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Welcome to the JMP Development Update for March 8, 2024!
The jmpsi OS upgrade and Perforce update that I headlined last week are now behind us. Thanks very much to Steve Morrison from SAS IT, Jim Borek and Nick Ruva for coordinating on these important changes! If you notice anything amiss, please do mention it to me or someone else on my DevOps team.
With JMP QA and Development having signed off on JMP 18.0, the software is now loaded in MyJMP in anticipation of completion and signoff of the MyJMP changes required to support administrators, trial downloads and more. The new authorization mechanism that customers will use with JMP 18 was among those features highlighted for customers in the Discovery Europe plenary session this week. You can find a great wrap up article about Discovery Summit Europe on Inside JMP with many pictures, details about the development plenary, and a summary of the closing plenary talk by zoologist, broadcaster, and New York Times best-selling author Lucy Cooke that seems especially appropriate on this International Women’s Day.
Cooke reminded the Discovery audience that even the most renowned scientific work can be impacted by bias and one’s particular world view. She recommended deliberately engaging with a diverse set of collaborators with varying opinions as the best way to learn to look at a problem from all angles – especially ones you have not yet considered. I am proud to be part of a JMP organization that does just that, daily! By the way, if you attended Discovery Europe, you can add your notes to the Confluence page Mia Stephens kindly created here. And recall that last week, JMP posted the Call for Content and Steering Committee nominations for Discovery Summit Americas 2024.
Also, please remember that JMP is partnering with InterAct, a non-profit based in the Raleigh-Durham area dedicated to ending the cycle of domestic and sexual violence. Now through Wednesday March 13, you’re invited to donate the essential items noted below. Donation bins will be available in the Building A breakrooms on the fourth and fifth floors. Contributors are asked to write their name, date and a description of donated items on the sheet attached to each bin. Thank you!
Breakfast items: boxes of cereal, instant oatmeal, instant grits, cereal bars, granola bars, fruit cups.
Meal items: canned tuna, canned chicken, Hormel Completes, microwaveable mac and cheese bowls, Ramen noodle bowls, pasta and pasta sauce in family size, canned Chef Boy-ar-dee pastas.
Cleaning supplies: laundry detergent (sheets), dish liquid detergent, paper towels, toilet paper, kitchen trash bags, tissues, all-purpose cleaner.
Finally, thanks very much to Tonya Mauldin for sharing this week’s Beta/crash cases with crashes selected. I appreciate the crash reports coming in from technical support tracks and Discovery this week – there have been several mysteries solved thanks to those collaborations!
JMP Beta Report for the week of 3/8/2024 | JMP Live (sas.com)
General Announcements
Important Upcoming Dates
- JMP 18.1 Feature Freeze – 4/19/24
- JMP 18.0.1 Code Freeze – 4/26/24
- JMP 18.0.1 Release – ~ 5/18/24
- JMP 18.1 Approval Mode Begins – 5/21/24
- JMP 18.1 Code Freeze – 6/14/24
- Please visit Confluence for a full list of JMP 18 and JMP 19 dates.
JMP Development Updates
Host
- John Schroedl: Visual Styling discussions and working on support for padding to combo box. A crash dump sent by a customer from Japan revealed a bug due to JMP including two unrelated files named zip.dll (JMP-20703 – fortunately it’s already resolved in 18.0). Triaged another crash dump related to an unexpected exception during drag/drop (JMPTEST-464); once again security/av software is the prime suspect. Debugging a crash with attempts to import table from bad web page (JMP-20144).
Interactive HTML
JMP Live
- Aurora: Refactoring, intermittent test fixes, teardown test fixes, performance improvements.
Statistics
- Laura C-S: Finally figured out the asymptotic covariance matrix for MIIV-2SLS when there are equality constraints and now have been working on the implementation. Also made some progress toward building a new SEM report for this new estimator. Completed the latest training in the Learning Management system.
Stat Documentation
- Michael C: Worked on improving Scripting Index content for a variety of Fit Model personalities. Met with doc team to discuss UI string review process and guidelines.
Stat Testing
- Tonya: Working on bug verification and unit test cleanup.
Technical Support and Engagement
- Duane: It’s been a busy week within our groups. It will be good to have all of us back next week after Discovery Europe. We’ve been involved with My JMP projects and are preparing for the JMP 18 Trial. Wendy and her Engagement team met with EMEA and US Inside Sales leaders to discuss current topics and learn how to continue to work better together. Those relationships are essential as we move forward. Here are the TS JMP Live reports and the link to the Jira filter showing the tickets reported by TS for the last 14 days.
Case Volume by week:
Case Topics for Engagement queue, total:
Case Topics for Engagement queue, last week:
Development Operations
- Nick R:
- Researched and made changes to the new AWS Nightly Build machine for performance related issues - increased hard drive speed, throughput, and iops. Investigated and fixed Mac 19.0 Daily UT issues where jobs were doubling up on the jmpbldr19 machine in AWS and found the jmpbldr23 agent was actually connecting to the jmpbldr19 machine, even with the right configuration setup in Jenkins. This is fixed now and the build running on the right machine.
