Home 
Product Reviews Visual Intercept Tracks Incidents in Style
Product Reviews Visual Intercept Tracks Incidents in Style
|
Visual Intercept is a full-featured incident management system designed to keep your development team moving forward. “Incident” is Elsinore Technologies’ blanket term for bugs, feature requirements, suggestions, documentation issues, and all of the other things that go into building a finished product. Elsinore actually sells a whole family of products under the Visual Intercept name, including desktop and Web client versions. I spent some time with Visual Intercept Enterprise Web, their current flagship. Installation was smooth and easy on my Windows Server 2003 test machine. The setup properly warned me that I didn’t have IIS installed the first time I tried to run it, so I was able to correct the missing prerequisite without wasting time. It didn’t notice that ASP pages were prohibited, though, leading to a few minutes of post-installation configuration on my part. In addition to IIS (4.0 or later), you need to have a database available to store everything. VI ships with Access, but for any serious project you’ll want to use one of the other supported databases (SQL Server 6.5 or later, Oracle 7.3 or later, or Sybase Adaptive Server). Once everything is installed, you’ll have a variety of tools available, including both desktop and Web configuration tools. The heart of the system from the user point of view, though, is the Visual Intercept Web application itself. Most users will probably want to start with the Explorer, which provides a graphical view of the hierarchy of their current project. Hierarchies can be set up in an ad-hoc fashion, or synchronized to your source code control system (and Visual Intercept includes a service that will keep the two trees in synch if you go that route). From here, you can retrieve incidents in a variety of ways: by navigating to them in the tree, by running a saved query, or through a freeform search.  Visual Intercept’s Explorer offers a variety of ways to locate incidents. Clicking an incident takes you directly to a page of details about it. In fact, there are so many details as to be overwhelming. In addition to the usual information that any tracking system collects (name, description, priority, severity, and so on), you also get a complete history of who worked on the incident, associated contacts, resources, and hardware, and related incidents. You can also add arbitrary documents (anything from specifications to user bug reports) to the incident, and relate it directly to files in your source code control system. Much of the information (such as status or priority) is chosen from drop-down lists, which helps ensure uniform data entry. The administrator can adjust the contents of these lists to match your own company’s preferences. A separate Promotion Editor lets the administrator configure the basic workflow for incidents. For example, a Q/A incident might be allowed to change to Closed or Reopen, but not to Duplicate. Visual Intercept includes a user- and group-based security system that lets the administrator limit who can see which parts of the hierarchy and what they can do (for example, you can refuse a particular group the right to delete incidents). A companion product, Visual Intercept Web Relay, is designed to let external testers enter new incidents into the system without having access to all of the core data. Users need not log on and run queries constantly to keep from missing things in this system. There’s a built-in rules-based notification system that can send e-mail when the user needs to know something. For example, you could have the system send e-mail to the designated Q/A lead for an incident whenever the incident’s status is set to “Q/A” to indicate that it’s ready to test. For an overview of the system, an embedded Crystal Reports server can provide a variety of graphs and reports. Overall, Visual Intercept Web is quite snappy, and it’s capable of tracking anything you can imagine about incidents in your organization (yes, anything: you can add a large number of custom fields to incidents if your needs are unusual). The price of this flexibility is paid in more setup and training than a simpler system might require. Although installing the product is simple, the administrator will need to make lots of decisions about the product hierarchy, custom fields, dropdown values, security, and so on before the system is ready to use. After setup, you’ll need to spend some time training users as well, to make sure that they understand how to use the system effectively (Elsinore offers both training and consultant referrals to make this easier). But the end result should be a system that can handle a large number of incidents and make it easy to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. Costs For team members who need full access to the Visual Intercept system, Elsinore licenses the Visual Intercept Suite. The suite entitles a user to use Visual Intercept Web, Visual Intercept Desktop, and Visual Intercept's integrations to Visual Studio, and Microsoft Office tools such as Outlook. The suite license simplifies your purchase decision and allows all users to use the Visual Intercept tools most valuable to them. The Visual Intercept suite is typically licensed in three modes.
Company Contact Elsinore Technologies, Inc. 7200 Falls of Neuse Road Suite 302 Raleigh, NC 27615 E-mail: info@elsitech.com Web: www.elsitech.com Phone: 866-866-0034 Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD .NET, MCDBA is an independent software consultant and author working in eastern Washington. He's the editor of ADT Magazine's Developer Central newsletter and the online Daily Grind (www.larkware.com), and the author of numerous books and articles. You can reach him at MikeG1@larkfarm.com.
Set as favorite
Bookmark
Email this
Hits: 7198 Trackback(0)Comments (0)
|
| Last Updated on Thursday, 12 January 2006 04:29 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed