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My favourite sites

September 22nd, 2009 by Jo Deeker

My three favourite sites at the moment are:

As we enable public intelligence and data provision, and we’re an Australian based company, I have to keep on top of this every day. I love how fast ideas are moving.
http://gov2.net.au

For all goodness in quality and testing management. If I ever have a question or problem to solve and I’m stuck, I go here. Good for inspiration and great ideas.
https://www.stickyminds.com

Just launched by the US Government and we’re going to be on it soon with a cloud provision of SuperWEB. Any US Government Agency will be able to buy us through this process. Super-excited about this one.
http://apps.gov

Tags: Gov2.0, Quality
Posted in General | No Comments »

Bug Safaris - a different way to find bugs

September 17th, 2009 by Jo Deeker

Here is a post from Adrian Mirabelli - a Customer Quality engineer at Space-Time Research. The idea for a bug safari came out of a presentation at the ANZ Test Board Conference in March 2009.

Bug safaris at Space-Time Research

For release 6.5, the STR quality team introduced “bug safaris” as a way to effectively and quickly find software bugs.

A bug safari involves the majority of the organisation including development, design, and management to locate bugs. Test cases or scripts are not necessarily provided but guidance should be given. Certain areas are targeted and the amount of interruptions is minimised to increase the effectiveness. Note the bug safari can be held multiple times over a release.

Planning is the key!

At the beginning of a bug safari, the quality manager invites the participants to a planning session or “kickoff”. The purpose of the kickoff is to define:

The objectives of the session – including to communicate what is being done; all participants should be very clear about this by the conclusion of the session
Areas to test and who will do it – this is important to ensure coverage and no wasteful duplication
Configuration required and who will do it
Test cases or documentation required and who will do it – the structure of these products should be agreed, for example, is it a checklist or a matrix that is filled out on-the-fly?
Some ideas of how to test – do something unusual or non-typical, test boundary values, do something unusual
Duration of session
Method for reporting issues and bugs

Typically the system configuration and documentation will be done by the testing team with the help of technical resources if required. Login information is distributed in advance. The quality manager needs to decide how to report results including submission of bug reports, and therefore plays a crucial role in this testing.

At the agreed date or time, the testing itself is performed, typically no longer than two hours but longer than 45 minutes. This session is generally intense in nature as the mission is to find problems. The system testers are usually assigned to a product and work with the participants to help identify issues and troubleshoot problems. They can also be actively testing the system depending on what is agreed at the kickoff session.

At the conclusion of the session, results are tabulated and any bugs found are raised in the incident tracking system.

Within the next couple of days at the absolute latest, a debriefing is held with the participants including the system testers. The quality manager reports on bugs found, and discussion is held regarding:

The perceived level of success of the bug safari
What can be improved for next time
What worked well this time
General feelings and sentiments
Required actions and action owners.

Why not just use structured tests?

Procedural test cases, which follow a step-by-step test script, are excellent for communicating to the wider audience how you are testing and to obtain buy-in and feedback from stakeholders. In my experience, however, you can find bugs by looking around the software, not just looking at the expected results of the test case. Further, bugs are found when testing certain sequences of data, mouse clicks, configuration, operating systems and more, and it is expensive to write test cases for all these combinations.

Why involve people outside the testing team?

You and I are testing software every day. Just by using software you are testing whether it satisfies your need and your purpose. Everyone interacts with software differently, and is likely to try things out in various and different ways, some typical and some strange, so it is good to have such testing sessions to really verify the software is “fit-for-purpose”. It also gives the opportunity for fresh eyes to look and question the software, and test out other important elements such as usability and compatibility. It also increases the participants’ knowledge of the software, whilst testing the accuracy of the configuration and documentation, including the quality of test harnesses and pre-defined scripts.

What are the benefits?

Bug safaris are defined as “exploratory testing” with more tangible results. The results can easily be reported on charts or whiteboards and transferred to the test management and tracking system.

We allow the participants to exercise freedom of thought in executing tests. In this way we can find new bugs as possible new combinations of tests are being exercised. Quality therefore improves as we can address and fix such bugs based on their priority. The participant is encouraged to investigate and should investigate any strange behaviour they find, perform further tests, and ask questions.

By everyone being involved in testing, and not just the test team, it improves the visibility of the test organisation and the importance of testing, whilst sharing the ownership of “quality” to all people involved in the development of the software from concept to implementation.

