Sonam ChauhanCorporate Express

B2B Change Management at Corporate Express

Overview

•Introduction•Change Process•Testing•Monitoring and Administration•Change Deployment•CECM Deployment Verification Tool•webMethods Deployer?•Some Feature Requests

Introduction

•Constant pressure for change

•Change management process crucial

•webMethods weaknesses–Development skills required for changes–Primitive source control–Lack of testing support–No verification of change deployments

Change Process

Requirements Definition

Requirements Specification

Development

Review and Testing

Change Deployment (Test UAT Live)

Changes

ValidatedChanges

Testing

•Like development, testing is an engineering skill

–Allocate limited resources for max. benefit.

•Best return for your testing buck Black-box Integration testing for Regressions

–High level tests simulate live use–Tests can be external to code

•Easy to retrofit to existing codebase

–Regression are the costliest bugs•All changes must “first do no harm”

More Testing Points

•Developers can be testers!–Commitment to quality

•Make test development part of development process•Make reviews of the test code part of code review process

–Automate testing•Automated Regression Testing Harness

–Without automation, testing is tedious work•Automation increases productivity and efficiency

–Permanently add hard-won insight to corporate memory•And replay it on demand

–Essential for managing change in complex systems–Active testing catches problems early

•Load testing often very important–Some bugs can only be "teased out" under load.

Testing with JMeter

Load testing part of same

test script

Use TN database to

help test document transforms

•Multiple such test scripts are run by an automated regression test harness

Monitoring and Administration

•Separate developers from day to day server administration

–Better staff productivity, better server stability

•Create monitor services specific to your needs–For eg: Can clients can access B2B resources?

Is B2B thread count approaching dangerous levels?

•Integrate monitor services with external monitoring tools (eg: Nagios, OpenView)

–Quantify system availability–Unified system monitoring interface makes it

easy to administer systems

Change DeploymentProcess

•A defined process is important–Implementation Plan–Reviews and approval signoffs…–Post Implementation Actions

–Test Plan–Rollback Pan

•Currently, some deployments require webMethods development skills

CECM Deployment Verification Tool

•CECM = CE Configuration Management•A B2B package used to collate and

compare package configuration information from an arbitrary number of webMethods B2B servers.

–Calculates md5 checksum of package files–Shows package level differences –Ability to drill down to file level differences

•Essentially, a “Server-Diff” tool

Choose servers to “Diff”

Package level issues

Drill down to file differences

Hatched pattern means package

missing

Hatched pattern means

file missing

Similar colours mean file has same

checksum

Different colours mean file has

different checksums

CECM - Usage

•Used in detecting and correcting incorrectly setup B2B environments

–For e.g.: a change that failed to deploy on one node in a cluster

•Used to assure correct deployment of B2B packages in a Develop/Test/Release cycle.

CECM - Details•Option to exclude package manifests file

–Manifest.v3 file contains package creation timestamp

•No session data persistence – need to use Mozilla for file-level drill-down–Arbitrary limitation in IE 5.5: GET URLs clipped to 4096 bytes

•Which files are included for package comparison?–Simple: All files documented as needing source control:

•/manifest.v3 •/pub/ •/widls/ •/templates/ •/code/jars/ •/code/libs/ •/code/source/ •/ns/

–Excludes /data/, /config/, and other directories

wM Deployer?

•Deployer - a good idea•Still maturing…

–Seems to lack rollback functionality(?)–Some bugs:

•Package version number promotion bug•Problem with ACL assignments

–Questions about TN promotion ability•Can it link profiles and document types to

processing rule changes? (i.e. Can it remove need for TN Console in change deployment?).

Some Feature Requests

•Deployer is a good idea - improve and extend it’s functionality

–Eg: Give it CECM’s ability to “diff servers”–Give it functionality to version a server state and

rollback the entire server to a known state

•Create functionality or build hooks for:–Source code management systems–Automated documentation generation

(including TN rules)–Automated Testing