All information is SAS company confidential. Do not disclose.
Welcome to the JMP Development Update for April 16, 2021!
First, Audrey Shull asked me to share this important public service announcement about our historical JMP knowledge base:
Confluence has become our preferred way to share knowledge and information. Our old JMPMediaWiki is coming close to end of life and is in a fragile state. Please do not edit any pages on the JMPMediaWiki, as content can no longer be saved and all the page content will be lost. Any pages you might want to update (and have not yet already been migrated) should be moved to Confluence. Contact Audrey Shull if you need help with moving any page or subset of pages. Most of us are happily working in Confluence, and we migrated all important How-To pages and other commonly used information. However, there are pages that were not moved: meeting notes, personal pages, orphan pages that weren’t linked to anywhere, old wish lists. We have collected an unwieldy list of all existing JMPMediaWiki pages. I invite you to look through them for any orphan pages you want to preserve. If you review pages, please help us update the page to indicate if the content has been migrated, shouldn’t be migrated, or request to migrate it. Thanks!
I hope you all had a chance to watch the JMP division update on Tuesday to hear news from around the world! If you missed it, you can see a recording here. Congratulations to all of us for creating, launching, and selling a new version of a product that customers are really excited to get their hands on!
This is the time of the cycle when Duane Hayes’ JMP TS team is deluged by customer questions about requesting software, downloading software depots, installing and applying license files. They are starting to get some early usage questions and we have received JMP 16.0 production crash reports to follow up as well. Thanks to everyone in tech support and development for helping triage those items and replicate issues so that we can enter defects to be fixed in 17.0 and/or 16.1 or 16.2.
Please remember if you are reporting a crash internally, you should uncheck the anonymous box in the crash dialog. Please provide your email address and do not submit your report anonymously so that we can follow up with you if we need more details. And as always, if you can add a note with any details about what you were doing when JMP crashed, that is extremely helpful.
The shortest path to a software defect (or Jira issue) for a problem that you find in a production version of JMP is always to submit your issue to support@jmp.com with a data table and script or set of interactive instructions to elicit the crash or bug. We know it’s not always possible to provide that level of detail for random crashes. However, even if a crash is intermittent when you follow your steps, developers may be able to see issues while debugging the code that help reveal the root of the problem.
Even as we continue to address bugs in 16.1 and near our Code Approval milestone for that release, we are working on the next feature iteration of JMP. I hope that you had the chance to attend the JMP dev demo given by Chung-Wei Ng and Mandy Chambers on Thursday. If you didn’t, you can find the recording here. Chung-Wei gave us a refresher on the Tabulate platform, which in fairness has so many features, it’s hard for anyone to know them all inside and out. I know I am not alone in saying that I learned a few new things from her demo!
Chung-Wei also showed off a JMP 17 new feature in Tabulate that allows a more compact table display, and Mandy followed up to show some of the additional Tabulate use cases that are important to the life sciences team. Thanks to all who attended, asked questions and gave feedback during the demo! I always learn something new when I watch others demo existing platforms and features in JMP and I definitely encourage volunteers to re-introduce JMP features at dev demos in the future. We have added a lot of new people to the JMP team over the last several years so I am sure they find this as useful as those of us who have been around for a while, but are still learning!
Thanks very much to Tonya Mauldin as usual for sharing the details about Crash/Telemetry files for the weeks of 4/9 and 4/16/2021 with JMP 16.1 selected. You can find her JMP Live report here: Crash/Telemetry files for the weeks of 4/9 and 4/16/21 | JMP Live (sas.com)
Company
Product Release
Topic
Subtopic
Platform
General Announcements
- As John Sall noted in the webcast, SAS in Cary is offering Moderna and Pfizer vaccinations on-site in partnership with WakeMed. You can sign up here. You must also be registered with CVMS-please see the SAS COVID info page for more links and details here.
- If you’re willing to be a featured employee on Inside JMP, please download a copy of the Get to Know form. Simply fill out the questions and when you’re done, upload it, along with 3 photos of you to the folder. Thank you for helping to make our JMP family a little more familiar!
Important Upcoming Dates
- JMP 16.1 Code Approval Mode Begins and String Edit Deadline – 4/27/21
- JMP 16.1 Code Freeze – 5/14/21
- Please visit Confluence for a full list of JMP 16 and JMP 17 dates.
JMP Development Updates
Statistics
- Jianfeng: Completed JMP16.1 bug fixes. Continue improvements to equivalence tests. This new feature should be pushed into JMP17 soon.