By performing such tests, we can report and therefore utilise many metrics to find out, for example:

Number of bugs or issues found per session
Number of sessions run
Areas covered in the session with combinations
Time required to configure
Time required to test
Time required to investigate issues

The key is that people work together and discuss openly the software and what it does.

What are the challenges?

This method of testing is still relatively new, and is therefore not a perfect method, nor a substitute for traditional testing methods. The key is to balance out the proportion of how much testing is structured versus unstructured, whilst ensuring that the testing results are captured sufficiently. Such examples of test tracking may require the participant to complete a spreadsheet, matrix or running sheet.

What is being done in future?

Space-Time Research will run bug safaris in future releases. Bug safaris have been shown to find bugs, and important bugs, and are continuing to win flavour in the testing industry as its true benefits are being realised. Introducing bug safaris have the advantage of not requiring major cultural or system changes, or expensive start-up costs.

Tags: bug safari, Quality
Posted in Quality | No Comments »

Our Quality Vision (and Addressing Our Quality Past)

August 24th, 2009 by Jo Deeker

Like all software companies, we at Space-Time Research have juggled customer demands, complex software, very different uses of our software, and ever changing requirements. This has sometimes resulted in us delivering release software to our customers that is not of a sufficient quality, and later than we planned.

In the past, and as recently as our 6.3 release of our software, our testing group has passed a release and the software has been delivered to a customer and then a critical issue has been found. One of the main reasons this happens is that every customer has a slightly different environment. We currently support Solaris, Red Hat Linux, Windows 64 bit, Windows 32 bit, Windows XP and Vista for our client applications, browsers including IE6, IE7, IE8, Chrome, Firefox, Safari. We read data from any relational database that has a jdbc driver including Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and others, plus different types of text files. We provide mapping with ESRI ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server, Google Maps and soon Bing Maps. We test all these environments and on our servers, our testing can pass.

Then we get out to the customer environment and encounter different environments & constraints. Not everyone can host a Tomcat application and we might have to hook to IIS. Firewalls might be an issue. Ports might be an issue. The client might operate in a remote way. Even if we don’t officially support a configuration, our clients will implement that way anyway and it’s up to us to sort it out.

Once we have the software successfully installed and configured at a client site, they then build some databases and work out how they are going to analyse or visualise their information. Every client has different types of databases, structures and uses of their information. Our testing doesn’t cover every different type of database - we try to, but of course we don’t cover everything. So sometimes we miss things - heirarchical summation options being a recent example.

Finally, our customers use the software with their own workflow. We follow a standard workflow with our automated tests, and then we conduct exploratory testing that mimics what a customer would do, but as we are not the customer, we don’t always get that exactly right either.

So, how do we improve it? What have we done and what are we doing next?

Firstly, for our 6.5 General Availability Release, Space-Time Research defined the following quality vision:

Timely, relevant, functioning software that works!
Performance, stability and resiliency focus.
Deliver releases of SuperSTAR that are perceived within STR and by our partners and customers as better than the previous release.

All decisions about testing, and then which bugs we fix, and when we release our software, are related back to the quality vision.

We implemented a partnership approach with some selected customers to enable them to test pre-release versions of our software. We conducted fortnightly builds, ran a couple of days of testing and then made the builds available to the customer. Builds were provided via FTP site, and customers were able to download the software and install in their own test environments. The customers were able to choose whether they would take a build or not. STR also hosted versions of our web applications so customers could do user interface testing without having to run their own installation and configuration.

The customers reported bugs, severity and their own priority via our normal support channel (via email to support@spacetimeresearch.com). We regularly triaged the bugs reported, and communicated via conference call with each customer to advise what we intended to do, or discuss concerns.

The benefits of this approach were clear for each customer involved:

Integration and configuration issues were ironed out during the pre-release phase.
Customer-focused testing found issues we would never have found.
The end delivery held no surprises.
We delivered on time to those customers and met their deadlines.

6.5 General Availability release is almost complete on all platforms. I’ll do another blog and announcement about that separately.

For our next release, we are implementing a fully agile development process. Another blog on that is coming too! But for our customers, please know that we want to:

Involve more customers in pre-release testing.
Collect more sample databases from customers.
Collect reference data sets from customers so we can validate our statistical routines.
Use client test beds for complex or unusual environments.
Open up our change management and support processes so customers can track issues they are interested in.

Cheerio

Tags: Quality, release, SuperSTAR
Posted in Quality, SuperSTAR | No Comments »

Open Data Initiative - Free SuperVIEW hosting of data

August 17th, 2009 by Jo Deeker

Open Data Initiative

Space-Time Research this week launced a new program called the Open Data Initiative at the International Statistical Institute (ISI) 2009 conference in Durban.

