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• Why is this loop over mysql resultset slow? (1.4ms per cycle)

  - by pawpro

  The $res contains around 488k rows the whole loop takes 61s! that's over 1.25ms per cycle! What is taking all that time? while($row = $res->fetch_assoc()) { $clist[$row['upload_id']][$row['dialcode_id']][$row['carrier_id']]['std'] = $row['cost_std']; $clist[$row['upload_id']][$row['dialcode_id']][$row['carrier_id']]['ecn'] = $row['cost_ecn']; $clist[$row['upload_id']][$row['dialcode_id']][$row['carrier_id']]['wnd'] = $row['cost_wnd']; $dialcode_destination[$row['upload_id']][$row['carrier_id']][$row['dialcode_id']]['other_destination'] = $row['destination_id']; $dialcode_destination[$row['upload_id']][$row['carrier_id']][$row['dialcode_id']]['carrier_destination'] = $row['carrier_destination_id']; } Now resultset of 10 rows, smaller arrays and performance 30 times higher (0.041ms) not the fastest still but better. while($row = $res->fetch_assoc()) { $customer[$row['id']]['name'] = $row['name']; $customer[$row['id']]['code'] = $row['customer']; }

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• Unwanted character being added to string in C

  - by Church

  I have a program that gives you shipping addresses from an input file. However at the beginning of one of the strings, order.add_one, a number is being added to the beginning of the string, that number is equivalent to the variable "choice" every time. Why is it doing this? #include <stdio.h> #include <math.h> #include <string.h> //structure typedef struct {char cust_name[25]; char cust_id[3]; char add_one[30]; char add_two[30]; char bike; char risky; int number_ordered; char cust_information[500]; }ORDER; ORDER order; int main(void){ fflush(stdin); system ( "clear" ); //initialize variables float price; float m = 359.95; float s = 279.95; //while loop, runs until user declares they no longer wish to input orders while (1==1){ printf("Options: \nEnter Customer information manually : 1 \nSearch Customer by ID(input.txt reader) : 2 \n"); int option = 0; scanf(" %d", &option); if (option == 1){ //Print and scan statements printf("Enter Customer Information\n"); printf("Customer Name: "); scanf(" %[^\n]s", &order.cust_name); printf("\nEnter Address Line One: "); scanf(" %[^\n]s", &order.add_one); printf("\nEnter Addres Line Two: "); scanf(" %[^\n]s", &order.add_two); printf("\nHow Many Bicycles Are Ordered: "); scanf(" %d", &order.number_ordered); printf("\nWhat Type Of Bike Is Ordered\n M Mountain Bike \n S Street Bike"); printf("\nChoose One (M or S): "); scanf(" %c", &order.bike); printf("\nIs The Customer Risky (Y/N): "); scanf(" %c", &order.risky); system ( "clear" ); } if (option == 2){ FILE *fpt; fpt = fopen("input.txt", "r"); if (fpt==NULL){ printf("Text file did not open\n"); return 1; } printf("Enter Customer ID: "); scanf("%s", &order.cust_id); char choice; choice = order.cust_id[0]; char x[3]; int w, u, y, z; char a[10], b[10], c[10], d[10], e[20], f[10], g[10], i[1], j[1]; int h; printf("%s value of c", c); if (choice >='1'){ while ((w = fgetc(fpt)) != '\n' ){ } } if (choice >='2'){ while ((u = fgetc(fpt)) != '\n' ){ } } if (choice >='3'){ while ((y = fgetc(fpt)) != '\n' ){ } } if (choice >= '4'){ while ((z = fgetc(fpt)) != '\n' ){ } } printf("\n"); fscanf(fpt, "%s", x); fscanf(fpt, "%s", a); printf("%s", a); strcat(order.cust_name, a); fscanf(fpt, " %s", b); printf(" %s", b); strcat(order.cust_name, " "); strcat(order.cust_name, b); fscanf(fpt, "%s", c); printf(" %s", c); strcat(order.add_one, "\0"); strcat(order.add_one, c); fscanf(fpt, "%s", d); printf(" %s", d); strcat(order.add_one, " "); strcat(order.add_one, d); fscanf(fpt, "%s", e); printf(" %s", e); strcat(order.add_two, e); fscanf(fpt, "%s", f); printf(" %s", f); strcat(order.add_two, " "); strcat(order.add_two, f); fscanf(fpt, "%s", g); printf(" %s", g); strcat(order.add_two, " "); strcat(order.add_two, g); strcat(order.add_two, "\0"); fscanf(fpt, "%d", &h); printf(" %d", h); order.number_ordered = h; fscanf(fpt, "%s", i); printf(" %s", i); order.bike = i[0]; fscanf(fpt, "%s", j); printf(" %s", j); order.risky = j[0]; fclose(fpt); printf("%s %s %s %d %c %c", order.cust_name, order.add_one, order.add_two, order.number_ordered, order.bike, order.risky); }

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• Suggest encoding which removes slashes which I can use as the format for REST-style URL-paramteters

  - by Binary255

  Given a path to a REST style URL: http://site.com/rest/customer/foo/robot/bar/1 When you GET it, it returns a PDF to the foo-customer containing page 1 of the bar-URL. While foo is the name of the customer bar is an URL. The URL usually contains slashes and might look something like this: http://anothersite.com/interestingarticle.html As REST URL's separate arguments by slashes I can't just put it into the REST URL above. Which encoding should I use? I can't use Base 64 as it utilizes the slash as well. As a technical note I will encode the URL in a .NET-application and decode it in PHP.

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• PHP object help -> unexpected T_OBJECT_OPERATOR

  - by php-b-grader

  Please help me understand: print gettype(new CustomerObject()) prints: "object" (so it is an object) BUT print gettype((new CustomerObject())->get_customer()); prints: unexpected T_OBJECT_OPERATOR If I do it over two lines it works fine $object = new Customer($order->customer_id); print gettype($object); prints: object $customer = $object->get_customer(); print gettype($customer); prints: array It appears that the lines cannot be joined into a single call. Is this correct? and what is the logic behind that?

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• Linq.Where-to-SQL on a text field comparing to a list of values

  - by StampedeXV

  Customer.text is a field in an T-SQL DB (that I do not control and thus may not alter) of type "text". I'd like to do something like this: List<string> compare = new List<string>(); compare.Add("one"); compare.Add("two"); var q = from t in customer where t.text.Contains( compare.First()) select t; this will work. But now I'd like to do something like: (!NOT WORKING!) var q = from t in customer where compare.Contains( t.text ) select t; How can I achieve this? Is it even possible?

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• Localizing validation (error) messages in Grails

  - by John

  Hi, I try to localize error messages from the Domain classes. This is possible with the default error messages, e.g.: default.blank.message=Property [{0}] cannot be blank and localized attribute names, e.g.: customer.address.label=Customer address Where "Customer" is my domain class and address is its attribute. My problem is that I can't localize some attributes because I need specific error messages. E.g: has.to.be.a.number=Property [{0}] has to be a number contingent.size.label=Contingent size. But the message I get is "Property [size] has to be a number" instead of "Property [Contingent size] has to be a number". The messages I cant localize are following: - Property [{0}] has to be a number - Property [{0}] has to be a valid date // I can't use g:datePicker in this context

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• linq with Include and criteria

  - by JMarsch

  How would I translate this into LINQ? Say I have A parent table (Say, customers), and child (addresses). I want to return all of the Parents who have addresses in California, and just the california address. (but I want to do it in LINQ and get an object graph of Entity objects) Here's the old fashioned way: SELECT c.blah, a.blah FROM Customer c INNER JOIN Address a on c.CustomerId = a.CustomerId where a.State = 'CA' The problem I'm having with LINQ is that i need an object graph of concrete Entity types (and it can't be lazy loaded. Here's what I've tried so far: // this one doesn't filter the addresses -- I get the right customers, but I get all of their addresses, and not just the CA address object. from c in Customer.Include(c = c.Addresses) where c.Addresses.Any(a = a.State == "CA") select c // this one seems to work, but the Addresses collection on Customers is always null from c in Customer.Include(c = c.Addresses) from a in c.Addresses where a.State == "CA" select c; Any ideas?

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• Does the order of the columns in a SELECT statement make a difference?

