Welcome to the JMP Development Update for February 4, 2022!
With JMP 17 EA6 now available to customers, we are looking forward to JMP 17 Feature Freeze planned for 2/18/22. JMP 17 EA7 is also planned to freeze on 3/11/22. Please continue to triage your Jira issues, wrap up feature projects, and create feature pages for any late-breaking items that you’d like to share with early adopters in our next iteration. Also, don’t forget to check on the status of your Scripting Index entries for new features. You can check out the list of options missing from Scripting Index entries by running this script:
unittest("GUI", "object doc coverage");
Thanks very much to Paul Nelson and Daniel Powell for presenting this week on the transition of JMP’s activation system to its new home in Amazon Web Services late in 2021. Paul reviewed some of the history behind JMP’s activation infrastructure and he and Daniel explained how the new system has been streamlined and improved in the transition to AWS. If you missed the meeting, you can see a recording here.
As John Sall noted at the start of yesterday’s dev meeting, this week we congratulate Brad Jones on winning two prestigious ASQ awards – the Brumbaugh Award (for a third time) and the Shewart Medal. You can read more details about these honors in this Inside JMP story: Re: Bradley Jones wins two 2021 ASQ awards and leave Brad a congratulatory note.
I also had the honor of congratulating JMP DevOps team member Melanie Drake on the occasion of her 20th anniversary with JMP in January! As I mentioned at the JMP dev meeting Thursday, Melanie started with JMP as a technical writer working on JMP documentation, and later moved over to Audrey’s testing team supporting many aspects of JMP’s host and display systems and scripting. Here’s the packed bar chart I mentioned during the meeting showing some of her areas of testing concentration:
Several years ago, Melanie joined the DevOps group to work on tooling and testing projects. She has focused on testing and development for L10N projects, learning the ins and outs of our internal string and doc processes for L10N and taking over our processes after Chris Swift moved to another group at SAS. Melanie has created and improved how we validate changes to the JMP XLF file that holds our UI strings, the MIF files we use for doc translation and various other translated deliverables like tutorials and built-in scripts. Melanie helped coordinate tooling changes for our big transition to a new MemoQ translation tool several years back. Mel has built up quite a library of scripts and processes over the years, and like she did in Audrey’s group, she continues to use JSL for testing. Melanie will be working to broaden her reach within the DevOps group this year as she transitions support for many of the L10N validation processes to Angelita, Howard and a new tester to be hired into Trish’s L10N group. Thanks so much again to Melanie for all she has done for our various teams over her time with JMP!
Thanks to Tonya Mauldin for sharing this week’s Beta/Crash/Telemetry tracks with crashes selected. JMP Live report is here: Beta/Crash/Telemetry Tracks for the Week of 2/4/2022 | JMP Live (sas.com)
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Company
Topic
Subtopic
Platform
JIRA
General Announcements
- Thanks to Bob Hickey for sharing that there was an important announcement about retirement of Outlook Public folders recently. On May 2nd, 2022, access to the Outlook Public Folders will be permanently disabled. If you are using public folders today, you must act before this date.
Important Upcoming Dates
- JMP 17.0 EA6 – 1/21/22
- JMP 17.0 Feature Freeze - 2/18/22
- JMP 17.0 EA7 – 3/11/22
- JMP 17.0 EA8 – 5/3/22
- JMP 17.0 EA9 – 7/8/22
- JMP 17 Code Freeze – 7/20/22
- Please visit Confluence for a full list of JMP 16 and JMP 17 dates.
JMP Development Updates
Product Management
- Dan V: Created videos for Workflow Builder. This first one is a 90 second sped up version of me using the workflow builder to solve a business problem. The other is a longer video of me talking through the process and then working through some challenges of linking this all together. Long story short, I love the workflow builder and see such great possibility for it in this and future versions of JMP. Tying workflow together with JMP Live and data refresh will make this capability even more impactful and even more far-reaching. It really does help bring the whole analytic workflow together from raw data to cleaned data to published report that then gets refreshed in JMP Live.
- Bryan F:
- Recorded Discovery Summit paper presentation and uploaded paper. Developed a usability script for Graph Builder tabular output functionality. Met with Ernest to review Workflow Builder in order to begin developing a usability test. Conducted 2 trial usability tests and 3 actual usability tests and began developing UX Research Report.
- Created survey for UX Workstream mitigation feedback on concerns raised during pre-mortem. Met with UX Workstream to discuss risk mitigation strategy. Met with Workstream focused on identifying and prioritizing specific JMP usability concerns. Conducted dot voting on specific usability concerns sent in by workstream via Miro whiteboard. Conducted dot voting on specific usability concerns registered by 2021 Academic Survey via Google Forms. Had one-on-ones with 5 UX Workstream members.