- Fixed 18.X Mac Analysis build projects. We continue to have issues with Beyond Trust on Macs in the lab, and I assumed that was the cause of our Perforce issues with the Analysis builds, however I discovered that after we updated the Perforce server last weekend, we had a project configuration error in the Analysis builds, as they were using both the View Mappings and Change View Perforce settings in Jenkins. Looks like after the Perforce update, the Change View settings shouldn't be used as they could trigger an error with the client spec in Jenkins. Instead, we need to use the View Mappings going forward (which I believe is the default for most of our projects. It appears Analysis was an outlier).
- Writing up a ticket now to research persistent Beyond Trust issues with SAS IT.
- Melanie: 18.1 string mis-match: investigated incorrect strings in Monday’s Windows JMP 18.1 builds and installers (turned out to be a Perforce sync error). Help projects: Met with Qiana and Chris Barrett to determine a schedule for creating help for 18.1 and 19 EAs. PDFs: added new Group Policy Object document into processes; streamlined locations for production PDFs in perforce; updated various Jenkins jobs accordingly. Localization: Collaborated with localization to give documentation an overview of the current doc localization processes (thanks for Krzysztof for putting it all together and presenting!). Hiring: Interviewed candidate for the DevOps program manager position.
- Myron: Mostly worked on getting JiraBot on jmptooldev, and I think that's working. I'll send you all some links and do a little doc so you can start testing on Monday. I also think we resolved JMPTEST-1158 – getting the dot-dot releases to work on the testing dashboard.
- Bob: Continued work with Legal on process for installer License Agreements. Worked on installer code changes to prep for 18 build machine in AWS. Testing alternative installers to overcome lack of updater.
- Shannon: Interviews for open position. Investigating UT failures. Crash investigations. Attended International Women’s Day event. Thank you, WIN and JMP!
Localization
- Allison: Validated and updated the PDF metadata of localized 18.0 Keyboard Shortcuts and Menu Description Cards for all languages, and added labels to them in P4; validated DJ images in the target language folders so Ying can take localized screenshots for 18.0; submitted PO requests for our DE, ES, FR, KO and ZH reviewers; created a Confluence page on how localized PDFs are created based on info provided by Ying from V16.
- Sandy: Worked on program that validates source in source file areas we use for processing. Finished verification of dashboard package launch bug and duplicate project creation bug. Worked on changes/testing needed due to new functionality of word count update in project creation dashboard. Ran file validation tests for new addition of GPO. Worked on automation to produce Trados style memoq wordcount report for one of our vendors. Took SAS required training.
- Howard: Dashboard feature enhancements, including Translation package delivery/return and Session Management for Word Count Refresh, project creation. L10n Jenkins job: book population to stage area.
- Trish: Opened JMP-20696 to explore how authorization will be setup for external localization teams. Interview for DevOps R&D Program Manager Position. Rescheduled QA’s start date for validating localized JMP Add-ins for 18.0 and sent an email to stakeholders. Completed setup work needed for localized screenshots of DJ to resume.
- Krzysztof: Upgraded memoQ server to the latest version (10.5), prepared presentation of the localization process and tools for the Doc team, setting up GPO book project for localization, working with dev on internationalization issues in Portable UI.
Documentation
- Qiana: Planned and prepped for intern Khawar Khan’s start. He is a PhD student in technical writing at NCSU. Attended the Intern Manager meeting with SAS HR. Began looking into the sample script updates that are needed for 18.0.1 along with Chris. Created drafts of the 18.0 Doc add-in pages in the Community. Met with Melanie and Chris to discuss JMP 19 help. Reached out to owners of the JMP Documentation pages about update needed for 18.0. Met with STAT and non-STAT writers about UI string improvements. Added labels to the cards. Created Doc add-in Jiras to track the project.
- Susan C: Working on FrameMaker & basic JMP training for our new intern, Khawar.
Drafted my goals for 2024. Updated the Confluence page on Labels. Reviewed past strings to pull out common errors to discuss at meeting. Updated the Confluence page for Generating and publishing the HTML5 help. Completed module 1 of SAS compliance training.
- Devon: Continued work on FrameMaker conversion. Finishing up mapping paragraph styles and wrapping rules for conversion to XML tags. Testing on chapters of the Discovering JMP book. Compliance training.
System/Host Testing-Cary
- Nick H: Compiled a list of all the Sample Presets that export to HTML as non-interactive and made Jiras on both the HTML5 and Preset side to try and get these all shipping as interactive in the future. Worked with Myron to get an issue fixed where 18.0.1 test results were not loading properly into the Testing Dashboard. Tracked down an issue brought up in an EA track where OnChange was not respecting RunScript(0) option for displaybox setters. Cleaning up some 19.0 unit tests failures, one leading to the discovery of a crash related to R script windows. Also worked on some 19.0/18.1 verifications.