  - by Frank Computer

  This question was inspired by a previous question posted on SO, "Does the order of the WHERE clause make a differnece?". Would it improve a SELECT statement's performance if the the columns used in the WHERE section are placed at the begining of the SELECT statement? example: SELECT customer.id, transaction.id, transaction.efective_date, transaction.a, [...] FROM customer, transaction WHERE customer.id = transaction.id; I do know that limiting the list of columns to only the needed ones in a SELECT statement improves performance as opposed to using SELECT * because the current list is smaller.

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• Why does my WCF service return and ARRAY instead of a List <T> ?

  - by user193189

  In the web servce I say public List<Customer> GetCustomers() { PR1Entities dc = new PR1Entities(); var q = (from x in dc.Customers select x).ToList(); return q; } (customer is a entity object) Then I generate the proxy when I add the service.. and in the reference.cd it say public wcf1.ServiceReference1.Customer[] GetCustomers() { return base.Channel.GetCustomers(); } WHY IS IT AN ARRAY? I asked for a List. help.

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• left join without duplicate values using MIN()

  - by Clipper87

  I have a table_1: id custno 1 1 2 2 3 3 and a table_2: id custno qty descr 1 1 10 a 2 1 7 b 3 2 4 c 4 3 7 d 5 1 5 e 6 1 5 f When I run this query to show the minimum order quantities from every customer: SELECT DISTINCT table_1.custno,table_2.qty,table_2.descr FROM table_1 LEFT OUTER JOIN table_2 ON table_1.custno = table_2.custno AND qty = (SELECT MIN(qty) FROM table_2 WHERE table_2.custno = table_1.custno ) Then I get this result: custno qty descr 1 5 e 1 5 f 2 4 c 3 7 d Customer 1 appears twice each time with the same minimum qty (& a different description) but I only want to see customer 1 appear once. I don't care if that is the record with 'e' as a description or 'f' as a description. How could I do this ? Thx!

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• Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

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• Bye Bye Year of the Dragon, Hello BPM

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  As CNN asks you to vote for most intriguing person of the year, what technologies do you think were most intriguing in 2012? Was it Social, Mobile, BPM or were you most captivated by Customer Experience? Well, we too observed these technology trends on the upswing and foresee that these will remain in limelight for 2013. What if we told you that there is a solution that brings these technologies together and helps not only to create efficient business processes but also an engaging customer experience. As we transition into 2013 let’s take a look at some of the top trending topics in BPM.  Ajay Khanna discusses these trends in OracleBPM blog, Bye Bye Year of the Dragon, Hello BPM.  Additional Information Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• Learn Cloud Computing – It’s Time

  - by Ben Griswold

  Last week, I gave an in-house presentation on cloud computing.  I walked through an overview of cloud computing – characteristics (on demand, elastic, fully managed by provider), why are we interested (virtualization, distributed computing, increased access to high-speed internet, weak economy), various types (public, private, virtual private cloud) and services models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS.)  Though numerous providers have emerged in the cloud computing space, the presentation focused on Amazon, Google and Microsoft offerings and provided an overview of their platforms, costs, data tier technologies, management and security.  One of the biggest talking points was why developers should consider the cloud as part of their deployment strategy: You only have to pay for what you consume You will be well-positioned for one time event provisioning You will reap the benefits of automated growth and scalable technologies For the record: having deployed dozens of applications on various platforms over the years, pricing tends to be the biggest customer concern.  Yes, scalability is a customer consideration, too, but it comes in distant second.  Boy do I hope you’re still reading… You may be thinking, “Cloud computing is well and good and it sounds catchy, but should I bother?  After all, it’s just another technology bundle which I’m supposed to ramp up on because it’s the latest thing, right?”  Well, my clients used to be 100% reliant upon me to find adequate hosting for them.  Now I find they are often aware of cloud services and some come to me with the “possibility” that deploying to the cloud is the best solution for them.  It’s like the patient who walks into the doctor’s office with their diagnosis and treatment already in mind thanks to the handful of Internet searches they performed earlier that day.  You know what?  The customer may be correct about the cloud. It may be a perfect fit for their app.  But maybe not…  I don’t think there’s a need to learn about every technical thing under the sun, but if you are responsible for identifying hosting solutions for your customers, it is time to get up to speed on cloud computing and the various offerings (if you haven’t already.)  Here are a few references to get you going: DZone Refcardz #82 Getting Started with Cloud Computing by Daniel Rubio Wikipedia Cloud Computing – What is it? Amazon Machine Images (AMI) Google App Engine SDK Azure SDK EC2 Spot Pricing Google App Engine Team Blog Amazon EC2 Team Blog Microsoft Azure Team Blog Amazon EC2 – Cost Calculator Google App Engine – Cost and Billing Resources Microsoft Azure – Cost Calculator Larry Ellison has stated that cloud computing has been defined as "everything that we currently do" and that it will have no effect except to "change the wording on some of our ads" Oracle launches worldwide cloud-computing tour NoSQL Movement  

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• Authorize.Net, Silent Posts, and URL Rewriting Don't Mix

  The too long, didn't read synopsis: If you use Authorize.Net and its silent post feature and it stops working, make sure that if your website uses URL rewriting to strip or add a www to the domain name that the URL you specify for the silent post matches the URL rewriting rule because Authorize.Net's silent post feature won't resubmit the post request to URL specified via the redirect response. I have a client that uses Authorize.Net to manage and bill customers. Like many payment gateways, Authorize.Net supports recurring payments. For example, a website may charge members a monthly fee to access their services. With Authorize.Net you can provide the billing amount and schedule and at each interval Authorize.Net will automatically charge the customer's credit card and deposit the funds to your account. You may want to do something whenever Authorize.Net performs a recurring payment. For instance, if the recurring payment charge was a success you would extend the customer's service; if the transaction was denied then you would cancel their service (or whatever). To accomodate this, Authorize.Net offers a silent post feature. Properly configured, Authorize.Net will send an HTTP request that contains details of the recurring payment transaction to a URL that you specify. This URL could be an ASP.NET page on your server that then parses the data from Authorize.Net and updates the specified customer's account accordingly. (Of course, you can always view the history of recurring payments through the reporting interface on Authorize.Net's website; the silent post feature gives you a way to programmatically respond to a recurring payment.) Recently, this client of mine that uses Authorize.Net informed me that several paying customers were telling him that their access to the site had been cut off even though their credit cards had been recently billed. Looking through our logs, I noticed that we had not shown any recurring payment log activity for over a month. I figured one of two things must be going on: either Authorize.Net wasn't sending us the silent post requests anymore or the page that was processing them wasn't doing so correctly. I started by verifying that our Authorize.Net account was properly setup to use the silent post feature and that it was pointing to the correct URL. Authorize.Net's site indicated the silent post was configured and that recurring payment transaction details were being sent to http://example.com/AuthorizeNetProcessingPage.aspx. Next, I wanted to determine what information was getting sent to that URL.The application was setup tolog the parsed results of the Authorize.Net request, such as what customer the recurring payment applied to; however,we were not logging the actual HTTP request coming from Authorize.Net. I contacted Authorize.Net's support to inquire if they logged the HTTP request send via the silent post feature and was told that they did not. I decided to add a bit of code to log the incoming HTTP request, which you can do by using the Request object's SaveAs method. This allowed me to saveevery incoming HTTP request to the silent post page to a text file on the server. Upon the next recurring payment, I was able to see the HTTP request being received by the page: GET /AuthorizeNetProcessingPage.aspx HTTP/1.1Connection: CloseAccept: */*Host: www.example.com That was it. Two things alarmed me: first, the request was obviously a GET and not a POST; second, there was no POST body (obviously), which is where Authorize.Net passes along thedetails of the recurring payment transaction.What stuck out was the Host header, which differed slightly from the silent post URL configured in Authorize.Net. Specifically, the Host header in the above logged request pointed to www.example.com, whereas the Authorize.Net configuration used example.com (no www). About a month ago - the same time these recurring payment transaction detailswere no longer being processed by our ASP.NET page - we had implemented IIS 7's URL rewriting feature to permanently redirect all traffic to example.com to www.example.com. Could that be the problem? I contacted Authorize.Net's support again and asked them if their silent post algorithmwould follow the301HTTP response and repost the recurring payment transaction details. They said, Yes, the silent post would follow redirects. Their reports didn't jive with my observations, so I went ahead and updated our Authorize.Net configuration to point to http://www.example.com/AuthorizeNetProcessingPage.aspx instead of http://example.com/AuthorizeNetProcessingPage.aspx. And, I'm happy to report, recurring payments and correctly being processed again! If you use Authorize.Net and the silent post feature, and you notice that your processing page is not longer working, make sure you are not using any URL rewriting rules that may conflict with the silent post URL configuration. Hope this saves someone the time it took me to get to the bottom of this. Happy Programming!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• What’s New for Oracle Commerce? Executive QA with John Andrews, VP Product Management, Oracle Commerce

