Welcome to the JMP Development Update for March 3, 2023!
This week we learned of some exciting changes in the Data Discovery group. Effective April 1, Xan Gregg is stepping back from management to focus his attention on coding projects and will assume the title of Distinguished Engineering Fellow. I’m excited for Xan to have the freedom to delve into new development projects as he settles into this new role! Julian Parris will assume responsibility as the new director of the Data Discovery group in April. Julian has been a standout in his numerous roles at JMP (see John’s announcement post on Inside JMP to read some details) and I know he will bring all his enthusiasm and curiosity to this new challenge. Julian is one of the biggest JMP fans I know and he is truly thrilled for the opportunity to help shape the group’s future plans.
Congratulations also go out this week to John Sall on the occasion of his first patent, issued for his work on the Design Space Profiler. The patent, titled Interactive Graphical User Interface for Specification Rate Settings and Predictions, was issued on 2023-02-21 as U.S. Patent No. 11,586,675. A copy of the patent is available here: Issued Patents. John asked me to say a special thanks to Ryan Lekivetz, who John says did most of the work when drafting the application.
After resolving a few final critical fixes to JMP 17.1 this week, we plan to create final installer candidates on 3/8/23. This maintenance release will deliver ~500 bug fixes across the product, from correcting issues in platforms and features to string and doc updates. We will release updaters on support.sas.com in early April and begin to deliver full installers for legacy customers on My.JMP when it is ready.
Meanwhile, we are looking ahead to JMP 18 EA2, planned to freeze on 4/7/23. Please continue to update feature pages for major initiatives and share links to smaller but important items that are ready for testing with Mia Stephens. Customers are already submitting their JMP 18 feedback, as you can see from Tonya Mauldin’s report below, and we want to encourage them to keep it coming!
Here are the beta/crash reports for the week of 3/3/23 with crashes selected.
JMP Beta Report for the week of 3/3/23 | JMP Live (sas.com)
Thanks very much to Paul Spychala from the Interactive HTML development group for presenting on updates to the HTML profiler this week! Paul has made numerous user interface, functionality and performance improvements to profilers since joining JMP last year. If you were not able to attend the meeting in person, you can find a link to the recording here. I hear Paul is being encouraged to submit his work for a future Discovery and I think it would be a great topic to share. His talk certainly highlighted how JMP development uses user customer feedback about real life scenarios to help improve our products!
Finally, thanks to Audrey Shull for sharing this Jira Tip of the Week!
Jira users can make use of Smart Checklists to add a little more granularity for what needs to be done for an item. We’re seeing some teams using checklists instead of subtasks to reduce the overhead of creating new Jira issues. You might also use it for a testing checklist, or a reminder to integrate. Jira issues cannot be closed until all of their Smart Checklist items have been checked off, and you can assign those items to particular people with @mentions. Feel free to experiment! You might refer to Trish O’Grady’s handy document about How to Find Smart Checklists in Jira. For a refresher demo, refer to Sarah’s segment in this recording (12:20 mark starts Sarah’s demo) from Jan 19th.
General Announcements
- Thanks to Xan Gregg for sharing that JMP signed on as a sponsor of the annual local Research Triangle Analysts conference in 2020 and it’s finally happening two weeks from tomorrow, in SAS Hall at NCSU. It’s an unconference aka barcamp style conference where: “… the program will be set the day of the conference based on all of the exciting pitches you'll hear first thing in the morning. Bring your 50-minute talk and a stack of business cards for a day of mathy fun with all of your favorite analysts. Your registration buys breakfast, lunch and coffee all day!” Xan has attended a few past sessions and JMP friend Melinda Thielbar is one of the organizers. Let Xan know if you have any questions!
Important Upcoming Dates
- JMP 18 EA2 Freeze – 4/7/23
- JMP 18 EA3 Freeze – 5/12/23
- JMP 17.2 Code Approval – 6/13/23
- JMP 18 EA4 Freeze – 6/23/23
- JMP 17.2 Code Freeze – 6/30/23
- Please visit Confluence for a full list of JMP 17 and JMP 18 dates.
JMP Development Updates
Data Discovery
- Dan S: Restored Filter preference for Categorical in 17.1/17.2. Started JMP 18 work on Group Platform for By / Multiple-Y launches. Fixed a JRP file issue. Continued work on edit focus in 18.
- Xan: Adding more user control over Graph Builder legend’s assignment of color vs styling to distinguish items (expanded from WL Gore feedback).
- Dave B: Fixed a journal crashing bug, fixed an alignment problem with ColStackDisplay, starting to work on annotation placement problems.
- Evan: Optimizing Where for Is Missing, ==, <, >, <=, >=, and | and & of these. Preparing for Discovery.
