Welcome to the JMP Development Update for September 27, 2024!
This week, I would like to extend a warm welcome to Valerie Nedbal who starts a new position in the product management team on October 1! Valerie has supported our JMP life sciences customers for many years as an SE and a member of the technical enablement team, and now will be the product manager for HLS and Advanced Analytics. We’re very glad to have her!
JMP 19 feature work continues and bug fixes continue to be integrated to the 18.2 track. Thanks for all the updates to JMP 19 feature pages in the past few weeks – there has been a lot of activity and great new content added! JMP 19 EA3 is still in the installer testing phase and is looking good so far. We plan to release JMP, JMP Pro and JMP Clinical EA3 and notify customers next week, provided no major issues are found as installer validation concludes.
We still have several weeks before we’ll get to security freeze for our next dot-dot release (18.1.1) so that leaves plenty of time to address any new high and critical security issues. Speaking of 18.1.1 fixes, if you think you have identified a showstopper bug that can’t wait for 18.2, please discuss it with your manager and if they are in support, request approval for inclusion in 18.1.1 via the JMP Approvers list.
A special note on server decommission + server ownership registration in ServiceNow
If you know of any CIS-managed servers which are no longer in use and should be decommissioned, please send an email to Shannon Leslie and she’ll file the request with CIS. Note these are already in the list to be decommissioned: jmpsrv10, jmpsrvut00-jmpsrvut06.
Shannon L is also working through our inventory of SAS-managed VMs and servers to make sure that we have ownership set in those Configuration Items in ServiceNow - so that CIS knows who to contact regarding alerts or if there is software out of compliance. If you or your teams know of any servers or VMs managed by CIS in SAS that also need a review, please send Shannon L an email.
Finally, thanks very much to Core developer Evan McCorkle for presenting on JMP Style Sheets (JSS) at the JMP Dev meeting this week! Thanks to Dan Schikore for helping monitor the very active chat. If you missed the meeting, you can find a recording here. This feature is in JMP 19 EA3 in testing now, and will continue to evolve as we move towards feature freeze next January.
General Announcements
Important Upcoming Dates
- JMP 18.1.1 Security Freeze – 11/1/24
- JMP 18.1.1 Final Image Candidate – 11/4/24
- JMP 18.1.1 QA Signoff – 11/14/24
- JMP 18.1.1 Release in MyJMP - ~11/19/2024
- Please visit Confluence for a full list of JMP 18 and JMP 19 dates.
JMP Development Updates
Product Management and Product Marketing
- Bryan F: Working on the logistics and studies for Discovery Summit JMP Lab, including studies for the new data table (a special shoutout to Sarah Sylvestre), Easy DOE (thank you Jacob Rhyne and Mark Bailey), and JMP Live control chart triaging (thank you to Aurora Tiffany-Davis). Continued development of JMP Live theme specifications for both JMP and HTML, with special recognition to Praveena Panineerkandy, Paul Spychala, and John Powell for their contributions to the JMP Live HTML5 revamp. Provided additional input on the placement of Data Connectors in the menu system. Currently in the process of handling the purchase requisition for icons through Oracle Fusion, and have successfully secured SAS legal approval for the distribution of the Roboto font. Grateful for the openness to design feedback on JMP Live shown by Adriana Beck, Michael Goff, and Justin Chilton!
Technical Support and Engagement
- Wendy:
- A big THANK YOU to Bryan Boone this week for his assistance with a Snowflake issue where it was discovered that the bug was on the Snowflake ODBC driver side!
- This week, I am including the usual graphs for case volume as well as topics for both Tech Support and Engagement.
- 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.
Technical Support Case Volume by week:
Case Topics for Technical Support queue, last week:
Engagement Support Case Volume by week:
Case Topics for Engagement queue, last week:
Development Operations
- Bob: Finished changes for EA3 that will prompt user to uninstall older EA if found. Added translated string to this message as provide by Trish's team. HTML file fixes with EA after build was done out of regular process. Work on fix for Python files not being processed properly by 18.1 Windows installer running in maintenance mode (JMP-23158).
- Shannon L: reviewing servers managed by CIS to ensure ownership is set, and determine any which need to be decommissioned; review Jira best-practices with users; weekly dev meetings on Builds, StringBot migration, DevOps; following up on older open Jira DevOps issues; program mgmt assistance for Oxygen migration; investigated problem with Confluence Cloud not consistently showing embedded images; investigating Confluence API scripting for better reporting on EA feature pages.