  - by Katrina Gosek

  Oracle Commerce was for the fifth time positioned as a leader by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce. This inspired me to sit down with Oracle Commerce VP of Product Management, John Andrews to get his perspective on what continues to make Oracle a leader in the industry and what’s new for Oracle Commerce in 2013. Q: Why do you believe Oracle Commerce continues to be a leader in the industry? John: Oracle has a great acquisition strategy – it brings best-of-breed technologies into the product fold and then continues to grow and innovate them. This is particularly true with products unified into the Oracle Commerce brand. Oracle acquired ATG in late 2010 – and then Endeca in late 2011. This means that under the hood of Oracle Commerce you have market-leading technologies for cross-channel commerce and customer experience, both designed and developed in direct response to the unique challenges online businesses face. And we continue to innovate on capabilities core to what our customers need to be successful – contextual and personalized experience delivery, merchant-inspired tools, and architecture for performance and scalability. Q: It’s not a slow moving industry. What are you doing to keep the pace of innovation at Oracle Commerce? John: Oracle owes our customers the most innovative commerce capabilities. By unifying the core components of ATG and Endeca we are delivering on this promise. Oracle Commerce is continuing to innovate and redefine how commerce is done and in a way that drive business results and keeps customers coming back for experiences tailored just for them. Our January and May 2013 releases not only marked the seventh significant releases for the solution since the acquisitions of ATG and Endeca, we also continue to demonstrate rapid and significant progress on the unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities of the two commerce technologies. Q: Can you tell us what was notable about these latest releases under the Oracle Commerce umbrella? John: Specifically, our latest product innovations give businesses selling online the ability to get to market faster with more personalized commerce experiences in the following ways: Mobile: the latest Commerce Reference Application in this release offers a wider range of examples for online businesses to leverage for iOS development and specifically new iPad reference capabilities. This release marks the first release of the iOS Universal application that serves both the iPhone and iPad devices from a single download or binary. Business users can now drive page content management and layout of search results and category pages, as well as create additional storefront elements such as categories, facets / dimensions, and breadcrumbs through Experience Manager tools. Cross-Channel Commerce: key commerce platform capabilities have been added to support cross-channel commerce, including an expanded inventory model to maintain inventory for stores, pickup in stores and Web-based returns. Online businesses with in-store operations can now offer advanced shipping options on the web and make returns and exchange logic easily available on the web. Multi-Site Capabilities: significant enhancements to the Commerce Platform multi-site architecture that allows business users to quickly launch and manage multiple sites on the same cluster and share data, carts, and other components. First introduced in 2010, with this latest release business users can now partition or share customer profiles, control users’ site-based access, and manage personalization assets using site groups. Internationalization: continued language support and enhancements for business user tools as well and search and navigation. Guided Search now supports 35 total languages with 11 new languages (including Danish, Arabic, Norwegian, Serbian Cyrillic) added in this release. Commerce Platform tools now include localized support for 17 locales with 4 new languages (Danish, Portuguese (European), Finnish, and Thai). No development or customization is required in order for business users to use the applications in any of these supported languages. Business Tool Experience: valuable new Commerce Merchandising features include a new workflow for making emergency changes quickly and increased visibility into promotions rules and qualifications in preview mode. Oracle Commerce business tools continue to become more and more feature rich to provide intuitive, easy- to-use (yet powerful) capabilities to allow business users to manage content and the shopping experience. Commerce & Experience Unification: demonstrable unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities include – productized cartridges that provide supported integration between the Commerce Platform and Experience Management tools, cross-channel returns, Oracle Service Cloud integration, and integrated iPad application. The mission guiding our product development is to deliver differentiated, personalized user experiences across any device in a contextual manner – and to give the business the best tools to tune and optimize those user experiences to meet their business objectives. We also need to do this in a way that makes it operationally efficient for the business, keeping the overall total cost of ownership low – yet also allows the business to expand, whether it be to new business models, geographies or brands. To learn more about the latest Oracle Commerce releases and mission, visit the links below: • Hear more from John about the Oracle Commerce mission • Hear from Oracle Commerce customers • Documentation on the new releases • Listen to the Oracle ATG Commerce 10.2 Webcast • Listen to the Oracle Endeca Commerce 3.1.2 Webcast

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• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality: Ever Integration-ready

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  It is closing in on a year now since Oracle’s acquisition of Datanomic, and the addition of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) to the Oracle software family. The big move has caused some big shifts in emphasis and some very encouraging excitement from the field.  To give an illustration, combined with a shameless promotion of how EDQ can help to give quick insights into your data, I did a quick Phrase Profile of the subject field of emails to the Global EDQ mailing list since it was set up last September. The results revealed a very clear theme:   Integration, Integration, Integration! As well as the important Siebel and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) integrations, we have been asked about integration with a huge variety of Oracle applications, including EBS, Peoplesoft, CRM on Demand, Fusion, DRM, Endeca, RightNow, and more - and we have not stood still! While it would not have been possible to develop specific pre-integrations with all of the above within a year, we have developed a package of feature-rich out-of-the-box web services and batch processes that can be plugged into any application or middleware technology with ease. And with Siebel, they work out of the box. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality version 9.0.4 includes the Customer Data Services (CDS) pack – a ready set of standard processes with standard interfaces, to provide integrated: Address verification and cleansing  Individual matching Organization matching The services can are suitable for either Batch or Real-Time processing, and are enabled for international data, with simple configuration options driving the set of locale-specific dictionaries that are used. For example, large dictionaries are provided to support international name transcription and variant matching, including highly specialized handling for Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean data. In total across all locales, CDS includes well over a million dictionary entries.   Excerpt from EDQ’s CDS Individual Name Standardization Dictionary CDS has been developed to replace the OEM of Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR) for attached Data Quality on the Oracle price list, but does this in a way that creates a ‘best of both worlds’ situation for customers, who can harness not only the out-of-the-box functionality of pre-packaged matching and standardization services, but also the flexibility of OEDQ if they want to customize the interfaces or the process logic, without having to learn more than one product. From a competitive point of view, we believe this stands us in good stead against our key competitors, including Informatica, who have separate ‘Identity Resolution’ and general DQ products, and IBM, who provide limited out-of-the-box capabilities (with a steep learning curve) in both their QualityStage data quality and Initiate matching products. Here is a brief guide to the main services provided in the pack: Address Verification and Standardization EDQ’s CDS Address Cleaning Process The Address Verification and Standardization service uses EDQ Address Verification (an OEM of Loqate software) to verify and clean addresses in either real-time or batch. The Address Verification processor is wrapped in an EDQ process – this adds significant capabilities over calling the underlying Address Verification API directly, specifically: Country-specific thresholds to determine when to accept the verification result (and therefore to change the input address) based on the confidence level of the API Optimization of address verification by pre-standardizing data where required Formatting of output addresses into the input address fields normally used by applications Adding descriptions of the address verification and geocoding return codes The process can then be used to provide real-time and batch address cleansing in any application; such as a simple web page calling address cleaning and geocoding as part of a check on individual data.     Duplicate Prevention Unlike Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR), EDQ uses stateless services for duplicate prevention to avoid issues caused by complex replication and synchronization of large volume customer data. When a record is added or updated in an application, the EDQ Cluster Key Generation service is called, and returns a number of key values. These are used to select other records (‘candidates’) that may match in the application data (which has been pre-seeded with keys using the same service). The ‘driving record’ (the new or updated record) is then presented along with all selected candidates to the EDQ Matching Service, which decides which of the candidates are a good match with the driving record, and scores them according to the strength of match. In this model, complex multi-locale EDQ techniques can be used to generate the keys and ensure that the right balance between performance and matching effectiveness is maintained, while ensuring that the application retains control of data integrity and transactional commits. The process is explained below: EDQ Duplicate Prevention Architecture Note that where the integration is with a hub, there may be an additional call to the Cluster Key Generation service if the master record has changed due to merges with other records (and therefore needs to have new key values generated before commit). Batch Matching In order to allow customers to use different match rules in batch to real-time, separate matching templates are provided for batch matching. For example, some customers want to minimize intervention in key user flows (such as adding new customers) in front end applications, but to conduct a more exhaustive match on a regular basis in the back office. The batch matching jobs are also used when migrating data between systems, and in this case normally a more precise (and automated) type of matching is required, in order to minimize the review work performed by Data Stewards.  In batch matching, data is captured into EDQ using its standard interfaces, and records are standardized, clustered and matched in an EDQ job before matches are written out. As with all EDQ jobs, batch matching may be called from Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) if required. When working with Siebel CRM (or master data in Siebel UCM), Siebel’s Data Quality Manager is used to instigate batch jobs, and a shared staging database is used to write records for matching and to consume match results. The CDS batch matching processes automatically adjust to Siebel’s ‘Full Match’ (match all records against each other) and ‘Incremental Match’ (match a subset of records against all of their selected candidates) modes. The Future The Customer Data Services Pack is an important part of the Oracle strategy for EDQ, offering a clear path to making Data Quality Assurance an integral part of enterprise applications, and providing a strong value proposition for adopting EDQ. We are planning various additions and improvements, including: An out-of-the-box Data Quality Dashboard Even more comprehensive international data handling Address search (suggesting multiple results) Integrated address matching The EDQ Customer Data Services Pack is part of the Enterprise Data Quality Media Pack, available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/oedq/downloads/index.html.