- Laura C-S: Prepared and presented a SEM mini-tutorial at DATAWorks. There were about 70 participants and was well received. Met with Narayanan from P&G to coordinate an upcoming presentation and answer his SEM questions. Discussed remaining doc defects in 16.1 with Michael. Continued research on instrumental variable estimation for starting values in SEM.
- John Sall: Work on yFullFormula support and "<
- Peng: Look into newly opened issues and fix bugs.
Stat Testing
- Jacob: Investigating performance issues and creating a document to keep track of potential issues for each machine. Testing MSA Design updates planned for 16.1. Verifying and adding tests for DOE fixes in 17.0 and 16.1.
- Fang: Testing and updating unit tests for Apple Silicon Mac in JMP 16.1 and JMP 17.
Tonya: Unit test cleanup and bug verification.
Life Sciences Updates
- John C: Created a script to automate the addition of variables to the JMP Clinical Set Value Order/Color preferences system, to allow custom level sorting for dictionary/term variables for non-English studies. Added a 'Safety' patient profile data and display template to JMP Clinical 8.1. Automated study metadata refresh for users updating from JMP Clinical 7.1.2 to 8.1. Improving custom API doc support for JMP Clinical.
Product Management
- Dan V: Set up a meeting with an account executive at Mapbox to discuss map box and JMP integration. Talk to Rachael about legal implications of including the software in 16.2 or 17.
Technical Support
- Duane: First, thanks to you for your assistance with helping us (Wendy) with Jira tips/tricks, and thanks to Audrey for her guidance with Confluence. TS is beginning to look at these tools, and will probably be reaching out for more insights!
- We are seeing an increase in track numbers, and more customers are reaching out to us for help ordering and installing JMP 16. Here are the TS JMP Live reports. Here is information regarding Customer Reported Defects filed by TS.
Development Operations
- Shannon: Updated How to Use Jira FAQ Confluence page to reflect current information on migration and workflow. Answered Jira questions and migrated some additional items from Defects to Jira. Reviewed open Jira issues as well as crash defects fixed in 17.0 but still open in 16.1; added any additional crash tracks and comments. Attended monthly Doc/L10 Collaboration meeting and entered follow-up Jira tickets.
Jim: Reported several Jira entries for JMP 17 assertion failures and 1610MacBSMX-only failures. Updated ODBC drivers on several testing VMs. Fixed a Mac Updater issue for 16.1.
Documentation
- Sheila: Finalized sample data tables and Sample Data Index script for Monday deadline. Generated 16.0 and 16.1 English Help and 15.2 ZH-CN help; working through a ZH-CN header problem with the web team. Had new FrameScripts written and tested them. Met with l10n team to discuss using Jira to ask questions and consider ways to streamline production processes. Updated the German, Italian, Spanish, and Korean Help templates to create web pages for Discovering JMP. Learned how to create a few Jira dashboards- I’ll put the instructions on the wiki.
Michael C: Addressed doc feedback from Japanese translation reviewers; finished adding Jira components for the JMPDOC project space; addressed some strings that were stuck in “New” for 16.1 prior to the final string extraction.
System/Host Testing
- Eric Wang: JMP Live 16.1 I18N testing. Investigating WEBJMP-3013. This issue blocks the JMPLiveJSL tests update, which creates connection to JMP Live with the HTTP Requests.
- Da Li: JMP Live 16.1 I18N testing. Testing JMP Live Jira items, testing download entire package WEBJMP-2533. Verify defects.
- Mike Wu: JMP Live 16.1 I18N testing. Testing JMP Live Jira items. Verify defects. Move JMPC installer monthly checkpoints to Confluence.
- Nala: JMP Live 16.1 I18N testing. Testing JMP Live Jira items. Updating/fixing JSL UT failures. Review Jira workflow proposal that Audrey created.
- Josh L: Upgraded the JMP Live 4 server distributed environment to 16.1. The environment will be updated weekly to the current 16.1 JMP Live build from Friday or Monday. Assisted with troubleshooting some user issues and general JMP Live questions. The rest of my time was story and bug testing / verification.
- Cary / Beijing JMP Live Testing Jira Status
- 64 Bugs / Stories Closed in the last 7 days
- 04 Stories in Testing
- 12 Bugs / Stories in Test-Ready
- 34 Bugs Created in the last 7 days
- Hui: Finished verification of 16.1 defects except those demanding for mobile devices. Reported and logged 3 issues in Jira and 2 defects in Defects. Continued working on HTML5 local data filter testing on different platforms. Continued working with help desk to configure the Mobile devices.