- Began evaluating wireframing tools such as Balsamiq and Adobe XD. Began learning Adobe Illustrator for icon development. Provided System Usability Scale test for JMP via Google Forms as well as 5 second impression test.
Technical Support
- Duane: TS continues working with NeuraFlash on our Service Cloud implementation. The design phase has begun and we are providing feedback as to our needs. Additionally, we are managing our tracks and have started reviewing support pages on the JMP site in order to remove references to SAS. As usual, here are the TS JMP Live reports. (JMP Live 16) Here is information regarding Jira tickets opened by Tech Support.
Development Operations
- Jim: Reported ASAN and Assertion Failures from the recent macOS UT run as Jira tickets. Acted as a middleman between TS and JMP Dev to get a new JMP command line option added for macOS. Provided details for Audrey and Michael about MATLAB failures on macOS (in JMP-4739).
- Myron: Fixed issues with Jenkins agents on the doc automation machine early in the week and fixed issues with memoQ at the end of the week (space and license issues – JMPTOOL-379), and worked on the crash system in the middle (mac symbolizing).
- Shannon: Researched anonymous and customer reported crashes in the JMP 16.X crash database. Thanks very much to Dave White, Dave Barbour, Dan Schikore and John Schroedl for diagnostic help leading to test cases for various crashes!
Documentation
- Susan C: Completed assessing the JMP 17 features page for Qiana to indicate which features belonged where (in which book/chapter). Catching up on a few meetings I couldn’t attend (JMP Live demo and UX group meeting). Today, I ran production checks on all of the books and now I’m compiling/publishing a revised version of the help for EA6.
- Qiana: Interviews with a candidate for the Senior Tech Writer position. Hired the candidate! Began going through old Doc JIRAs. Mapped out the JIRA structure for 17.0 and began creating JIRAs. Watched the Intern Kickoff meeting. Completed JMP Academy homework.
System/Host Testing-Cary
- Mandy: Worked mostly on workflow builder and writing some tests with the JSL that Ernest provided for internal use for testing and found a few memory things he fixed with it. Answered TS tracks and worked on reproducing a random Mac crash when dragging the mouse across a preview window in Stack. Demoed the WFB for Mike and Anna who will do UI interactive testing and Sikuli testing. Also got new Windows machine and spent a few hours Tuesday moving files and installing Apps and staging it in preparation for replacing my older Windows machine Tuesday.
- Mike M: Good bit of noise in image tests this week, fixed a new failing image test, reviewed Michael Hecht’s Discovery paper, opened new bug on Google indexing in 16.2 help, and a new bug from a tech support track on editing parameters in the Formula Editor (also added new Sikuli test to cover this scenario). Great Sikuli meeting with Annie, and a Workflow Builder meeting with Mandy should help with generating several interactive Sikuli tests.
- Audrey: Found a bug with Query Builder and ODBC, verified the fix after Bryan B fixed it. Our automated reporting machine is now using more current JMP 17 builds and will auto-update each week. Attempting to test MATLAB on various Mac operating systems with mixed results.
- Hui: Investigated HTML5 support for portable change on treemap labeling and reported issues. Created testing projects and tasks. Met with Steve and brainstormed HTML5 interactive testing.
- Hunter: Opened several projects defects, defect verification, investigated EA tracks, and met with Evan about testing needed for features in the new context search window.
- Josh L: Working or JSL for publish and replace testing JMP Live. Working on Jira story testing and bug verification. Answering questions and triaging issues from other testers.
- Beijing / Cary JMP Live Testing Jira Status
- 05 Stories in Testing
- 74 Stories in Test Ready
- 03 Bugs Created in the last 7 days
- 02 Stories / Bugs Closed in the last 7 days
Data Discovery
- Dan S: Fixed hierarchical filter scenario when second filter is added dynamically to existing platform. Updated Platform base class to allow scripted filter to run on the first pass - around 10-15 platforms now opt in to this behavior, speeding things up and correcting behavior in some cases. Fix for JRP/Session output for OutlineBox, and prototyping changes to Project to use the new session scripts. Fixed customer-reported crash during drag-and-drop in Tabulate.
- Evan: Added search results for Pro when running Trial or Standard JMP. Added new/refereshed/legacy icons to search results. Looking into removing unused Student edition flags to avoid confusion. Also looking into adding search results for Statistics Index, Sample Data Index Teaching Resources, and Tip of the Day.
- Dave B: Looked into a couple of crashes, fixed scatterplot3d update problem, worked with Mike M to try to fix some problematic image tests, and fixed hover label textlet journaling problem.