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• Need help with software licensing? Read on&hellip;

  - by juanlarios

  Figuring out which software licensing options best suit your needs while being cost-effective can be confusing. Some businesses end up making their purchases through retail stores which means they miss out on volume licensing opportunities and others may unknowingly be using unlicensed software which means their business may be at risk. So let me help you make the best decision for your situation. You may want to review this blog post that lays out licensing basics for any organization that needs to license software for more than 5 or less than 250 devices or users. It details the different ways you can buy a license and what choices are available for volume licensing, which can give you pricing advantages and provide flexible options for your business. As technology evolves and more organizations move to online services such as Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Azure Platform, Windows Intune and others, it’s important to understand how to purchase, activate and use online service subscriptions to get the most out of your investment. Once purchased through a volume licensing agreement or the Microsoft Online Subscription Program, these services can be managed through web portals: · Online Services Customer Portal (Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Intune) · Dynamics CRM Online Customer Portal (Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online) · Windows Azure Customer Portal (Windows Azure Platform) · Volume Licensing Service Center (other services) Learn more >> Licensing Resources: The SMB How to Buy Portal – receive clear purchasing and licensing information that is easy to understand in order to help facilitate quick decision making. Microsoft License Advisor (MLA) – Use MLA to research Microsoft Volume Licensing products, programs and pricing. Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) – Already have a volume License? Use the VLSC to get you easy access to all your licensing information in one location. Online Services – licensing information for off-premise options. Windows 7 Comparison: – Compare versions of Windows and find out which one is right for you. Office 2010 Comparison: – Find out which Office suite is right for you. Licensing FAQs – Frequently Asked Questions About Product Licensing. Additional Resources You May Find Useful: · TechNet Evaluation Center Try some of our latest Microsoft products For free, Like System Center 2012 Pre-Release Products, and evaluate them before you buy. · Springboard Series Your destination for technical resources, free tools and expert guidance to ease the deployment and management of your Windows-based client infrastructure.   · AlignIT Manager Tech Talk Series A monthly streamed video series with a range of topics for both infrastructure and development managers.  Ask questions and participate real-time or watch the on-demand recording.

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• Social Business Forum Milano: Day 2

  - by me

  @YourService. The business world has flipped and small business can capitalize  by Frank Eliason (twitter: @FrankEliason ) Technology and social media tools have made it easier than ever for companies to communicate with consumers. They can listen and join in on conversations, solve problems, get instant feedback about their products and services, and more. So why, then, are most companies not doing this? Instead, it seems as if customer service is at an all time low, and that the few companies who are choosing to focus on their customers are experiencing a great competitive advantage. At Your Service explains the importance of refocusing your business on your customers and your employees, and just how to do it. Explains how to create a culture of empowered employees who understand the value of a great customer experience Advises on the need to communicate that experience to their customers and potential customers Frank Eliason, recognized by BusinessWeek as the 'most famous customer service manager in the US, possibly in the world,' has built a reputation for helping large businesses improve the way they connect with customers and enhance their relationships Quotes from the Audience: Bertrand Duperrin ?@bduperrin social service is not about shutting up the loudest cutsomers ! #sbf12 @frankeliason Paolo Pelloni ?@paolopelloniGautam Ghosh ?@GautamGhosh RT @cecildijoux: #sbf12 @frankeliason you need to change things and fix the approach it's not about social media it's about driving change  Peter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser #sbf12 Company Experience = Product Experience + Customer Interactions + Employee Experience @yourservice Engage or lose! Socialize, mobilize, conversify: engage your employees to improve business performance Christian Finn (twitter: @cfinn) First Christian was presenting the flying monkey   Then he outlined the four principals to fix the Intranet: 1. Socalize the Intranet 2. Get Thee to a Single Repository 3. Mobilize the Intranet 4. Conversationalize Your Processes Quotes from the Audience: Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Engaged employees think their work bring out the best of their ideas @cfinn #sbf12 http://pic.twitter.com/68eddp48 John Stepper ?@johnstepper I like @cfinn's "conversify your processes" A nice related concept to "narrating your work", part of working out loud. http://johnstepper.com/2012/05/26/working-out-loud-your-personal-content-strategy/ Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Organizations are talent markets - socializing your intranet makes this market function better @cfinn #sbf12 For profit, productivity, and personal benefit: creating a collaborative culture at Deutsche Bank John Stepper (twitter:@johnstepper) Driving adoption of collaboration + social media platforms at Deutsche Bank. John shared some great best practices on how to deploy an enterprise wide  community model  in a large company. He started with the most important question What is the commercial value of adding social ? Then he talked about the success of Community of Practices deployment and outlined some key use cases including the relevant measures to proof the ROI of the investment. Examples:  Community of practice -> measure: systematic collection of value stories  Self-service website  -> measure: based on representative models Optimizing asset inventory - > measure: Actual counts  This use case was particular interesting.  It is a crowd sourced spending/saving of infrastructure model.  User can cancel IT services they don't need (as example Software xx).  5% of the saving goes to social responsibility projects. The John outlined some  best practices on how to address the WIIFM (What's In It For Me) question of the individual users:  - change from hierarchy to graph -  working out loud = observable work + narrating  your work  - add social skills to career objectives - example: building a purposeful social network course/training as part of the job development curriculum And last but not least John gave some important tips on how to get senior management buy-in by establishing management sponsored division level collaboration boards which defines clear uses cases and measures. This divisional use cases are then implemented using a common social platform.  Thanks John - I learned a lot from your presentation!   Quotes from the Audience: Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 what's in it for individuals at Deutsche Bank? Shapping their reputations in a big org says @johnstepper #e20Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl Any reason why not? MT @magatorlibero #sbf12 is Deutsche B. experience on applying social inside company applicable to Italian people? Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Your career is not a ladder, it is a network that opens up opportunities - @johnstepper #sbf12 Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg @johnstepper: Institutionalizing collaboration is next - collaboration woven into the fabric of daily work #sbf12 Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 @johnstepper talking about how Deutsche Bank is using #socbiz to build purposeful CoP & save money

