Welcome to the JMP Development Update for February 7, 2025!
After what feels like several weeks in a row of announcing new JMP desktop releases, I don’t have one of those to announce today! However, I am very happy to share the news that the JMP Marketplace February update has been released. You can read all the details in the February JMP Marketplace update article published by the product marketing team. This month, the featured extension is Will Morgan’s S3 data connector. The article also shares statistics on Marketplace usage and a list of new extensions available for download. It’s been exciting to see the continued growth and expansion of the Marketplace, a collaborative effort between product management, host development, system testing, and the localization team. The team has met all of their phase 1 goals and will continue to improve the Marketplace on a monthly cadence.
As we move towards freezing for JMP 19 EA7 next Thursday February 13, thanks in advance for updating your JMP 19 feature pages. As I mentioned in this morning’s call for updates email, Mia uses feature pages in our standard EA process to gather details about features that are ready to test for each EA. Also, these pages become a valuable source for writers on JMP documentation teams as well as Hyde Miller who develops training material for SEs each release cycle.
If you haven’t created a feature page recently and need a refresher on how to do it, please see this How-To page in the JMP 19 Features Category section in the JMP Confluence project. There are also many feature pages already in the JMP 19 Features Category section that you can take a look at for ideas. For example, here’s a nice page Ernest Pasour and Mandy Chambers put together to highlight updates made to the Column Tagging feature for EA6. Note the summary information in the Motivation and Summary section, the Jira issue listed, the list of questions for EA customers and of course some colorful screenshots.
If you already have a feature page created but it’s been a while since you updated it to add new content, please make sure that you update the Motivation and Summary section of your feature page and specifically call out items ready for testing in EA7. You can remove outdated details, or move older information that is still relevant but not new to the bottom of the page.
Since we are freezing on Thursday 2/13/25, please complete your feature page updates by the end of the day Friday, 2/14/25. But you don’t have to wait for the freeze to start working on updates. The more up to date you can keep your feature pages as you make progress throughout the month, the less Mia will need to ping you to ask for updates while she’s compiling content. As I noted in a previous week, we are switching from Friday to Thursday EA freezes to give DevOps an extra day before the weekend to troubleshoot any unexpected EA build or installer issues. Audrey is also working with her teams to further streamline the installer vetting process so that QA can sign off on installers sooner. All in all, we hope to shrink the time between EA freeze to EA availability in MyJMP so that we can get feedback on your new items as soon as possible.
Finally, thanks very much to Tonya Mauldin for sharing this week’s beta/crash cases (with crashes selected)!
Beta and crash report for the week of Feb 7 2025 | JMP Live
Tonya has also created summary reports for the EA feedback we have received so far for JMP 19 (preEA – EA5). You can find the following graphs and many others a JMP 19 EA Summary Reports | JMP Live.
Here is a treemap of Subtopic.
Here is a stacked bar chart for Jira tickets reported during the EA cycle that are still open.
General Announcements
Important Upcoming Dates
- JMP 18.2 Security Freeze – 2/21/25
- JMP 18.2 Final Image Candidate – 2/24/25
- JMP 18.2 QA Signoff – 3/13/25
- JMP 18.2 Release in MyJMP - 3/18/25
- Please visit Confluence for a full list of JMP 18 and JMP 19 dates.
JMP Development Updates
Hosting and Interfaces
- Michael H:
- Improving the performance of our Leaks run, which according to Jim Borek was taking a month (!) to complete.
- Fixed a few leaks I found while working on the above.
- Worked with Chris on the Sequoia slowdown caused by us asking the OS for printer metrics too often.
- Worked with John Schroedl on Input Method Editor (i.e., Japanese, etc.) improvements for Scintilla text fields (i.e., a Script window).
- John Schroedl: Pushed first attempt at supporting inline IME text entry in the script editor for Japanese, Chinese and Korean languages (JMP-586). Thanks to Morgan Gribbins for reviewing my abuse of scintilla and to Yusuke Ono-san for diving in and already reporting a bug. Michael Hecht has also helped my understanding of the Mac code. This addition on Windows will deserve a late-feature page if we get it working well enough for production. I have made various changes related to text handling and addressed a font-fallback issue Evan helped uncover.
