them?

So, let’s revisit Larry’s example statement. I repeat the example here for ease. Below, you will see the metrics:

“To ensure optimum delivery of services for its membership, Mini Healthcare of Elbonia will leverage the administrative and legal structure of its parent company, Maxi Healthcare, Inc. to administer a cost-effective combination of local plan operations and shared corporate resources that ensure a person-centered, outcomes-focused approach to delivering managed care services.”

Sentence Length: 50 Words

Clichés: Multiple, including: ‘outcomes-focused approach’, ‘person-centered’ etc.

Passive Voice: none

So looking at the metrics, we see; long sentences and clichés.

If there is any positive in Larry’s example, it is the absence of passive language. Unfortunately, even without passive language, a sentence of 50 words is a disaster. You need to put it on a diet and bring out the critical customer benefits, ideally using bullets or lists. So, identifying long sentences is our first port of call.

Now let’s say you have a lengthy proposal. If you scan the full proposal and identify all examples of long sentences and passive voice, then you can prioritize areas for edits. This saves review time.

So, this is exactly what our customers are doing with VisibleThread. They upload proposals at pink or red team stage. In minutes, they can review the statistics, pin pointing long sentences and passive language. This forms the basis of rapid prioritization of edits.

Sharing the metrics with SMEs and marketing teams means that the quality of base contributions starts to improve too.

Let’s see how this works in reality.

To show you how this works, I took 6 recent proposal documents from 4 contractors (3 federal, 1 commercial). I uploaded them to VisibleThread for analysis.

For fun and so that we have a reasonable benchmark of ‘good writing’; I analysed Isaac Asimov’s; ‘The Best of Isaac Asimov’ alongside. (Worth a read if you have a moment.)

So, here are the long sentence statistics. The rank column gives you a fairly clear understanding of best and worst performers. The % measure is the proportion of total sentences exceeding 25 words.

Long Sentences Score Rank Novels / Isaac Asimov - The Best of Isaac Asimov.pdf 7% 1 Proposals / Contractor 3: RFP_XXX_Technical_Services2.docx 7% 2 Proposals / Contractor 1: XXX - with pricing - FINAL.docx 8% 3 Proposals / Contractor 2: XXX Comm Shell rev8.doc 10% 4 Proposals / Contractor 4: T-1 Vol 2 TechnicalPart1.docx 10% 5 Proposals / Contractor 2: XXX-Combined NearFinal.doc 12% 6 Proposals / Contractor 4: T-1 Vol 2 TechnicalPart2.docx 26% 7

Based on this report, we should immediately pay closest attention to ‘Contractor 2: XXX-Combined NearFinal.doc’ and ‘Contractor 4: T-1 Vol 2 TechnicalPart2.docx’.

Uncovering long sentences is the first step to cleaner and tighter docs.

Once you have long sentences down to a nice 5% or below, then it’s onto passive language removal and so on down the line.

Summary Takeaways

Readability metrics have these advantages:

1. Rapid Insight to Weak Content: They provide rapid insight into the weakest content in a proposal much sooner than manual review.
2. Encourage better writing from colleagues: They can help your colleagues tighten their submissions, so that ultimately a better quality response is submitted. With tighter inputs, you have more time to focus on being truly responsive to customer need.
3. Remove Subjective and emotive discussion, introduce objectivity: You say to me: ‘I’d like to suggest some edits’. As an SME, I hear ‘Your content sucks’. As an SME, I say to myself: ‘well, you can take a flying leap!’ Metrics provide objectivity and move the conversation to a different place. If I change the conversation to: “32% of the sentences in your content are longer than 25 words, whereas winning proposals tend to have 5% or less”, then metrics become a way to drive towards better quality.
4. Alleviate Editorial Bottlenecks: Metrics and better quality base submissions shift the onus back to contributors. They provide a needed line of defense for the proposal manager.

Check out these 3-minute demos to how we scan documents with VisibleThread.

If you want to see how your own proposal docs rank for long sentences and passive, just sign up for a no-obligation 30-day free trial of VisibleThread in the cloud here: www.visiblethread.com/products/evaluate/. Or use it simply to see how your marketing pdfs or docs rank.

