Loupe - Who's it For?
In my last post, I announced the forthcoming release of Loupe from Gibraltar Software</a>. In this post, I want to give you some insight into who we’re building Loupe for.
As you’ll know by now, 2013 sees Gibraltar Software aligning products around some key themes that we believe are important for software delivery. On the theme of “Behind All Rock Solid Software, is a Rock Solid Team”, we believe Loupe is for everyone!
Now that’s not some marketing angle where we say, “Loupe is for everyone, so it’s for you, so buy it please”. No, what we’re saying is that Loupe delivers value to every member of your team, not just the guy who’s computer Gibraltar Analyst was installed on and who became the de facto “logging guy”. So, that said, how will different people in the team use Loupe?
The Developer
In the past, if a developer wanted to keep a weather eye on a piece of the application that they’d been working on, then they’d have to keep bothering The Logging Guy. But with Loupe they can log in and check out how their code-baby is doing anytime they want, and from anywhere they want.
If a developer is trying to fix an issue they can go from zero to fully informed in seconds with Loupe. The Loupe Server ties common problems together and makes it easy to drill through all of the information on just one problem without being distracted by everything else that gets gathered.
When a problem merits it, developers can use the extended capabilities of the Loupe Windows Client to drill down to more detailed information, right up to the detailed logging and metrics for one instance of your application.
The Product Manager
Bugs happen everywhere and you need to be able to analyze and fix them from anywhere. With Loupe, a Product Manager can find out what’s broken, where, for whom and on which platforms, from any web enabled device! Having done that they can triage the bugs and create tasks for them to be fixed. This information is integrated between Loupe and your defect tracking system. If you don’t have a defect tracking system that’s no problem either - you still get all the benefits of Loupe showing you what problems are the most important right now for your team to work on.
The Support Guy
Working in support is a tough job but Loupe makes it a bit easier. Using this product you can survey the entirety of your product landscape, viewing all the combinations of product and operating systems. From here you can start to see bugs that are connected through OS and version combination. You can also see which bugs are related: If you get this bug, and you are on this OS, then there’s a 75% chance you’ll have this bug too, even if you haven’t seen it yet.
Sometimes all you get when providing support is a vague few words from an error message. With Loupe you can search through the full text of what’s happened in your applications to find any relevant errors and with that any resolution or workaround information the development team has recorded. Loupe lets you go quickly from “it said something like repository failed” to “OK, this was addressed in version 3.5”.
Indeed, Loupe is a tool for all the team and in future posts we’ll dig into the functionality in more detail, but until then, happy coding.