- Myron: Working on Mac symbolize script to fix permission errors (JMPTOOL-1374). Finished updating PHP, ODBC, test & crash web pages, etc. on jmptool for GIS compliance (JMPTOOL-1353). Started initial planning for SQL Server database migration (to Postgres).
- Jim: Worked on EA#3 and JIRAs.
Localization
- Krzysztof: Processing Japanese 18.0 Book translation returns from the vendor. Processing translation updates to Marketplace translations. Machine translated Marketplace add-in descriptions. Processing Chinese translations of Clinical. Testing new L10N automation features.
- Allison: Finalized and validated JA localized 18.0 JMP Documentation. Validated localized Documentation pdfs and screenshots and handed off localized Documentation pdfs to QA for testing. Responded to queries related to localizing JMP Marketplace.
- Howard: Finish Dashboard Translation push feature, updated some client side JQuery handling. Finish API standardization. Working on Dashboard JIRA integration – Project enabling.
- Sohail: Completed external deployment of TM Search interface with supporting maintenance scripts, added new search and download features, resolved some reported bugs.
- Sandy: Continuing work on file validation program for image diff job. Tested push function on project creation dashboard.
Documentation
- Khawar: Essential Graphic Jiras: Resolved some issues that came up in JMP 17 and 18; Reached out to Xan for help and feedback. Sample Index: Adding content to the spreadsheet and finding examples of issues. Oxygen: Creating some callout images using the SnagIt theme.
- Qiana: Completed the doc retention policy work (for now). Worked on a few Jiras. Did some JMP 19.0 project planning.
System/Host Testing-Cary
- Audrey: EA3 Testing (expecting a signoff Monday morning). Continuing work related to parallelizing our JSL test runs – this week I looked at rebalancing our JSL unit test streams. See the graph below (or in JMP Live) showing how long our various runs take each day. The ‘regular’ stream takes the longest amount of time currently. The goal will be to balance the streams so that they each take roughly equal amounts of times, by partitioning our tests intelligently among the three streams. I’ve started experimenting with rebalancing 18.1.1 (shown on the left) and have overcompensated. I am still looking at different ways to do it.
- Mandy: Created 2 EA videos - one for Workflow builder find/replace search and the other for Column tagging updates since EA1. Tested JMP19EA3 and reported/documented a Tabulate crash - it will be fixed for EA4 but if anyone reports it in EA3, the crashes should match up easily. Continued testing New Data Grid - adding issues found by me or others and testing new changes. Reported a performance issue on Mac with the new Sequoia update (JMP-23167). Working on a Discovery Summit roadmap talk for Workflow builder updates to 18 and 19 and Presets in preparation for practice next Tuesday. Below, you can see an example of the WFB find/replace dialog that lets you change something in the workflow and rerun it another way.
- Hunter: Completed JMP 19 EA3 testing on several configurations. Worked with Daniel P. to report and test a fix for offline, air-gapped authorization failures exclusive to JMP 19 on Mac. Reported problem to CIS staff and tested their workaround where a recent update to BeyondTrust prevents JMP and other applications from running with Intel emulation on Apple Silicon Macs. Reviewed more localized documentation PDF files.
- Nick H: Worked on some testing dashboard enhancements to prepare for upcoming jmptool retention policy changes. Also fixed a bug with the unit test view for all testers showing null instead of ‘All Testers’ in the page header, worked on some bug verifications and added image tests for padding changes in JMP 19.
Web Testing – Cary
- Josh: Working on JMP Live regression. I have spent a lot of time converting some of the refresh scripts to python or running JSL on a local server that also doubles as a webserver. This allows me to have refresh scripts run more often and avoids errors due to rate limits on other sites. So far this has been very helpful in stress testing and keeping the servers over some sort of load.
- Natalie: Made progress this week with Phase 2 of the Interactive HTML automation updates for Fit to Window. We now have several dual coverage testcases for these areas. Added a new plugin to our testing tools for this continued work. Our monthly dev/testing meeting to discuss automation and UI progress and future plans was very successful.
- Anna: Finishing verifications for Add-Ins fixes. Testing resizing for Graph Builder charts in HTML5 and JMP Live. Verifying Group platform fix.
System/Host Testing-Beijing
Core
- Dan S: Data Filter Order-By-Count is now consistent between Mac/Win. Replaced an undocumented styling feature for JMP Clinical with a JMPClinical JSS file. Fixed a few cases where unnecessary SendToReport were generated for platform reports. Working on the general issue of SendToReport for font changes via JSS styling. Fixes for TabPage/TabList/Splitter to make stretching more consistent with expectations. Fixed some by-group launch cases that did not have a Group Platform outline.