Categories: Vendor

Software Development Tools Directory - Wed, 02/08/2012 - 19:25

SST (selenium-simple-test) is a web test framework that uses Python to generate functional browser-based tests. Tests are made up of scripts, created by composing actions that drive a browser and assert conditions. You have the flexibility of the ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Wed, 02/08/2012 - 19:20

Serenade.js is yet another MVC client side JavaScript framework. We believe that Serenade.js more closely follows the ideas of classical MVC than competing frameworks and has a number of other advantages as well: * Super pretty, powerful yet logi ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Wed, 02/08/2012 - 16:51

Jama Software, the leader in collaborative requirements management solutions, announced Contour 3.4, the latest version of its software that provides a centralized collaboration hub for enterprise organizations to execute complex projects success ...

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Oracle Database News - Wed, 02/08/2012 - 14:00

Oracle Integrates R Statistical Programming Language into Oracle Database 11g /us/corporate/press/1515738 en

Categories: Database, Vendor

Software Development Tools Directory - Wed, 02/08/2012 - 13:01

SmartBear Software announced Code Collaborator™ 7.0, a major release that makes peer code review more productive and automated than ever before. Featuring revamped navigation, a streamlined, intuitive user interface, and a new SOAP API, Cod ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Wed, 02/08/2012 - 12:49

HP launched a new offering that allows partners to provide a branded solution for application performance testing in the cloud, helping their customers to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver high-quality applications. Enterprises need to quickly ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Wed, 02/08/2012 - 10:23

ALAMEDA, CALIFORNIA--(Marketwire - Feb. 7, 2012) - Polarion Software, a recognized leader in application lifecycle management, announced today it has further expanded its end-to-end support for software development teams with the launch of the co ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Wed, 02/08/2012 - 09:52

LogicNP Software has released CryptoLicensing For ActiveX 2012 which adds licensing, copy-protection, activation and hardware-locking capabilities to your VB6, VBA, RealBasic, Delphi, Borland, MFC, ATL, C++, etc applications, libraries, component ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Wed, 02/08/2012 - 09:19

Xeround, the Cloud Database Company, today announced Xeround FREE, a free version of its popular cloud database for MySQL applications. Xeround FREE provides MySQL users a free, zero-management, highly available cloud database solution in just on ...

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Appcelerator - Wed, 02/08/2012 - 02:18

Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. – February 9, 2012 – Appcelerator®, the leading mobile platform company, announced today that it has acquired Cocoafish, a mobile app infrastructure provider. Cocoafish offers a robust set of more than 25 popular cloud-based mobile features for [...]

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Software Development Tools Directory - Tue, 02/07/2012 - 09:18

Simba Technologies Inc., the industry expert on relational and multi-dimensional data connectivity, announced today the release of SimbaEngine ODBC SDK 9. SimbaEngine ODBC SDK is used by top software companies to implement ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET and ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Tue, 02/07/2012 - 09:16

Idera, a leading provider of Microsoft SQL Server management and administration solutions, today announced SQL diagnostic manager™ 7.1. Idera's powerful SQL Server performance monitoring, diagnostics and collaboration solution makes it ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Mon, 02/06/2012 - 15:43

HM2Go is a free local webserver that is only 1.7 mb in size and does not require installation. It is designed to serve a Webhelp system locally or from CD/DVD. You can use and redistribute HM2Go royalty-free. Technical documentation, online help ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Mon, 02/06/2012 - 15:42

Specialized components of the Ribbon Designer allow you to quickly build custom SharePoint ribbons and add a new ribbon to your existing project. The Ribbon Designer components are integrated inside of Visual Studio and make creating custom ribbo ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Thu, 02/02/2012 - 14:27

AdaCore, provider of Ada tools and expertise for the mission-critical, safety-critical, and security-critical software communities, today announced the immediate availability of the GNATtest unit test harness generator for Ada. The GNATtest tool ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Thu, 02/02/2012 - 14:17

VANCOUVER, BC, Feb 1, 2012 - ActiveState, whose software enables developers and enterprises to innovate from code to cloud smarter, faster, and safer, announced today the release of Komodo IDE 7: The world's fiercest IDE. Komodo is an award-w ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Thu, 02/02/2012 - 14:12

Apeel PHP Code Generator Pro is a next-generation tool for building robust, Ajax enabled PHP Data Maintenance Applications for your MySQL Databases. Generate quality PHP data-entry Web/Intranet Applications in minutes without writing a single lin ...

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Software Development Tools Directory - Thu, 02/02/2012 - 14:11

Help+Manual is a single-source help authoring and content management system for both single and multi-author editing. Working with Help+Manual is as easy as writing text with a word processor. Help+Manual scales from small to really large project ...

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