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• Metro: Promises

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to describe the Promise class in the WinJS library. You can use promises whenever you need to perform an asynchronous operation such as retrieving data from a remote website or a file from the file system. Promises are used extensively in the WinJS library. Asynchronous Programming Some code executes immediately, some code requires time to complete or might never complete at all. For example, retrieving the value of a local variable is an immediate operation. Retrieving data from a remote website takes longer or might not complete at all. When an operation might take a long time to complete, you should write your code so that it executes asynchronously. Instead of waiting for an operation to complete, you should start the operation and then do something else until you receive a signal that the operation is complete. An analogy. Some telephone customer service lines require you to wait on hold – listening to really bad music – until a customer service representative is available. This is synchronous programming and very wasteful of your time. Some newer customer service lines enable you to enter your telephone number so the customer service representative can call you back when a customer representative becomes available. This approach is much less wasteful of your time because you can do useful things while waiting for the callback. There are several patterns that you can use to write code which executes asynchronously. The most popular pattern in JavaScript is the callback pattern. When you call a function which might take a long time to return a result, you pass a callback function to the function. For example, the following code (which uses jQuery) includes a function named getFlickrPhotos which returns photos from the Flickr website which match a set of tags (such as “dog” and “funny”): function getFlickrPhotos(tags, callback) { $.getJSON( "http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?jsoncallback=?", { tags: tags, tagmode: "all", format: "json" }, function (data) { if (callback) { callback(data.items); } } ); } getFlickrPhotos("funny, dogs", function(data) { $.each(data, function(index, item) { console.log(item); }); }); The getFlickr() function includes a callback parameter. When you call the getFlickr() function, you pass a function to the callback parameter which gets executed when the getFlicker() function finishes retrieving the list of photos from the Flickr web service. In the code above, the callback function simply iterates through the results and writes each result to the console. Using callbacks is a natural way to perform asynchronous programming with JavaScript. Instead of waiting for an operation to complete, sitting there and listening to really bad music, you can get a callback when the operation is complete. Using Promises The CommonJS website defines a promise like this (http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/Promises): “Promises provide a well-defined interface for interacting with an object that represents the result of an action that is performed asynchronously, and may or may not be finished at any given point in time. By utilizing a standard interface, different components can return promises for asynchronous actions and consumers can utilize the promises in a predictable manner.” A promise provides a standard pattern for specifying callbacks. In the WinJS library, when you create a promise, you can specify three callbacks: a complete callback, a failure callback, and a progress callback. Promises are used extensively in the WinJS library. The methods in the animation library, the control library, and the binding library all use promises. For example, the xhr() method included in the WinJS base library returns a promise. The xhr() method wraps calls to the standard XmlHttpRequest object in a promise. The following code illustrates how you can use the xhr() method to perform an Ajax request which retrieves a file named Photos.txt: var options = { url: "/data/photos.txt" }; WinJS.xhr(options).then( function (xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("success"); var data = JSON.parse(xmlHttpRequest.responseText); console.log(data); }, function(xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("fail"); }, function(xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("progress"); } ) The WinJS.xhr() method returns a promise. The Promise class includes a then() method which accepts three callback functions: a complete callback, an error callback, and a progress callback: Promise.then(completeCallback, errorCallback, progressCallback) In the code above, three anonymous functions are passed to the then() method. The three callbacks simply write a message to the JavaScript Console. The complete callback also dumps all of the data retrieved from the photos.txt file. Creating Promises You can create your own promises by creating a new instance of the Promise class. The constructor for the Promise class requires a function which accepts three parameters: a complete, error, and progress function parameter. For example, the code below illustrates how you can create a method named wait10Seconds() which returns a promise. The progress function is called every second and the complete function is not called until 10 seconds have passed: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; function wait10Seconds() { return new WinJS.Promise(function (complete, error, progress) { var seconds = 0; var intervalId = window.setInterval(function () { seconds++; progress(seconds); if (seconds > 9) { window.clearInterval(intervalId); complete(); } }, 1000); }); } app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { wait10Seconds().then( function () { console.log("complete") }, function () { console.log("error") }, function (seconds) { console.log("progress:" + seconds) } ); } } app.start(); })(); All of the work happens in the constructor function for the promise. The window.setInterval() method is used to execute code every second. Every second, the progress() callback method is called. If more than 10 seconds have passed then the complete() callback method is called and the clearInterval() method is called. When you execute the code above, you can see the output in the Visual Studio JavaScript Console. Creating a Timeout Promise In the previous section, we created a custom Promise which uses the window.setInterval() method to complete the promise after 10 seconds. We really did not need to create a custom promise because the Promise class already includes a static method for returning promises which complete after a certain interval. The code below illustrates how you can use the timeout() method. The timeout() method returns a promise which completes after a certain number of milliseconds. WinJS.Promise.timeout(3000).then( function(){console.log("complete")}, function(){console.log("error")}, function(){console.log("progress")} ); In the code above, the Promise completes after 3 seconds (3000 milliseconds). The Promise returned by the timeout() method does not support progress events. Therefore, the only message written to the console is the message “complete” after 10 seconds. Canceling Promises Some promises, but not all, support cancellation. When you cancel a promise, the promise’s error callback is executed. For example, the following code uses the WinJS.xhr() method to perform an Ajax request. However, immediately after the Ajax request is made, the request is cancelled. // Specify Ajax request options var options = { url: "/data/photos.txt" }; // Make the Ajax request var request = WinJS.xhr(options).then( function (xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("success"); }, function (xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("fail"); }, function (xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("progress"); } ); // Cancel the Ajax request request.cancel(); When you run the code above, the message “fail” is written to the Visual Studio JavaScript Console. Composing Promises You can build promises out of other promises. In other words, you can compose promises. There are two static methods of the Promise class which you can use to compose promises: the join() method and the any() method. When you join promises, a promise is complete when all of the joined promises are complete. When you use the any() method, a promise is complete when any of the promises complete. The following code illustrates how to use the join() method. A new promise is created out of two timeout promises. The new promise does not complete until both of the timeout promises complete: WinJS.Promise.join([WinJS.Promise.timeout(1000), WinJS.Promise.timeout(5000)]) .then(function () { console.log("complete"); }); The message “complete” will not be written to the JavaScript Console until both promises passed to the join() method completes. The message won’t be written for 5 seconds (5,000 milliseconds). The any() method completes when any promise passed to the any() method completes: WinJS.Promise.any([WinJS.Promise.timeout(1000), WinJS.Promise.timeout(5000)]) .then(function () { console.log("complete"); }); The code above writes the message “complete” to the JavaScript Console after 1 second (1,000 milliseconds). The message is written to the JavaScript console immediately after the first promise completes and before the second promise completes. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe WinJS promises. First, we discussed how promises enable you to easily write code which performs asynchronous actions. You learned how to use a promise when performing an Ajax request. Next, we discussed how you can create your own promises. You learned how to create a new promise by creating a constructor function with complete, error, and progress parameters. Finally, you learned about several advanced methods of promises. You learned how to use the timeout() method to create promises which complete after an interval of time. You also learned how to cancel promises and compose promises from other promises.

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• Whitepaper list for the application framework