What is the Open Data Initiative?

The Open Data Initiative is a Web 2.0 site for disseminating public data. Users discover and explore data in a rich, interactive, and intuitive application, rather than browse or read large documents of published tables and charts. The end user can select and visualize any combination of data. It can be exported, printed, linked to, and shared in collaboration environments.

The Open Data Initiative is a freely available online service for the creation and dissemination of data for public consumption. You have the data; we have the service to disseminate it to the public.

The Open Data Initiative is hosted on the Google AppEngine Cloud, enabling providers of public data to create engagingand rich Web 2.0 experiences built on top of Space?Time Research’s SuperVIEW product suite. This provides transparent, lightning?fast web traffic responsiveness, scalability and built in redundancy no matter where in the world you are.

Data types suitable for the Open Data Initiative: Health, Transport, Education, Agriculture, Population Statistics, Labour Force, etc.

How do I sign up?

Key Benefits. The Open Data Initiative:

Is Cost and Time Efficient — Reduces the workload on your data analysts and researchers.
Provides Data that is Complete — Why compromise on providing a subset of the data? Maximize the ability of the public to self?service data of personal interest.
Provides Data as Service — Now you can provide a new online data service to the public.
Protects the Relevance of Your Brand — Provide an engaging and rewarding experience for the public. This reinforces the relationship of trust they have in your organization.
Delivers Data Integrity — Have confidence that the public are seeing the right numbers, graphs, and maps, andreaching the correct interpretation and understanding behind those numbers.
Delivers Data Responsiveness — Minimize the time between data collection and data dissemination to ensure maximum relevancy of the data to the audience.
Creates Communities of Users — Ensure the online experience can be captured and shared by the public incollaborative environments from Blogs to Twitter.

Frequently asked questions coming from some of our early adopters:

Q. What is the business model for Space-Time Research?
A. This is a free service and as such it has business model restrictions for customers - they cannot charge a fee for access to their created sites. It must be public and not sit behind authentication or payment gateways. We have a paid service available that overcomes these restrictions but this is a good way to test drive the technology and the dissemination approach using the free service initially. Alternatively customers can purchase a paid SuperVIEW software license and implement their own business model around a deployed SuperVIEW.

Q. What about confidentiality?
No confidentiality capabilities are offered with the free SuperVIEW. The Open Data Initiative will host all data in the Cloud so by it’s nature data provided should not contain confidential information. We can provide a confidential Cloud based service using our Hybrid connector, but this becomes a paid solution engagement.

Q. How do statistical boundaries get loaded?
We will detail this in the data collection process over the next week with people that sign up to our early adopter program, but think it will be along the lines of providing a shapefile (with some size limits — i.e. pre-simplified and for particular areas) or KML to us.

Q. How does the application get integrated with the data providers website.
Option 1 -> provide a link that takes the user from the data provider website to the Open Data Initiative website.
Option 2 -> use an IFRAME to embed the Open Data Initiative hosted site into their website.

Jo Deeker

Tags: Cloud computing, Google app engine, Gov2.0, Open data initiative, SuperVIEW
Posted in Cloud computing, Gov2.0 | No Comments »

SuperSTAR and Cloud - nutting through the details of Google Apps Engine

August 7th, 2009 by Jo Deeker

I have spent the past week further working through the details of cloud offerings and how it can be used by existing and new SuperSTAR customers. It’s still a hot topic, and I’m still sure it’s a really good thing and something that we should be offering our customers if they want it.

So far, Space Time Research has put our SuperVIEW software into the Google App Engine cloud and demonstrated that it works just fine. We’re confident that we’re addressing many of the security concerns associated with clouds because we’ve chosen to go with a hybrid model, where the core database and SuperSERVER software still resides in the client’s own server environment. It’s just the application itself that is in the cloud. The data that is passed to the application is aggregated and encrypted already and something that would be passed to the web browser and then to the user regardless of whether the app is hosted in a cloud or not. So most of the security / data location concerns are not an issue with this model. [Aside: it will be for our SuperWEB product so we need to come up with a different way of handling that.]

At the risk of repeating myself, I do see some clear benefits of using this model over an internally hosted web server:

For clients who already have a SuperSTAR infrastructure, external web hosting can sometimes be difficult to arrange. This is an easy and inexpensive way to get around it.
Clients can take advantage of the scalability offered and handle peak loads without having to buy massive servers.
Of course, there’s others. They’re in last week’s blog.

