Archive for January, 2008

Gathering Signup

Don’t forget – if you ARE coming to the First Virtual Gen Gathering on Tuesday, it’s important that you join “The Gen Gathering” Group, otherwise you won’t receive the Gentalk T-Shirt! (and I won’t know you’re coming!)….

PS – new pictures of the location at the Gathering Page.

Gen ecosystem’s ecosystem

Having taken an initial look at IET’s VerifIEr product (bearing in mind all I have seen is the brochure that’s on the website), it strikes me as a very useful product.

It would be really useful if the product could also generate a subset of items which fail a check (or group of checks), and either check it out, store it such that it could be checked out later for modification of the code to modify the code such that those checks were passed next time – since it appears that for a “job” of checks can be restarted, so that a group of checks isn’t run again – the checks could be run on the modified code.

I know it’s a small thing, but the product is about aiding productivity, so any small thing that aids productivity surely must be an advantage.

It may well be that the product already allows this sort of feature.

EDIT: yes it does have this functionality! – check out the post from IET here – and also there is a live WebDemo here which you can sign up for.

Additionally, I would hope that around the product, there will develop an ecosystem that people can construct new, additional checks which people will either place in the public domain for others, or give/sell back to IET to integrate into the product, or sell – again, we’ll wait and see !

The Gathering is open !

The Gen Gathering is now open!

“The Gen Gathering” group is now available for those who want to attend next week’s First Virtual Gathering on Tuesday 22nd January 2008 at 9pm UK Time (GMT).

To sign up, go to the Gathering site, and follow the instructions there.

The first Gathering notice has gone out – a reminder where and when:

To get the message in Second Life, don’t forget to join (for free!) “The Gen Gathering” Group.

Once you join, you’ll get your free Gentalk T-shirt, which you should wear to the Gathering next Monday!

There are more freebies to those who attend !

IET announces VerifIEr

IET is delighted to announce a new product called VerifIEr which will be available in March 2008.

VerifIEr is a quality assurance tool for checking that Gen models are compliant with standards. It includes many pre-configured checks which scan and validate your Action Diagrams and other Gen objects, as well as providing the ability to extend its set of checks to include your own logic.

Most Gen sites have development standards covering aspects such as naming conventions, use of return codes, factors that affect performance, etc. Projects that out-source development activity will especially want to check the models for compliance to standards.

Checking that the model meets these standards can be a time consuming task, and this is usually allocated to an experienced Gen developer to perform manually via code inspection.

VerifIEr can automate most compliance and QA checking tasks, thus freeing up experienced Gen developers for more value added activities. Verification checks can be performed on an entire model, selected objects or the contents of a GuardIEn Change Request, Release Pack or System Update.

Automated checking means that a far greater range of checks can be performed when compared with the effort involved in manual checking.

Checks can be invoked on demand, scheduled in batch, performed automatically on upload or as part of a GuardIEn System Update. The integration with GuardIEn ensures that checks are automatically performed as part of the normal development life-cycle, thus ensuring that the Gen models are compliant with standards.

Examples of checks that VerifIEr can perform include:

• Naming Standards, e.g. action blocks, member names, trancodes, view names and other object names

• Coding Standards, e.g. use of exit states, checking return codes, perfect view matching, standard NOTEs, avoiding use of certain functions, etc.

• CBD tiering, e.g. correct use of public operations, component consumption and data access layers

• SQL Efficiency, e.g. use of functions and choice of predicates in READ qualifiers

• Audit Checks, e.g. SOX compliance checks

Visit www.iet.co.uk/verifier for more details and register now for a live web demo at www.iet.co.uk/WebDemo

Apologies for the downtime – Gentalk.biz is back online.

10-JAN-2008: 16:33 GMT

I have restored the functionality of the site i.e. forums and comments, chat etc. etc. However, some of the incoming newsfeeds are still unavailable, only because I want to have few hours of stable operation with the majority of the site before adding those functions back in again.

The issue was a PHP 5 and mySQL5 upgrade by the hosting company. PHP 5 is more memory hungry that PHP4, which consequently led to the amount of usable memory for the gentalk.biz site being less, resulting in the errors that were being displayed.

I have had the hosting company raise the memory limit to take account of this. Hopefully, there should be no more problems.

Once again, many thanks to all of you readers for having patience during the downtime. Hopefully, things should stabilise now.

PS – don’t forget to check out http://gathering.gentalk.biz !!!!!

10-JAN-2008: 14:16 GMT

I have taken parts of the gentalk.biz offline today (10th January 2008) in an attempt to resolve the PHP errors that are occurring. Please bear with me while I attempt to get the site up and running again. If you need any contact, or want to report any problems, please use the contact form (if available) or send an email to info@gentalk.biz Meanwhile, thanks again for your patience.