  - by Rick Finley

  We're reposting the list of technical whitepapers for the Oracle ETPM framework (called OUAF, Oracle Utilities Application Framework).  These are are available from My Oracle Support at the Doc Id's mentioned below. Some have been updated in the last few months to reflect new advice and new features.  This is reposted from the OUAF blog:  http://blogs.oracle.com/theshortenspot/entry/whitepaper_list_as_at_november Doc Id Document Title Contents 559880.1 ConfigLab Design Guidelines This whitepaper outlines how to design and implement a data management solution using the ConfigLab facility. This whitepaper currently only applies to the following products: Oracle Utilities Customer Care And Billing Oracle Enterprise Taxation Management Oracle Enterprise Taxation and Policy Management           560367.1 Technical Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework Based Products Whitepaper summarizing common technical best practices used by partners, implementation teams and customers. 560382.1 Performance Troubleshooting Guideline Series A set of whitepapers on tracking performance at each tier in the framework. The individual whitepapers are as follows: Concepts - General Concepts and Performance Troublehooting processes Client Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the browser client with common issues and resolutions. Network Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the network with common issues and resolutions. Web Application Server Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the Web Application Server with common issues and resolutions. Server Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the Operating system with common issues and resolutions. Database Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the database with common issues and resolutions. Batch Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the background processing component of the product with common issues and resolutions. 560401.1 Software Configuration Management Series  A set of whitepapers on how to manage customization (code and data) using the tools provided with the framework. The individual whitepapers are as follows: Concepts - General concepts and introduction. Environment Management - Principles and techniques for creating and managing environments. Version Management - Integration of Version control and version management of configuration items. Release Management - Packaging configuration items into a release. Distribution - Distribution and installation of releases across environments Change Management - Generic change management processes for product implementations. Status Accounting - Status reporting techniques using product facilities. Defect Management - Generic defect management processes for product implementations. Implementing Single Fixes - Discussion on the single fix architecture and how to use it in an implementation. Implementing Service Packs - Discussion on the service packs and how to use them in an implementation. Implementing Upgrades - Discussion on the the upgrade process and common techniques for minimizing the impact of upgrades. 773473.1 Oracle Utilities Application Framework Security Overview A whitepaper summarizing the security facilities in the framework. Now includes references to other Oracle security products supported. 774783.1 LDAP Integration for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products Updated! A generic whitepaper summarizing how to integrate an external LDAP based security repository with the framework. 789060.1 Oracle Utilities Application Framework Integration Overview A whitepaper summarizing all the various common integration techniques used with the product (with case studies). 799912.1 Single Sign On Integration for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products A whitepaper outlining a generic process for integrating an SSO product with the framework. 807068.1 Oracle Utilities Application Framework Architecture Guidelines This whitepaper outlines the different variations of architecture that can be considered. Each variation will include advice on configuration and other considerations. 836362.1 Batch Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products This whitepaper outlines the common and best practices implemented by sites all over the world. 856854.1 Technical Best Practices V1 Addendum Addendum to Technical Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Customer Care And Billing V1.x only. 942074.1 XAI Best Practices This whitepaper outlines the common integration tasks and best practices for the Web Services Integration provided by the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. 970785.1 Oracle Identity Manager Integration Overview This whitepaper outlines the principals of the prebuilt intergration between Oracle Utilities Application Framework Based Products and Oracle Identity Manager used to provision user and user group security information. For Fw4.x customers use whitepaper 1375600.1 instead. 1068958.1 Production Environment Configuration Guidelines A whitepaper outlining common production level settings for the products based upon benchmarks and customer feedback. 1177265.1 What's New In Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4? Whitepaper outlining the major changes to the framework since Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.2. 1290700.1 Database Vault Integration Whitepaper outlining the Database Vault Integration solution provided with Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.1.0 and above. 1299732.1 BI Publisher Guidelines for Oracle Utilities Application Framework Whitepaper outlining the interface between BI Publisher and the Oracle Utilities Application Framework 1308161.1 Oracle SOA Suite Integration with Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products This whitepaper outlines common design patterns and guidelines for using Oracle SOA Suite with Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products. 1308165.1 MPL Best Practices Oracle Utilities Application Framework This is a guidelines whitepaper for products shipping with the Multi-Purpose Listener. This whitepaper currently only applies to the following products: Oracle Utilities Customer Care And Billing Oracle Enterprise Taxation Management Oracle Enterprise Taxation and Policy Management 1308181.1 Oracle WebLogic JMS Integration with the Oracle Utilities Application Framework This whitepaper covers the native integration between Oracle WebLogic JMS with Oracle Utilities Application Framework using the new Message Driven Bean functionality and real time JMS adapters. 1334558.1 Oracle WebLogic Clustering for Oracle Utilities Application Framework New! This whitepaper covers process for implementing clustering using Oracle WebLogic for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products. 1359369.1 IBM WebSphere Clustering for Oracle Utilities Application Framework New! This whitepaper covers process for implementing clustering using IBM WebSphere for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products 1375600.1 Oracle Identity Management Suite Integration with the Oracle Utilities Application Framework New! This whitepaper covers the integration between Oracle Utilities Application Framework and Oracle Identity Management Suite components such as Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Adaptive Access Manager, Oracle Internet Directory and Oracle Virtual Directory. 1375615.1 Advanced Security for the Oracle Utilities Application Framework New! This whitepaper covers common security requirements and how to meet those requirements using Oracle Utilities Application Framework native security facilities, security provided with the J2EE Web Application and/or facilities available in Oracle Identity Management Suite.

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• The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin &ndash; #3 &ndash; Make Evolvability inevitable