- Andrew: Fixed some issues with hover annotations, added a new parameter to treemaps for adjusting the splitting aspect ratio, and fixed the handling of ordering variables in treemaps with groups.
- Xan: Continued work on tabular data in GB; code modernization (enum to enum class).
DOE
- Brad: Got the ASQ Brumbaugh Award (3rd time) and the Shewhart Medal. Moved office from the 4th to the 5th floor - still unpacking.
- Joseph: Continued work on .jmpdoe Easy DOE file type (including adding JSL support) as well as continued work on refining Guided Analyze and Predict tab functionality. Also, fixed several reported bugs.
- Caleb: Added scripting support for the new Nesting Structure feature in MSA Designs.
Host
- John Schroedl: Fixed bug with data table left in memory when closing a set from the window list. Investigated and reproduced an old variability chart crash. Fix issue with tooltips showing and disappearing quickly. Various icon delivery discussions. Had to reboot our old open street map server. Attended first “Git in four weeks” O’Reilley class taught by SAS’ Brent Laster.
- Paul N: Getting a modified JMP, displaying map tiles from the Open Street Map server I built in a Virtual Machine as proof of concept.
HTML5
- John Powell: Reviewed resumes for our Software Developer position and started planning for interviews. Provided input for the Hiring and Retention Workstream. Participated in JMP Live Steering Committee meeting. Detected when floating legends are position over the graph which is not supported in Interactive HTML. Added support for customized Font size for custom text in pinned hover labels. Started investigating adapting HTML Treemap Label drawing to match a recent change in JMP. Responded to Florence K.’s questions about JMP Live. Started a Support Confluence Page for JMP Live with Dieter.
- Mayowa: Fixed regression bugs affecting annotations (JMPHTML-1469, JMPHTML-1437), working on Support customized font size for popup hover labels (JMPHTML-1138).
JMP Live
- Michael G: Merged our Publish on Client branch work back into main. You can now use the latest JMP Runner build against JMP Live Daily to see the new publish dialog. Upgraded to webpack 5 along with many dependencies. Added replace to publish on client dialog. Various bug fixes.
- Aurora: Publish on Client feature: small bug fix, adding support for creation of a new empty folder. Drop all support for old 'includeChildrenForeignFolder' search flag. Jira triage. A bit of Intro to Vue training.
- Eric: Working on identifying the remaining work that must be done for JMP Live 17. Continuing work on being able to securely pass stored credentials from JMP Live to JMP to use for ODBC connections.
- Josh: Made progress on the data table viewer for JMP Live, with WEBJMP-4560 - Make data table column sidebar have paging and WEBJMP-4481 - Columns only shows in half of the Sidebar in the data view area. Discussion of scope and design with Justin and Michael.
Statistics
- Elizabeth: Worked on identifying and giving warnings when there is confounding between random effects with each other or with fixed effects in Mixed Model and GLMM.
- Peng: Continued testing and polishing the repeated measures degradation platform, nailed down a bug that has bothered me for at least two weeks. Worked with Di and Leo on preparing training materials. Added alias JSL functions for Exponential distribution. Di helped me realize that it is difficult to recognize their existence when the abbreviation used was Exp.
- Laura C-S: Met with Chris to discuss modification indices in SEM, adapted the predicted values’ plot code for multiple groups, and got started on modification indices. Met with UX workstream team and replied to SEM questions in the community.
- Annie: Worked on a few smaller NF Jira items and bug fixes. Specifically,
Jira issues JMP-6573, JMP-6574, JMP-6575, and Jira 10523.
Stat Documentation
- Michael C: Continued work on SI updates for Reliability platforms; worked on doc rewrites for Contingency, Logistic, and Oneway chapters; resolved tracked edits in preparation for EA help build.
- Colleen: Updating the Distribution entries in the SI (there’s A LOT) and incorporating comments from review pdfs into the documentation.
Stat Testing
- Tonya: Testing the MSA and Variability Chart changes for Linearity and Bias. Testing bug fixes for CCB and Process Screening. Answered a user community question about reference lines in CCB.
- Mark: Investigate EA feedback from Heath Rushing about the Design Space Profiler for Tonya. Participating in activities for JMP UX/UI workstream. Working on design and testing of Easy DOE.
- Jacob: Testing Easy DOE, adding unit tests for the Design tab. Cleaning my unit tests. Assisting JMP Technical Support with a DOE question and responding to beta feedback.
Note from Shannon
I know the rodent-turned-meteorologist forecast 6 more weeks of winter, but I have it on good authority that he’s only right 30% of the time! I’m just going to head out for a walk and enjoy the warm weather while it lasts. Hope you have a wonderful weekend!