So now we have a viable demonstration to show customers. The next question I had to answer was - if a customer wants it, would it work for them in a production setting? How scalable is it really? Is it true that there is no SLA for the Google App Engine? And how much would it cost and for what? Here’s what I found out:

It’s true that there is no SLA for the Google App Engine. I reckon this rules out half of our customers straight away. Especially those who are data providers like the Australian Bureau of Statistics and want to reliably provide access to data and analytical tools to the world 24/7. Other customers, such as those who use our software for internal or researcher use, or those who are just starting out with SuperVIEW, might take this risk on board and try it out.
It’s really difficult to work out what it would actually cost. Everything is costed by usage per day and there’s the option of getting a free service that then jumps into a paid service, or a paid service that gets more expensive as your user base grows. What we did work out was that it would be free for most SuperVIEW applications up to 2,000 user sessions per day. After that, it would cost approximately $300 USD per month to add an additional 1,000 users.

Conclusion:

Using the Google App Engine for SuperVIEW is a good way for us to get started with a real cloud offering. We can do this cheaply, and we can pilot and test it over the next 6 months with some of our customers. Space-Time Research needs to provide alternatives for our customers so they can make informed decisions about which method to go with.

We know we have cloud-enabled software and maybe this is enough for now. Our software doesn’t work on every cloud (e.g. by definition it won’t work on Microsoft Azure because our application is java-based), but it operates in virtual environments and can be hosted securely in some way outside a customer’s server environment.

We need to understand more about the potential governmental restrictions - in particular what it means for Australia, the US and the EU which is where most of our customers come from. And what our customers expect us to do for them - do they want us to find the provider, or just provide assurance that our software will work in the cloud of their choosing? There is no point in us going down a path of recommending certain providers and finding out that the government would NEVER choose them.

A whole other topic, and one I will not write about but the gov2.0 thinkers are writing about, is the public servant aversion to risk and change that means that it’s possible no-one wants to really do this anytime soon.

Next steps:

I am preparing a white paper for our sales team and customers on what we offer now and intend to offer in the future. This will have enough technical details to be able to talk to project owners / sponsors, but IT representatives will need more detail.
I’m finding out as much as I can about what governs our customer decisions now. I’m keen to get help on that because it’s really hard to find out.
I’m talking to Gartner analysts to get their take. Particularly as the article I’m sent most often is one that Gartner wrote about the security concerns of cloud and what to watch out for.
I’m talking to a real cloud provider - Telstra - who are an Australian provider and who are going to host all of Visy Recycling’s applications which is a significant move.
I’m going to ask questions of the Australian gov2.0 taskforce and see what they think about it.
I’m going to keep reading the articles I get sent every day.

Reflection:

Even though there is so much information out there, and so many articles and blogs being written about cloud computing at the moment, there is no one-stop answer shop that answers my questions. As I’ve been searching and figuring things out this week, I’ve really wished that I could just pick up the phone and call the Google App Engine product manager and talk to a real person. As I write, I realise I could have at least tried. This week’s resolution is to ask more questions of real people via whatever means is appropriate.

Jo Deeker

Tags: Cloud computing, Google app engine, Resources, SuperVIEW
Posted in Cloud computing | No Comments »

Cloud Computing Services at Space-Time Research

July 28th, 2009 by Jo Deeker

I have been doing a lot of reading about cloud computing and concerns over security of data. In case you hadn’t noticed, cloud computing is a hot topic and IT magazines and blogs are overflowing with articles. Kundra is talking about it (Kundra courts the risk of innovation — Government Computer News ), Gov 2.0 and Data.gov encourage it, and some US city departments are investigating moving all their services into a cloud (L.A. weighs plan to replace computer software with Google service - Los Angeles Times )

At first I wondered what all the fuss was about - it’s only third party hosting of applications after all, and it’s already been done – A LOT. Over the last few weeks I’ve delved a bit deeper, and discovered that my understanding of the technology, and options available, was limited. There are a number of different ways applications can be hosted or delivered via a cloud, and putting your application on a separate server housed at an external provider, which is what we do for some of our existing clients, is a very simple but expensive way to do it. I’ve since discovered there are other ways that might be better.

I have worked at and with large organizations over the last 20 years, and I understand why the idea of moving applications into a cloud is attractive. Sometimes it can be nearly impossible for a business unit within an organization to get a server or space on a server to host applications. And if you can get one, for some organizations, it can cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars even if the server itself only cost a few thousand. Here we have an opportunity to get rid of one of the major stumbling blocks in putting a new application (particularly a web-application) out there.