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/04/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin-ndash-3-ndash-make-evolvability-inevitable.aspxThe easier something to measure the more likely it will be produced. Deviations between what is and what should be can be readily detected. That´s what automated acceptance tests are for. That´s what sprint reviews in Scrum are for. It´s no small wonder our software looks like it looks. It has all the traits whose conformance with requirements can easily be measured. And it´s lacking traits which cannot easily be measured. Evolvability (or Changeability) is such a trait. If an operation is correct, if an operation if fast enough, that can be checked very easily. But whether Evolvability is high or low, that cannot be checked by taking a measure or two. Evolvability might correlate with certain traits, e.g. number of lines of code (LOC) per function or Cyclomatic Complexity or test coverage. But there is no threshold value signalling “evolvability too low”; also Evolvability is hardly tangible for the customer. Nevertheless Evolvability is of great importance - at least in the long run. You can get away without much of it for a short time. Eventually, though, it´s needed like any other requirement. Or even more. Because without Evolvability no other requirement can be implemented. Evolvability is the foundation on which all else is build. Such fundamental importance is in stark contrast with its immeasurability. To compensate this, Evolvability must be put at the very center of software development. It must become the hub around everything else revolves. Since we cannot measure Evolvability, though, we cannot start watching it more. Instead we need to establish practices to keep it high (enough) at all times. Chefs have known that for long. That´s why everybody in a restaurant kitchen is constantly seeing after cleanliness. Hygiene is important as is to have clean tools at standardized locations. Only then the health of the patrons can be guaranteed and production efficiency is constantly high. Still a kitchen´s level of cleanliness is easier to measure than software Evolvability. That´s why important practices like reviews, pair programming, or TDD are not enough, I guess. What we need to keep Evolvability in focus and high is… to continually evolve. Change must not be something to avoid but too embrace. To me that means the whole change cycle from requirement analysis to delivery needs to be gone through more often. Scrum´s sprints of 4, 2 even 1 week are too long. Kanban´s flow of user stories across is too unreliable; it takes as long as it takes. Instead we should fix the cycle time at 2 days max. I call that Spinning. No increment must take longer than from this morning until tomorrow evening to finish. Then it should be acceptance checked by the customer (or his/her representative, e.g. a Product Owner). For me there are several resasons for such a fixed and short cycle time for each increment: Clear expectations Absolute estimates (“This will take X days to complete.”) are near impossible in software development as explained previously. Too much unplanned research and engineering work lurk in every feature. And then pervasive interruptions of work by peers and management. However, the smaller the scope the better our absolute estimates become. That´s because we understand better what really are the requirements and what the solution should look like. But maybe more importantly the shorter the timespan the more we can control how we use our time. So much can happen over the course of a week and longer timespans. But if push comes to shove I can block out all distractions and interruptions for a day or possibly two. That´s why I believe we can give rough absolute estimates on 3 levels: Noon Tonight Tomorrow Think of a meeting with a Product Owner at 8:30 in the morning. If she asks you, how long it will take you to implement a user story or bug fix, you can say, “It´ll be fixed by noon.”, or you can say, “I can manage to implement it until tonight before I leave.”, or you can say, “You´ll get it by tomorrow night at latest.” Yes, I believe all else would be naive. If you´re not confident to get something done by tomorrow night (some 34h from now) you just cannot reliably commit to any timeframe. That means you should not promise anything, you should not even start working on the issue. So when estimating use these four categories: Noon, Tonight, Tomorrow, NoClue - with NoClue meaning the requirement needs to be broken down further so each aspect can be assigned to one of the first three categories. If you like absolute estimates, here you go. But don´t do deep estimates. Don´t estimate dozens of issues; don´t think ahead (“Issue A is a Tonight, then B will be a Tomorrow, after that it´s C as a Noon, finally D is a Tonight - that´s what I´ll do this week.”). Just estimate so Work-in-Progress (WIP) is 1 for everybody - plus a small number of buffer issues. To be blunt: Yes, this makes promises impossible as to what a team will deliver in terms of scope at a certain date in the future. But it will give a Product Owner a clear picture of what to pull for acceptance feedback tonight and tomorrow. Trust through reliability Our trade is lacking trust. Customers don´t trust software companies/departments much. Managers don´t trust developers much. I find that perfectly understandable in the light of what we´re trying to accomplish: delivering software in the face of uncertainty by means of material good production. Customers as well as managers still expect software development to be close to production of houses or cars. But that´s a fundamental misunderstanding. Software development ist development. It´s basically research. As software developers we´re constantly executing experiments to find out what really provides value to users. We don´t know what they need, we just have mediated hypothesises. That´s why we cannot reliably deliver on preposterous demands. So trust is out of the window in no time. If we switch to delivering in short cycles, though, we can regain trust. Because estimates - explicit or implicit - up to 32 hours at most can be satisfied. I´d say: reliability over scope. It´s more important to reliably deliver what was promised then to cover a lot of requirement area. So when in doubt promise less - but deliver without delay. Deliver on scope (Functionality and Quality); but also deliver on Evolvability, i.e. on inner quality according to accepted principles. Always. Trust will be the reward. Less complexity of communication will follow. More goodwill buffer will follow. So don´t wait for some Kanban board to show you, that flow can be improved by scheduling smaller stories. You don´t need to learn that the hard way. Just start with small batch sizes of three different sizes. Fast feedback What has been finished can be checked for acceptance. Why wait for a sprint of several weeks to end? Why let the mental model of the issue and its solution dissipate? If you get final feedback after one or two weeks, you hardly remember what you did and why you did it. Resoning becomes hard. But more importantly youo probably are not in the mood anymore to go back to something you deemed done a long time ago. It´s boring, it´s frustrating to open up that mental box again. Learning is harder the longer it takes from event to feedback. Effort can be wasted between event (finishing an issue) and feedback, because other work might go in the wrong direction based on false premises. Checking finished issues for acceptance is the most important task of a Product Owner. It´s even more important than planning new issues. Because as long as work started is not released (accepted) it´s potential waste. So before starting new work better make sure work already done has value. By putting the emphasis on acceptance rather than planning true pull is established. As long as planning and starting work is more important, it´s a push process. Accept a Noon issue on the same day before leaving. Accept a Tonight issue before leaving today or first thing tomorrow morning. Accept a Tomorrow issue tomorrow night before leaving or early the day after tomorrow. After acceptance the developer(s) can start working on the next issue. Flexibility As if reliability/trust and fast feedback for less waste weren´t enough economic incentive, there is flexibility. After each issue the Product Owner can change course. If on Monday morning feature slices A, B, C, D, E were important and A, B, C were scheduled for acceptance by Monday evening and Tuesday evening, the Product Owner can change her mind at any time. Maybe after A got accepted she asks for continuation with D. But maybe, just maybe, she has gotten a completely different idea by then. Maybe she wants work to continue on F. And after B it´s neither D nor E, but G. And after G it´s D. With Spinning every 32 hours at latest priorities can be changed. And nothing is lost. Because what got accepted is of value. It provides an incremental value to the customer/user. Or it provides internal value to the Product Owner as increased knowledge/decreased uncertainty. I find such reactivity over commitment economically very benefical. Why commit a team to some workload for several weeks? It´s unnecessary at beast, and inflexible and wasteful at worst. If we cannot promise delivery of a certain scope on a certain date - which is what customers/management usually want -, we can at least provide them with unpredecented flexibility in the face of high uncertainty. Where the path is not clear, cannot be clear, make small steps so you´re able to change your course at any time. Premature completion Customers/management are used to premeditating budgets. They want to know exactly how much to pay for a certain amount of requirements. That´s understandable. But it does not match with the nature of software development. We should know that by now. Maybe there´s somewhere in the world some team who can consistently deliver on scope, quality, and time, and budget. Great! Congratulations! I, however, haven´t seen such a team yet. Which does not mean it´s impossible, but I think it´s nothing I can recommend to strive for. Rather I´d say: Don´t try this at home. It might hurt you one way or the other. However, what we can do, is allow customers/management stop work on features at any moment. With spinning every 32 hours a feature can be declared as finished - even though it might not be completed according to initial definition. I think, progress over completion is an important offer software development can make. Why think in terms of completion beyond a promise for the next 32 hours? Isn´t it more important to constantly move forward? Step by step. We´re not running sprints, we´re not running marathons, not even ultra-marathons. We´re in the sport of running forever. That makes it futile to stare at the finishing line. The very concept of a burn-down chart is misleading (in most cases). Whoever can only think in terms of completed requirements shuts out the chance for saving money. The requirements for a features mostly are uncertain. So how does a Product Owner know in the first place, how much is needed. Maybe more than specified is needed - which gets uncovered step by step with each finished increment. Maybe less than specified is needed. After each 4–32 hour increment the Product Owner can do an experient (or invite users to an experiment) if a particular trait of the software system is already good enough. And if so, she can switch the attention to a different aspect. In the end, requirements A, B, C then could be finished just 70%, 80%, and 50%. What the heck? It´s good enough - for now. 33% money saved. Wouldn´t that be splendid? Isn´t that a stunning argument for any budget-sensitive customer? You can save money and still get what you need? Pull on practices So far, in addition to more trust, more flexibility, less money spent, Spinning led to “doing less” which also means less code which of course means higher Evolvability per se. Last but not least, though, I think Spinning´s short acceptance cycles have one more effect. They excert pull-power on all sorts of practices known for increasing Evolvability. If, for example, you believe high automated test coverage helps Evolvability by lowering the fear of inadverted damage to a code base, why isn´t 90% of the developer community practicing automated tests consistently? I think, the answer is simple: Because they can do without. Somehow they manage to do enough manual checks before their rare releases/acceptance checks to ensure good enough correctness - at least in the short term. The same goes for other practices like component orientation, continuous build/integration, code reviews etc. None of that is compelling, urgent, imperative. Something else always seems more important. So Evolvability principles and practices fall through the cracks most of the time - until a project hits a wall. Then everybody becomes desperate; but by then (re)gaining Evolvability has become as very, very difficult and tedious undertaking. Sometimes up to the point where the existence of a project/company is in danger. With Spinning that´s different. If you´re practicing Spinning you cannot avoid all those practices. With Spinning you very quickly realize you cannot deliver reliably even on your 32 hour promises. Spinning thus is pulling on developers to adopt principles and practices for Evolvability. They will start actively looking for ways to keep their delivery rate high. And if not, management will soon tell them to do that. Because first the Product Owner then management will notice an increasing difficulty to deliver value within 32 hours. There, finally there emerges a way to measure Evolvability: The more frequent developers tell the Product Owner there is no way to deliver anything worth of feedback until tomorrow night, the poorer Evolvability is. Don´t count the “WTF!”, count the “No way!” utterances. In closing For sustainable software development we need to put Evolvability first. Functionality and Quality must not rule software development but be implemented within a framework ensuring (enough) Evolvability. Since Evolvability cannot be measured easily, I think we need to put software development “under pressure”. Software needs to be changed more often, in smaller increments. Each increment being relevant to the customer/user in some way. That does not mean each increment is worthy of shipment. It´s sufficient to gain further insight from it. Increments primarily serve the reduction of uncertainty, not sales. Sales even needs to be decoupled from this incremental progress. No more promises to sales. No more delivery au point. Rather sales should look at a stream of accepted increments (or incremental releases) and scoup from that whatever they find valuable. Sales and marketing need to realize they should work on what´s there, not what might be possible in the future. But I digress… In my view a Spinning cycle - which is not easy to reach, which requires practice - is the core practice to compensate the immeasurability of Evolvability. From start to finish of each issue in 32 hours max - that´s the challenge we need to accept if we´re serious increasing Evolvability. Fortunately higher Evolvability is not the only outcome of Spinning. Customer/management will like the increased flexibility and “getting more bang for the buck”.