- Lisa G: Looked at new Pick Color Theme update and triaged some hover label defects that appear to have already been resolved from another fix.
- Hunter: JMP 16.1 and 17 defect verification, testing project fixes for S1588130 (an Excel import issue) and S1587791.
Audrey: Prep for Jira demo, JSL UT cleanup, JMPMediaWiki preservation.
Data Discovery
- Xan: Added support for SAS street map server to main. Creating Jira Epic for it (JMP-386).
- Paul V: Improved the performance of the Pareto platform by caching some results and removing a weak pointer lock. Added the ability to control the legend and fixed some issues related to setting bar colors through the legend.
- Dan S: Scripting Index updates for box stretching, fix for namespace-scoped function evaluation for 16.1. Add PickColorTheme(), add filter<
- Dave B: Worked with John Schroedl to track down libxml leak, fixed problem with jsl sib append/prepend when display box does not have a parent, added pdf to multiple file import, and fixed addin builder bug that allowed addin menu item to not have any command.
- Evan: JMP Host Information changes for Apple M1. JSL Classes bug fixes for Clinical.
Ernest: Performance investigation. Table Preview.
DOE
- Caleb: Early this week I participated in the DATAWorks 2021 virtual workshop. I presented a paper on my research and participated in several round-table discussions. Also, I’ve been working on fixing/deferring 16.1 defects related to MSA and Sample Size Explorers. There are a lot of fixes already pushed into 17.0 that are awaiting testing so that they can be merged into 16.1.
- Joseph: Worked on MSA bug fix candidates for JMP16.1. Also, I attended DataWorks 2021 and jointly taught a tutorial with Ryan titled Pseudo-Exhaustive Testing.
Brad: Working on a paper with Doug Montgomery on adapting DSDs so that they can handle split-plotting.
Host
- Paul T: Getting familiar with SQL Query Builder code by fixing a defect with Run Query (S1562689) in 17.0 and will integrate to 16.1 if testing goes smoothly.
- John Schroedl: Working with Bob to add JMP 17, Student Sub. and Excel Add-In checks to Install Checker. Fix JMP Host Information which lost support for the (very old) Windows Server 2012. Include XBase files in recent file list. Fixed mem leak in libxml2 usage.
HTML5
- Josh M: Attending Vueconf Wednesday.
- Refactoring and optimization: Pushed first step in row states refactoring (JMPHTML-532) and considered other possibilities (see Confluence page). Coordinated with Bryan Fricke on JMPHTML-502 since he owns the Framebox code. He will take the first step, and I will help add code for individual segments next. This spawned a related refactoring task (JMPHTML-758), which I completed. Started work on JMPHTML-534 and submitted a review for an old shelved performance optimization (see JMPHTML-762.)
- Profilers: Corresponding with platform owners to assess their availability to help implement yFullFormula for JMP 17 and work through priorities and design issues for Categorical Profiler. John Sall implemented yFullFormula for several segments which will help me work through issues in my JavaScript code and test across multiple platforms. Pushed a fix to allow categorical formulas to be exported for partition, boosted trees and bootstrap forest. Ryan Parker integrated his fix for S1572659 in 16.1, a bug I found while working on FDE profilers; tested the fix to confirm that S1584810 and S1584711 are fixed in 16.1.
- Bryan F: Completed replacement of older mouse and touch events for newer pointer events, which allows for mouse capture. An additional benefit is that the resulting code is less complicated, which should help with maintenance. Here is a link to a JMP Live example. Working on unifying code that determines which graph element to use for both selection and tooltips
- Mayowa: Completed refactoring code to determine full or partial support for interactive html (JMPHTML-547), started working on refactoring CSS to use browser based cursors in interactive html (JMPHTML-530).
JMP Live
Tommy: Attended Vue.conf and a Vue.conf workshop this week and worked through some JMP Live 17 and 16.1 bugs.
Note from Shannon
Bobby Riggs asked me to share this note and picture of his beloved Jeep, which was wrecked but saved his life in a recent extremely bad car crash. Thankfully, Bobby is recovering from his concussion and is back in the office dealing with JMP 16 tracks as customers get started installing and working with our latest release.
Thank you all very much for the card and extremely generous gifts. I’m overwhelmed with the generosity and support of the JMP division. A very special thank you to Amy Stuart for coordinating it all. As an update I still have some pretty big bruises and a burn mark on my hand, but I would consider myself very lucky considering the condition my Jeep was in. The roll bar and seatbelt saved my life.
