News and Views of a Technical Nomad

Feb

29

I have been meaning to mention this for a while, but Digital Arts have a pretty good review/overview of Visual Studio 2008 which can be found here.

Feb

22

One aspect of Siebel development that was brought home to me in particularly brutal fashion recently is that there is a huge difference between testing something in the system test phase and testing something in the user acceptance test phase! This applies in all areas of Siebel, but especially perhaps in Integration.

Without being too specific about things, the problem we encountered was that files for export to an external system were being generated with the same sequence name but a different timestamp.

This issue was absolutely crucial to the client’s business and there was no way they could go live with it.

We could not understand why this was happening as the workflows were supposed to query only unallocated sequence numbers. We eventually twigged that the problem was not with the way the numbers were assigned but with the fact that the workflow which was supposed to run every 5 minutes was taking longer due to data volumes and that instances of the same workflow were overlapping and retrieving the same unallocated sequence numbers. We solved this by setting a flag in Server Configuration instructing the Repeating Workflow to wait until the previous instance had completed.

The point I am trying to make is that this is a problem that only occurred when testing with very high data volumes and which had nothing to do with the structure of the workflow itself, but rather the environment that the workflow instance ran in.

We ended up modifying the workflow considerably in terms of how and when sequence numbers were queried, allocated and updated including code to assign numbers in a pseudo random fashion, before we stumbled on the real culprit.

This example illustrates why one should not expect user acceptance testing to be a “cakewalk”! It is often the first time that “real” business conditions have been applied to the system.

Feb

18

It’s Arrived

February 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment

The Touch Cruise finally arrived on my doorstep today courtesy of UPS a day ahead of schedule.

Unfortunately, I am not going to see it any time soon as I have just started a new project in Belgium!

That said, I have finally seen working versions of the phone in the shops here in Brussels and it does look really good.

Feb

17

I am writing these posts at Bromma Airport in Stockholm as I have now finished my project here in Sweden and am off to pastures new in Belgium.

If you ever travel through Bromma Airport, do not hurry to go through security. There is absolutely nothing to do on the other side apart from pay good money to surf the internet and write articles to your blog site!

No coffee shop, cafe, comfy seats etc. You get the picture. There is a machine selling Mars Bars and that is about it!

Be warned!

For those of you who thought that Bromma only had domestic Swedish flights, think again. You can fly to Brussels from here.

It’s a good thing I checked, I almost went to Arlanda by mistake.ÂÂ

Feb

17

It’s shipped!

February 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Finally, after many postponements and calls to Expansys to find out what is going on, I finally discovered on Thursday last that my HTC Touch Cruise had shipped!

My god, talk about overdue! I ordered it in mid November and have had to suffer the mental stress of continuous postponements and delays.

Apparently, the Touch Cruise has been a huge success and sales have far exceeded expectations. It’s one of the few products I have seen recently where prices have gone up not down from the pre-release price.

I did consider other options, notably the Imate 8150, but in the end I decided to wait; I hope that wait will have been worth it, but we will see.

Still, I won’t see it very soon as it is being shipped to my home in Canada and I am currently working in Europe.

Curses, Foiled again!

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