DOE
- Peng: Continue working on two fronts for JMP18: fatigue data analysis in reliability; working with Jacob on stabilizing new factor list derived work for actual DOE applications. Working on a discussion paper on priors for reliability data analysis.
- Caleb: Working on the infrastructure for the revamped ALT platform. Brad and I also had a big breakthrough in our work Monday! I’m also finishing up a paper revision on a new calibration technique for lower tolerance bounds.
Host
- John Schroedl: Help menu changes to remove "Statistics Index" and add "JMP Capabilities". Updated Windows processMessages to more closely match Mac callback and background handling. More cleanup from SAS Integration removal.
- Paul N: Had to revert the new Open Street Map server to the legacy server after discovering that after an unexpected reboot, some of the tables had been incorrectly marked as Unlogged and 3 tables were truncated to 0 rows. This gave the behavior that everything was working except when you went to a tile that had not yet been rendered, all you got was the background, county/state/country boundaries, and text without roads, buildings, water,… It took a lot of detective work to figure out the issue was the empty tables. Had to reload the database and rebuild the indexes on the tables. Made sure the tables are Logged so that this doesn’t happen again. After all the indexes are rebuilt, should be able promote back to production. Confirmed that tiles are again properly rendering after the rebuilding of the database. Also created a new localhost ssl certificate for JMP Live and worked on some small Python test apps, for building C/C++ modules loadable by Python, and various newer ways to init Python from C++.
Interactive HTML
- John Powell: Provided unique IDs for Outline Boxes to help Steve & Hui’s automated interactive testing system identify them (JMPHTML-1993). Fixed a layout issue when updating a local data filter in JMP Live (JMPHTML-2009). Refactored subset row indices (JMPHTML-546) and fill colors (JMPHTML-2017) to allow compression and sharing for load time performance improvement. Thanks for John Schroedl’s help with JMPHTML-546! Helped a user with a security error when trying to embed interactive HTML output form one server in a web page on another server. Kudos to David Barbour for making hyperlinks for JIRA IDs in regression test emails. Started planning for our first new feature sprint for JMP 18 now that our performance improvement sprint is winding down.
- Praveena: Completed work on S1423455: Page never finishes loading chart w/overlay for large data table (>180k rows) (JMPHTML-1962). Change use of concat() while calculating indices in LineSegment.
- Paul Spychala: Working on more Performance Enhancements for JMP 18 with the rest of the team. Reworking the Profiler re-draw system (JMPHTML-976). Optimizing Unique calculations (JMPHTML-977).
- Mike S: Finished working a performance issue (JMPHTML-1855), got practice using JMP for analyzing performance results, worked through push build issues and Perforce hiccups, got set up on the travel/expense pages and booked travel to Cary in April, and began an O’Reilly Javascript course.
Statistics
- John Sall: In Hierarchical Cluster for 17.1, fix the Cubic Clustering Criterion, which was wrong for column standardized after a cluster summary reorganization in 17.0. Using a placeholder technique to make report ordering consistent in Decision Tree, Bootstrap Forest, and Boosted Trees. (JMP-14895, referenced in a comment on Dan Schikore's Scripting and report order Confluence page. Looking forward to getting feedback from customers at the European Discovery Conference.
- Elizabeth: Worked with Chris and Fang on a large change/fix for nesting of subjects logic in Mixed prior to beginning work on implementing repeated measures for GLMM. Big thanks to Chris for working through the disentangling! Bonus: it fixes at least one known crash! Implemented Type I (Sequential) tests for fixed effects in GLMM.
- Laura C-S: Continued working on a new Define Time Code model shortcut, which is nearly ready and should help a lot with tedious tasks in longitudinal models. Answered inquiries about path diagram functionality and residuals in SEM. Continued consulting in data analyses for a customer at P&G.
- Jianfeng: Completed porting the exact tests in the Contingency platform. Now I am working on the exact tests in the Oneway platform.
- Annie: Working on support for subgroup-variables and summarization for Short Run control charts.
Stat Documentation
- Michael C: Working on some doc projects: investigating the future of the NF document, the Statistics Index, and reorganizing how we document platform messages that are available only via JSL.
Stat Testing
- Tonya: Working on beta feedback, testing short run control charts, and bug verification.
Technical Support
Development Operations
- Myron: Worked on/updated/fixed various help builds and help map uploads for 17.0, 17.1, 18.0 (JMPTOOL-582, JMPTOOL-495, JMPTOOL-597, JMPTOOL-755). Added database support for distinguishing between unit tests timeout and failures (JMPTOOL-195, JMPTOOL-415). Worked on issue with Windows crash symbolizer (JMPTOOL-757). Continued set up for telemetry file processing (JMPTOOL-729).