- Mandy: Worked on some JIRAs and tried a few workflow builder things I had seen. Played a lot with the reworked JMP 19 data table and identified issues. Answered a few TS tracks – trying to resolve crashes that came in with and without details. Opened a few tracks after developers looked to try and help narrow down where issues were. Shout out to Chris Humphrey and Dave Barbour for always keeping the JMPRUNNERs up for us – I for one use them a lot, especially when comparing different JMP behavior quickly or narrowing down where something broke.
- Audrey: Jenkins job maintenance, obtained and set up my new M3 Mac, ran tests on said M3 machine and found no new diffs in Baseline or NIST, ongoing Jira and Confluence admin tasks, helping team members catch up with verifications from past releases.
- Lisa: Updated the JSL test timing script to remove 18.0 tests and get it running for 18.1 and 19.0 and spent some time triaging hover label tickets.
Web Testing – Cary
- Natalie H: Continued Automation training with Steve. This week we focused on HTML5 specifically. I am now running tests on my own, looking at failures and attempting to isolate the issues.
- Anna: Verifying hoverlabel issues Andrew fixed for Summary Statistics formatting. Adding tests programs and investigating TS tracks. Reported a crash that JMP user Anderson Mayfield encountered when copying a complex map with the Web Map Service as map background.
- Josh L: JMP Live testing including but not limited to User Sync, package updates, publishing, sign-in, installation and configuration. Upgrading servers from JMP Live 18.0 to 19.0. Discussing the roadmap for JMP Live and HTML automation.
System/Host Testing-Beijing
- Beijing Team:
- Da Li: (1) Bug verification. (2) Corresponding UT cases. (3) DONE: Feature testing (WEBJMP-7867: Upgrade to Vue 3), total of 50 bugs created.
- Nan Wu: (1) Bug verification. (2) JMP 18.0 final installer #5 testing done. (3) Technical support issue investigation and sent feedback – Case number 00131333, 00122635. (4) Completed the ACT-Now Compliance Training (Q1)
- Kimi(Yu) Wang: (1) Bug verification. (2) Debug python-related UT failures – Root Cause: Install scripts is categorized under Regular Tests, but other python-related cases are in Rapid Tests. Discussed with Audrey and Jim to solve this issue. (3) Tech Support: Case TS-00130380 – Cannot reproduce but enter a jira to track, details refer to JMP-20685. (4) Do sanity regression testing for JMP 19.0 as upgrading to vue3 (Data-Client, Data Viewer-Client &Schedule-Client). (5) Jenkins: Check results for Beijing Daily UT. Debug migration test failures, details refer to JMPTESTBJ-2985 - Done. Debug E2E test failures on windows, details refer to JMPTESTBJ-2983 - Done. Debug E2E abort jobs on mac, details refer to JMPTESTBJ-2984 – NoRep now.
- Da Zhang: (1) Bug verification. (2) JMP Live servers upgrade (JMPTESTBJ-2988).
- Bella: (1) Learning and Development: Learn about using JMP. (2) The installment and testing of JMP 18.0. (3) Upgrade PostgreSQL to 14.11 for JMP Live 18.1. (4) Bug verification.
- Nala: (1) Bug Verification. (2) Training for Bella: Getting to know her experience and skills, and briefly introducing JMP Live installation packages.
Data Discovery
- Dan S: 18.1 fix for crash calling <
- Morgan: Began work on adding insertable snippets to Script Editor, which allow users to write their own bits of code which they can invoke via shortcuts. Continued early work on the light IDE which is expected for 19, and on expanding the types of files which are supported in Script Editor.
- Dave B: Spent some time looking at why the image tests seem to sometimes get stuck on a few tests. Updated jmprunner to match the new nightly builds directory names. Looked into a couple of crashes.
- Parker: Worked with Peng Liu and found potential O(n*m) -> O(nlog(n)) runtime fix for Life Distribution platform (JMP-20402). OOO next week.
Note from Shannon
There are many thought-provoking comics out there for International Women’s Day – below is just one that I came across. On this day, and every day, I think the question we should be asking ourselves is - what are we personally doing to “pass along our signs” to our daughters and sons so that they too learn to advocate for greater equality for all people? Yes, it would be great if no one anywhere in the world still needed those signs, but we are just not there yet. Fact-based education about the history of the struggle for equality in this country is one important step in the process.
In addition to IWD, this week also marked the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday at Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, a key event in the Civil Rights movement. Whatever your political opinions, you have to appreciate the historical significance of the first woman of color to win the office of Vice President delivering remarks about the events of that day (PBS News Hour article here)!
Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!
