A Personal Message from Compendium Developments lead consultant: Alan Richardson

I had to write Compendium-TA, the tool that I wanted just didn't exist...until now, that is.

Compendium-TA can help people organize their planning, writing, thinking, designing and learning. But I'm getting ahead of myself, let me tell you what we've built and why we built it.

I have been using testing and modelling tools for years but they never really supported me the way I wanted them to. 

Perhaps that is just because of the way I work, but I know that I'm not alone. After all, are you completely satisfied with your tools?

Looking through all my notebooks I notice that I use a variety of techniques: graphs, outlines, lists and cross references, so I need a tool that can manage all of them together. 

I also see that in the early stages of analysis I'm thinking my way around the construction of a model, and the model isn't solid enough to be placed in any of the other tools at my disposal. 

I need a tool which I can use to construct a model and which allows the model to become more structured as the model evolves. 

I need to turn unstructured information into entities once I figure out what those entities are.

Modelling is an organic, learning process, and I need a tool which can cope with that.

Sure I could just use a diagrammer to design the graphs, but then they would just be diagrams, I can't easily use them to assess coverage and generate paths, in a normal diagrammer they're just pictures.

I could just use spreadsheets to do the cross reference matrices but then I can't store extra information about the entities, and can't easily visualise my entities in different ways. Because they aren't entities, they're just cells.

In Compendium-TA graphs and entities are more than data.

I can, and did, use outliners to structure my thoughts, but with a normal outliner I could only manage one outline at a time. I want to be able to manage multiple outlines or hierarchies and have the same piece of information in them all if I want to. 

I want hierarchies to represent my source documents and to put in the test conditions I derive from the sections of the document.

I want the same test condition in a classification hierarchy to let me think about the effect in system testing, and in another hierarchy for UAT.

Most of all, I want the flexibility to be able to what I want to do.

I write macros in excel, in perl, in access, all to tweak and massage my data, to dive into my tools, pull information out, re-shape it and then plug it into another tool, so I need a tool which allows me to write my own reports and my own macros. 

A tool that provides enough functionality to get me working and allows me to customise it for the model that I am developing.

I want control over my model.

So I sat down and started to write the ultimate test tool. 

But as I went on, It dawned on me that I wasn't really writing a test tool at all. I was writing a general purpose modelling tool. A modelling tool that assists my thinking process and doesn't get in the way. 

A tool that lets me explore, build and learn about the model at the same time. A tool that allows me to expand my definition of what that model is going to be, and lets my model evolve.

Compendium-TA is the result of all this work and it isn't just a test tool. Yes it has functionality that, as a tester, I have always wanted: automatic construction of cross reference matrices, automatic generation of test scripts from test paths, coverage analysis, that kind of thing, but more than that, it helps me model.

And now I can see it being used instead of other tools I used to use. Where before I might have used an outliner, and a diagram in a diagrammer, and a spreadsheet, and a database, now I can use Compendium-TA.

I'm really excited about this tool and I can't wait to see how other people use it because I believe it can help anyone, I really think this is a modelling tool for everyone.

Now you can download it and try it for yourself.

Sign up for more information and I'll keep you informed of its progress.

Thanks,

Alan Richardson
Compendium Developments