- Jim: Kudos to Michael Hecht and John Schroedl for their help in working on the mac JMP 18 installer and build scripts, respectively. With Bob’s help, updated silent install scripts for JMP 18 unit test machines. Perforce support.
Documentation
- ChrisB: Finished the 17.0 Compatibility doc. Wrote a couple of small tools to try to help us test our web images. Confirmed that our web CSS is using the latest FrameMaker styles. Investigated help build issues… which came to a head today with the production help.
- Qiana: Worked on JMP Live Help for 17.1. Worked on JMPLOC-4040. Looked at the Help key report and map projects. Project planning for 18.0.
- Susan: Mainly worked on the localized JMP Live/Public help for 17.1, generating the help, identifying and fixing issues.
System/Host Testing-Cary
- Nick H: Submitted changes for the JSL Unit Test GUI to adjust for recently added StatDoc folders. There is now a check box to show these folders or not, as well as a preference for a default setting. When the folders are shown there will also be a filter that can be selected to check all of the StatDoc folders. Submitted changes to the Testing Dashboard. There is now a preference to show only unknown issues by default in the Unit Test Results window and individual tester pages. Users should also notice a toggle available on the main unit test result page. Up next for the dashboard are to incorporate the crash vs timeout changes which Myron recently made. Also made adjustments to my unit tests following the SAS Integration changes for JMP 18 and added new tests to the framework for JMP 18 and 17.2 verifications.
- Hunter: Responded to JMP 18 EA1 tracks, opened two JIRA items that were possibly the result of recent EditFocus updates in JMP 18. Opened a ticket for a BeyondTrust privilege management problem on the Mac that prevents sending crash reports from JMP since we can no longer access or write crash files to the user’s “/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports” folder.
- Anna: Adding new tests for Jira issues reported in 2022. Testing Analyze menu platforms to identify and report persistence and ordering issues with Redo Analysis.
- Lisa: Updated the Get All JMP Jira Issues.jsl script after we were missing some tickets, evaluated an EA track regarding 3D graphing functionality, and continued cleaning up old bugs.
- Audrey: AWS Learning, thanks Nick Ruva for helping with some technical issues as I move some of our internal-data-monitoring jobs to AWS.
System/Host Testing-Beijing
- Beijing team:
- Eric Wang: (1) Tested the new field “sendtoserver” in publish payload, related stories: (WEBJMP-4611), (WEBJMP-6588), (WEBJMP-6589). (2) Completed a quick regression testing for JMP Live 17.1 since NodeJS was upgraded. (3) Upgraded NodeJS on Beijing tests servers to v18.14.0. (4) Testing the new access control type “allow_data_import”
- Da Li: (1) Verify and close 3 bugs for JMPC and Import-SAS, corresponding UT added. (2) DONE: JMP C 17.1 Regression Testing, total 3 bugs created. (3) Failure UT investigation and fix(The failure is due to SAS integration removal (JMP-15601). (4) Prepare test env for more JMPC testing (JMPC17.0->17.1 updater). (5) DONE: JMP Desktop 17.1 Regression Testing, no issue found. (5) Adding a confluence page for migration workarounds between different JMP Live version and Node version.
- Mike Wu: (1) Bug regression on the remove WebView version check in Windows installers. (2) Regression testing for HTML Profiler Performance Updates for all the affected Profilers: Remove unneeded getDescendants from ProfilerSegment. (3) Technical support issues investigation and sent feedback for case number: 00034872, 00034873 and 00034874 (these 3 cases are the same issue)
- Kimi: (1) Check the SAS Integration related part is removed and test the SAS import and code generation part. (2) JMP 17.1 regression testing. (3) JMP C 17.1 regression testing (4) JMP C 17.1 Document Testing. (5) Completed a quick regression testing for JMP Live 17.1 since NodeJS was upgraded. (6) Fix some of the failures in Jmeter testing scripts, there are new failures now since JMP Live change the APIs, still needs further fix. (7) Bug verification.
- Da Zhang: (1) Regression testing for JMP 17.1. (2) JMPC 17.1 regression testing – Done. (3) Installed JMPC 8.1 for more JMPC 17.1 testing. (4) JMP C 17.1 Document Testing. (5) Bug verification.
- Nala: (1) Completed JMPC 17.1 regression testing. (2) JMPC 17.1 Doc Testing. (3) Completed a quick regression testing for JMP Live 17.1 since NodeJS was upgraded. (4) Jira verification
Note from Shannon
I hear we may get some stormy weather overnight. Hope you all sleep through it! At least it will wash the early pollen out of the air! Hope you have a great weekend!