Interactive HTML
- Praveena: Worked with Paul on menu refactoring and worked on the following Control Chart Warnings issues:
- Mike Stickles: Completed work on JMPHTML-2123 (Support axis Format to show Scientific format w/base and power/exponent instead of "e"), expanded to cover all labels (not just axes). Currently evaluating several other formatting issues in the HTML to see which should be worked on next.
JMP Live
- Aurora: Control chart warning improvements (tell client about number of data tables associated with valid warnings, sort markers by package update time, working on cursor paging of markers, prep for Discovery Europe). Improve formatting of objects in downloaded files.
Statistics
- Laura C-S: Continued working with Haley on the SEM workshop for SPSP (we finally finished all our slides). Fixed a crash with multiple group analysis and a bug with multivariate latent growth curves. Investigating another bug with specific indirect effects.
Stat Testing
- Mark: Finished an add-in for Chris to emulate the newer IndPenSim 2 simulator for a fed-batch process to ferment Penicillin. Also finished the introduction to the new add-in and emulator for Chris. Attended the first quarterly meeting of the JMP DEI Action Team in 2025. Reviewed the code for a unit test script by Jacob for the new Random Coefficients feature with him. Jacob and I drafted a presentation to JMP Stat Dev about how we use JMP covering arrays in our unit test scripts. Jacob and I reviewed a new usability study for the enhanced Random Coefficients feature with Ryan and Joseph.
- Tonya: Working on beta feedback reports and testing Annie’s recent CCB changes.
Life Sciences Updates
- Richard: Data Visualization with Applications to the Life Sciences Short Course will be taught to two ASA Chapters:
- Mid-Missouri Chapter
- Orange County/Long Beach Chapter
Product Management and Product Marketing
- Kaylee: The product marketing team just published the February JMP Marketplace update. This update gives information about the featured extension of the month (S3 data connector), new Marketplace stats, and the newest extensions on the Marketplace. As a reminder, Marketplace updates happen on a monthly cadence.
Technical Support and Engagement
- Wendy:
- Despite all the sickness going around, the Support teams have pulled together to stay on top of customer questions. Christine Kjellberg shared the following comment from a customer this week: "Thank you so much for all your help and your wonderful customer service and support …. such a great company to work with."
- Below are 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 Support 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
- Shannon L: Curating list of Atlassian February release changes affecting our Jira and Confluence sites. Configuration updates for our Jira instance - updates on both Atlassian updates and our configuration changes will be shared early next week. Regular product security vulnerability reviews. Meeting with Snyk support on scanning 3rd party library source code and kicked off project to manage that process and track library updates per product release. Program management help in the doc project. Product registration for export compliance discussions. Weekly technical meetings.
- Jim: Preparing new M3 and M4 Macs for UT runs. Thanks for the adapters, Michael Hecht; thanks to Josh LoPresti for setting up aliases for many Mac machines, allowing me to remotely access them. Multiple OS updates for unit test machines. Perforce support.
- Bob: Cleaned up folders with old installers. Secured downloads from sas.com in preparation for placement in MyJMP. Working with MyJMP team and consultants on strategy for proper uploading of software with critical metadata.
- Myron: Continuing the cleanup of old unit test files and data. Working on clean up and migration of telemetry data (JMPTOOL-1497).
- Shannon C: Reviewing JMP 19 Late Features page for completeness. Investigating unit test stream failures. Prepared for and attended various technical group meetings focused on tooling-related topics.
Localization
- Krzysztof: Continuing setup of the FrameMaker+FM2DITA envirnoment on our AWS machine (for Oxygen migration tasks). Refining MT process for JMP Marketplace Add-ins. Processing Korean PortableUI 19.0 delivery from our vendor. Answering queries from reviewers. Build test kits for all book and ui projects that will be automatically updated every weekend – they will be used for scoping, planning and evalution of updates and their impact on pretranslation.
- Ying: Upgraded to Windows 11. Reviewed Screenshot Instructions for JMP19 and set up the environment as required. Continuing to check EN screenshot scripts for UG and retaking screenshots if needed.
- Trish: Group goals for 2025 drafted and being reviewed by Localization Team. Worked with Documentation Team to refine process for Ying’s screenshot projects. Reviewing test kits created for JMP books.