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• Measuring Usability with Common Industry Format (CIF) Usability Tests

  - by Applications User Experience

  Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience A User-centered Research and Design Process The Oracle Fusion Applications user experience was five years in the making. The development of this suite included an extensive and comprehensive user experience design process: ethnographic research, low-fidelity workflow prototyping, high fidelity user interface (UI) prototyping, iterative formative usability testing, development feedback and iteration, and sales and customer evaluation throughout the design cycle. However, this process does not stop when our products are released. We conduct summative usability testing using the ISO 25062 Common Industry Format (CIF) for usability test reports as an organizational framework. CIF tests allow us to measure the overall usability of our released products.  These studies provide benchmarks that allow for comparisons of a specific product release against previous versions of our product and against other products in the marketplace. What Is a CIF Usability Test? CIF refers to the internationally standardized method for reporting usability test findings used by the software industry. The CIF is based on a formal, lab-based test that is used to benchmark the usability of a product in terms of human performance and subjective data. The CIF was developed and is endorsed by more than 375 software customer and vendor organizations led by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), a US government entity. NIST sponsored the CIF through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards-making processes. Oracle played a key role in developing the CIF. The CIF report format and metrics are consistent with the ISO 9241-11 definition of usability: “The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” Our goal in conducting CIF tests is to measure performance and satisfaction of a representative sample of users on a set of core tasks and to help predict how usable a product will be with the larger population of customers. Why Do We Perform CIF Testing? The overarching purpose of the CIF for usability test reports is to promote incorporation of usability as part of the procurement decision-making process for interactive products. CIF provides a common format for vendors to report the methods and results of usability tests to customer organizations, and enables customers to compare the usability of our software to that of other suppliers. CIF also enables us to compare our current software with previous versions of our software. CIF Testing for Fusion Applications Oracle Fusion Applications comprises more than 100 modules in seven different product families. These modules encompass more than 400 task flows and 400 user roles. Due to resource constraints, we cannot perform comprehensive CIF testing across the entire product suite. Therefore, we had to develop meaningful inclusion criteria and work with other stakeholders across the applications development organization to prioritize product areas for testing. Ultimately, we want to test the product areas for which customers might be most interested in seeing CIF data. We also want to build credibility with customers; we need to be able to make the case to current and prospective customers that the product areas tested are representative of the product suite as a whole. Our goal is to test the top use cases for each product. The primary activity in the scoping process was to work with the individual product teams to identify the key products and business process task flows in each product to test. We prioritized these products and flows through a series of negotiations among the user experience managers, product strategy, and product management directors for each of the primary product families within the Oracle Fusion Applications suite (Human Capital Management, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Financials, Projects, and Procurement). The end result of the scoping exercise was a list of 47 proposed CIF tests for the Fusion Applications product suite.  Figure 1. A participant completes tasks during a usability test in Oracle’s Usability Labs Fusion Supplier Portal CIF Test The first Fusion CIF test was completed on the Supplier Portal application in July of 2011.  Fusion Supplier Portal is part of an integrated suite of Procurement applications that helps supplier companies manage orders, schedules, shipments, invoices, negotiations and payments. The user roles targeted for the usability study were Supplier Account Receivables Specialists and Supplier Sales Representatives, including both experienced and inexperienced users across a wide demographic range.  The test specifically focused on the following functionality and features: Manage payments – view payments Manage invoices – view invoice status and create invoices Manage account information – create new contact, review bank account information Manage agreements – find and view agreement, upload agreement lines, confirm status of agreement lines upload Manage purchase orders (PO) – view history of PO, request change to PO, find orders Manage negotiations – respond to request for a quote, check the status of a negotiation response These product areas were selected to represent the most important subset of features and functionality of the flow, in terms of frequency and criticality of use by customers. A total of 20 users participated in the usability study. The results of the Supplier Portal evaluation were favorable and exceeded our expectations. Figure 2. Fusion Supplier Portal Next Studies We plan to conduct two Fusion CIF usability studies per product family over the next nine months. The next product to be tested will be Self-service Procurement. End users are currently being recruited to participate in this usability study, and the test sessions are scheduled to begin during the last week of November.

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• Introducing the Oracle MDM Blog - Why All MDM Solutions Aren't Equal

  - by ken.pulverman

  Welcome to the Oracle MDM Blog.  Dave Butler, Tony Ouk, and myself - Ken Pulverman, will be bringing you news and information from the world of MDM at Oracle.  Dave is our resident expert with more than 30 years of experience in data and information management. Tony has deep expertise in our Exadata product line which provides a strong hardware synergy with MDM.  I come from Siebel Systems where I helped found the team that built our integration product line and then our Universal Customer Master with is part of our MDM offering at Oracle. I thought I'd hit the ground running with a topic we are going to want to continue to bend your ear about.  We had a recent meeting with Ford Goodman, our head of MDM commercial sales in the US and he was very fired up about and important topic.  He's irked that all MDM solutions get painted with the same brush even though they aren't the same at all. There are companies out there trying to represent frameworks and toolkits as out of the box solutions.  They give you the pleasure (read pain) of doing things like developing your own multi-application data model, building your own web services, or creating your own APIs.  Huh?  What gets sold as flexibility in reality is a barrier to ever going live.  At Siebel Systems we obsessed over the notion of a customer.  Our data model took over 10 years to perfect as defining a customer is a very complex task indeed.  There are divisions, subsidiaries, branches, acquisitions, sites etc., etc., etc..  You'll want to do your homework, but trust me - you aren't going to want to take the time or resource to build these canonical data structures yourself.  And what about APIs?  Again, it sounds flexible.  In reality it's a lot of work. Our DNA at Oracle is to reduce the cost of information technology so we pre-integrate our technology with all of our major applications and pre-build integrations and connectors for all the major systems you work with.  This is tedious work that requires detailed knowledge of the interfaces of all the applications involved.  It is also version specific as the interface features and technology are always changing.  We have a substantial organization to manage this complexity so you don't have to.  Suffice to say, we'd like to help our customers peel back the rhetoric of companies that fly the MDM flag without a real offering that you can quickly benefit from. Please watch this space for more information on this storyline as well as news and information around Oracle MDM.

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• Skechers Leverages Oracle Applications, Business Intelligence and On Demand Offerings to Drive Long-Term Growth

  - by user801960

  This month Oracle Retail in the USA announced that Skechers - a world leading lifestyle footwear retailer - would be adopting several Oracle Retail products as part of their global growth strategy and to maximise business efficiency.  While based primarily in the USA, Skechers is a respected retailer across the world and has been an Oracle customer since 1997.  The key information about the announcement is below.  To find out more about Skechers visit their website: http://www.skechers.com/  Skechers U.S.A. Inc., an award-winning global leader in the lifestyle footwear industry, has upgraded and expanded its Oracle® Applications investment, implemented Oracle Database and moved to Oracle On Demand, Oracle’s premier cloud service to support rapid growth across its retail and wholesale channels. The new business information systems are part of a larger initiative for the billion-dollar-plus footwear company to fuel growth, reduce total cost of ownership and enable the business to respond faster to market opportunities. With more than 3,000 styles of shoes to design, develop and market, Skechers upgraded to Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management and PeopleSoft Supply Chain Management to increase operational efficiencies and improve controls by establishing an integrated, industry-specific platform. An Oracle customer since 1997, Skechers implemented PeopleSoft Enterprise Real Estate Management to meet the rapid growth of its retail stores worldwide. The company is the first customer to go live on the Real Estate Management module and worked closely with Oracle to provide development insight. Skechers also implemented Oracle Fusion Governance, Risk, and Compliance applications. This deployment enabled the company to leverage its existing corporate governance and compliance efforts throughout the global enterprise and more effectively manage the audit processes across multiple business units, processes and systems while reducing audit costs. Next, Skechers leveraged Oracle Financial Analytics, a pre-built Oracle Business Intelligence Application and PeopleSoft Enterprise Project Costing and PeopleSoft Enterprise Contracts to develop a custom Royalty Management dashboard, providing managers with better financial visibility to the company’s licensing contracts. The company switched to Oracle Database and moved database hosting and management to Oracle On Demand to reduce maintenance, implementation and system administration costs. As a result, Skechers is also achieving a better response time and is delivering a higher level of 24x7 support. OSI Consulting, a Platinum partner in Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), provided implementation and integration services to Skechers.   To view the full announcement please click here

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• choosing Database and Its Design for Rails

  - by Gaurav Shah

  I am having a difficulty in deciding the database & its structure. Let us say the problem is like this. For my product I have various customers( each is an educational institute) Each customer have their own sub-clients ( Institution have students) Each student record will have some basic information like "name" & "Number" . There are also additional information that a customer(institution) might want to ask sub-client(student) like "email" or "semester" I have come up with two solutions : 1. Mysql _insititution__ id-|- Description| __Student__ id-|-instituition_id-|-Name-|-Number| __student_additional_details__ student_id -|- field_name -|- Value Student_additional_details will have multiple records for each student depending upon number of questions asked from institution. 2.MongoDb _insititution___ id-|- Description| _Student__ id-|-instituition_id-|-Name-|-Number|-otherfield1 -|- otherfield2 with mongo the structure itself can be dynamic so student table seems really good in mongo . But the problem comes when I have to relate student with institution . So which one is a better design ? Or some other idea ?

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