The potential benefits of cloud computing are clear:

It can be MUCH cheaper. We’ve worked out that a basic SuperVIEW application could be hosted for under sixty dollars a month (depending on number of users etc.) This compares with an external hosting service cost of $1500 AUD per month for a dedicated server.
It removes constraints imposed by IT departments, or even harder to deal with, IT Service Providers. The approvals to host applications on internal servers can be onerous.
It can offer scalability to scale up or down, particularly when there is an initial peak load. I’m hoping that when we launch 2011 census data online with the Australian Bureau of Statistics that we can use cloud resources to cope with our initial peak loads.
As the hardware and infrastructure are already available, it can be very quick to deploy at application and use it. No more waiting for the server to be ready.

The major considerations are:

Some cloud services offerings won’t tell you or guarantee where your data is stored and this makes some organizations nervous.
The technology and different options available are new and don’t necessarily follow strict government security procedures. I figure that by the time some government organizations are ready to launch an application it will sorted out.
Working out your optimal pricing can be a little tricky - it’s a bit like a mobile phone plan and if you don’t know how your system is going to be used, it can be hard to work out which is the most cost-effective model.

We have recently come up with a couple of cloud offerings for our SuperVIEW software that offer the best of both worlds for SuperSTAR customers. Our customers have given us some direct feedback that they are very interested in cloud models for hosting web applications, but they would like to keep their data in-house. This is not simply an issue of security; all of our customers have substantial data management systems in place, either fully in-house, or connected to privately outsourced data centres. Having the data for SuperVIEW hosted in-house ensures that the provider retains full ownership and does not have to extend its data management policies to address the differences that cloud computing would introduce.

Our HYBRID model fits this bill. The SuperVIEW application is hosted on a cloud provided by the Google App Engine. Via a secure data connector developed by STR, the application connects to a customer’s existing SuperSTAR database housed internally. Encrypted, aggregated data is returned to the web application for analysis and visualization in the SuperVIEW web client. Because SuperSTAR databases are read-only, and cannot be manipulated by SQL or other programs, the raw data is secure and is not vulnerable to alteration or attack.

We also want offer the ability to experience the whole SuperSTAR application in a cloud using a different service provider . Currently, we do provide fully hosted dedicated-server solutions, and over the next month we are working out who best to source these services from in a more distributed environment. There are some customers who will always want to keep their data management tools in-house, but others may want to migrate the whole solution to a cloud. We expect to be able to provide a hybrid, or fully cloud-based SuperSTAR service to customers with the next release of our software in the next month or so.

Until next time,

Tags: Cloud computing
Posted in Cloud computing, SuperSTAR | No Comments »

The Auto Correlation Engine

July 12th, 2009 by Andrew Naish

An idea came to me after viewing the Campaingers embrace maps article from The Economist.

Say you had a bunch of data, and I’m not talking a couple of spreadsheets, I’m talking tens of millions of records, each holding attribute information… so much data you literally don’t know what to do with - like perhaps all the information collected by governments around the world in their yearly census. It’s too big to simply browse through to find out any useful information and there’s too many geographic layers to add into a G.I.S to do any manual spatial analytics on it. But you know there’s gold in the data somewhere. You know there must be some correlation between separate observations.

Enter the Auto Correlation Engine.

Imagine you had a system where by, for each geographic layer (State, Suburb, Region, Census District, etc, etc) you could attach a predefined observation (e.g, count, percentage, calculation) and derive all the possible spatial correlation indices amongst the observations, and report them to you.

E.G:

Let’s say your a government employee in charge of deciding what to do next about the high rates of child obesity in your district. Naturally as a G.I.S user you decide to add a new layer to your system displaying the count (and the lat/long points perhaps using proportional symbols) of obese children in your district. But what next? Do you add the fast food restaurants and perhaps do some concentric ring analysis? Do compare it with a layer displaying the number of game consoles bought in the area?

What if, you had a system that had already found out, for that layer, what other geographic layers and associated attributes have a high correlation index. As soon as you added the child obesity rates to your G.I.S platform, the Auto Correlation Engine would have predetermined that there is a correlation between high child obesity rates and the number of parks in the area, and informed you of the correlation. It would then ask you if you would like to add the correlated layer to your map. Of course it wouldn’t be one of those annoying Microsoft paperclips, but it might be useful.

Tags: geospatial, Mapping
Posted in Mapping | No Comments »

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