- Sohail: Experimented different prompts/models for keyword extraction tasks, set up script for keyBERT/keyLLM extraction, tested JSL generation model and reported bugs.
- Sandy: Working on new string return process.
Documentation
- Qiana: Sample Index Consistency project work. Triaged Jiras for my team. Finished applying edits to the Windows and Apple macOS menu descriptions. Met with Trish and Devon to discuss Ying’s creation of screenshots for the UG. Met with Devon and Jill to discuss the editing of the UG. Ran production checks on assigned deliverables for EA 7 help build.
- Devon: Pushed converted XML documentation files for Doc team review, made a header formatting change for Stats and Doc writer review, and preparing to write Column Tagging documentation.
- Khawar: Shared sample index project updates. Created callout images. Reviewed and discussed callout guidelines with Chris. Ran production checks. Started working on JMP-24261.
System/Host Testing-Cary
- Mandy:
- Continue to work through Data table, Filter View and Tags issues. Wrote a test this week for Filter views – hoping to get JSL for tags soon so I can use Workflow builder to write some tests that import tables from scratch and work with tags and properties. Working through verifications and test updates. Answered a few TS tracks for EA6 – though not as many yet as I would have thought with all the new changes. Worked on creating a Feature Page for Tabulate updates for EA7 (even though those changes really were in EA5 and EA6).
- In the screenshot below showing the latest image of the 19 data table today, you can see that the rows panel now will show Visible Rows if using a filter; also note the Hide Columns icon to hide columns. Note that TAGS have moved down to the Columns Panel, they are no longer at the top:
- Hunter: Verification for recent authorization and host bug fixes. Met with Aaron about the state of several project defects.
Web Testing – Cary
- Josh:
- Added DNS aliases for Jim so he doesn't have to remember the IP versus the long, non-descriptive machine name.
- Fixed the schedule for the JMP Live 18.2 servers still in na.sas.com. Password changes on or around 1/15 caused this issue.
- Consolidated my JMP Live Server data collection scripts from 10 to 2, making them much more manageable.
- Completed Jira verifications for JMP Live and HTML.
- Moved some of my Jira reports to JMP Live.
- Natalie: We are successfully seeing ‘clean’ runs in the daily HMTL automation tests. Added new test coverage for Control Charts and Pie Charts. Steve and I are planning additional coverage for Control Charts with the addition of new Control Chart warning libraries for automation.
- Anna: Testing Xan’s fix for dynamic transforms, reporting Beta issues, looking at new data table filtered views and checking output in JMP Live.
Core
- Dan S: Graphlets for multiple response columns show the correct subset now. Fixed Model Dialog launcher to adapt to the new containers for each platform. Data Filter now creates categorical filter views (list, check, radio, etc) on demand rather than in advance - this is a nice speedup when using the filter-field to search in the list. Fixed "Start Over" in Data Filter, which in some cases left parts of the display, which could lead to a crash.
- Dave B: Fixed some progress bar regressions and updated ThreadPool to support confirmCancel. Add in Status dialog work. Outline box title editing bug fix. Tried to figure out why the jmprunner builds have slowed down so much.
- Xan: Added new JSL functions to operate on lists as sets, so that data filter can use them in its where clause expression for multiple-response variables.
- list = Set Intersection( list1, list2 );
- list = Set Union( list1, list2 );
- list = Set Difference( list1, list2 );
- list = Set Unique( list );
DOE and Reliability
- Caleb: Feverishly working to finalize some updates to the latest sample size explorers this week. Yeng and Jacob have been very helpful in providing quick feedback!
Note from Shannon
I hope that you all saw the Inside JMP article posted this week in honor of Black History Month! It notes that the SAS BIG group welcomes all SAS employees to a series of special BIG Friday events during this month, including wellness-focused meetups and themed café menus celebrating favorite dishes of historic Black Americans like Thurgood Marshall, Maya Angelou, Garrett Morgan and John Lewis. SAS and JMP have a strong commitment to fostering and celebrating diversity, equity and inclusion at our companies through education, events and fellowship. This month and throughout the year, I am truly proud to be a part of an organization that values diversity in people and perspectives.
Hope you all have a great weekend – although this still isn’t “real” spring yet – I’ll take it!