- Morgan: Sdded column name and data table name styling settings to Script Editor, removed the “Additional code folding keywords” preference, and added a preference that enables auto-completion in Script Editor.
- Evan: More MetadataExplorer (aka DataTable Left Panel) work. Preparing for Discovery Roadmap session.
- Xan: Stat Speaking prep and color contrast work.
DOE and Reliability
- Caleb: Spent some time preparing for the upcoming Fall Technical Conference. I’ll be presenting on some joint work with Brad Jones and Chris Nachtsheim. I also addressed some sample size explorer bugs.
- Irene: Working on a few more Jira tickets, preparing slides for MEMOCODE and AISC, and running simulations for research project.
Hosting and Interfaces
- John Schroedl: Dark Mode on Windows is now available. It is still very fresh and there are definite limitations and problems -see the full progress details I sent in an earlier email to the JMP RD list. I’m not ready to take jiras on every detail as there are still large areas unimplemented. But let me know of serious issues. I’d like to thank Evan McCorkle greatly for discussion, debugging and help on the effort!
Interactive HTML
- John Powell:
- Added to a discussion about a feature not being supported in Interactive HTML on the JMP User Community. Completed the first module of the STIPS course.
- Spoke with Nick Ruva and Paul Spychala about our build no longer automatically starting when we commit JavaScript code. Fixed by Nick. Thanks!
- Completed Q3 check-in conversations. Met with team to discuss and set story points on stories in our current sprint.
- Discussed Aaron’s work to publish John’s Process Screening Browser to JMP Live (WEBJMP-9084). Created a bug for Fit to Window when outline nodes are closed (JMPHTML-14121).
- Interactive HTML Scatterplot 3D:
- Support for Ordinal color role (JMPHTML-14113).
- Detect and render By Groups/Subsets static (JMPHTML-14122).
- Researched marker sizing which appears to be different depending on the marker shape.
- Added selection reflection support to Scatterplot 3D(JMPHTML-14126).
- Reviewed Michael Senoyuit’s initial implementation of Multiple Response local data filters.
- Fixed a static analyzer warning with respect to switch case fall through.
- Mike Stickles: Continuing work on JMPHTML-1407 (Legend setting on size role does not work on HTML5). Discovered some complicating factors that made the initial approach non-viable; trying a different approach. Began to split time between that issue and JMPHTML-13966 (Word Cloud selections not working properly) and the related issue JMPHTML-13982 (Implement selection capability in Text Explorer term lists); currently getting up to speed on recent changes in HTML table selection which will likely affect both issues.
- Paul Spychala: Added support for Control Chart Builder with Phase Role Fit to Window in HTML (JMPHTML-14096). This completes Fit to Window support for Control Chart Builder.
- Michael Senoyuit: Started working on multi response data filters for JMP live and tooltip graphlets for JMP Live.
JMP Live
- Aurora: Control chart warning improvements (minor bug fix, ironing out implementation questions with other devs, working on a script for a UX lab at Discovery Americas with Praveena, finalized Discovery Europe 2025 abstract with other devs, met with Jianfeng and others to brainstorm MDMVCC and JMP Live). Third party package updates.
Statistics
- Laura C-S: Added a new red triangle menu to the Equation Details outline of the MIIV-2SLS report in SEM, which allows users to display MSE and composite disturbances for each equation. Fixed numerous bugs with higher-order models when using MIIV-2SLS, including issues with convergence, interactive specification, and proper identification of instrumental variables. Integrated a fix to 18.2 related to a confusing message in a progress bar in SEM. Fixed a path diagram issue where R^2 values weren’t showing up consistently.
- John Sall: In Response Screening, the option "Missing is Category" now is supported for Grouping columns also (JMP-22931).
Stat Documentation
- Michael C: Volunteered at the Food Bank in Raleigh with other members of the Stat R&D team; starting work on Scripting Index updates for Standard Least Squares in Fit Model; completed some manager training courses.
Stat Testing
- Jacob: Writing a unit test for Choice Design. Preparing add-in for Easy DOE usability study at Discovery. Investigating potential performance issues. Verifying Jira tickets and cleaning unit tests.
Life Sciences Updates
- Drew: Fix/implement JMP Clinical 18.2 and 19.0 bugs/features. Provided JSL scripts and guidance to Chris at FDA for managing their JMPC 18.1 rollout. Started work on Discovery plenary contribution/presentation - section 4d (plenary).
Note from Shannon
Thanks to Mike Stickles for sharing this t-shirt picture – I think we’ve all been there! :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes: Hope you all have a great weekend!
