Sonam Chauhan

1
B2B Change Management at Corporate Express

• Sonam Chauhan
• Corporate Express

2
Overview

• Introduction
• Change Process
• Testing
• Monitoring and Administration
• Change Deployment
• CECM Deployment Verification Tool
• webMethods Deployer?
• Some Feature Requests

3
Introduction

• Constant pressure for change ?
• Change management process crucial
• webMethods weaknesses
• Development skills required for changes
• Primitive source control
• Lack of testing support
• No verification of change deployments

4
Change Process
Requirements Specification
Requirements Definition
Changes
ValidatedChanges
Review and Testing
Change Deployment (Test ? UAT ? Live)
5
Testing

• Like development, testing is an engineering skill
• Allocate limited resources for max. benefit.
• Best return for your testing buck ? Black-box
  Integration testing for Regressions
• High level tests simulate live use
• Tests can be external to code
• Easy to retrofit to existing codebase
• Regression are the costliest bugs
• All changes must first do no harm

6
More Testing Points

• Developers can be testers!
• Commitment to quality
• Make test development part of development process
• Make reviews of the test code part of code review
  process
• Automate testing
• Automated Regression Testing Harness
• Without automation, testing is tedious work
• Automation increases productivity and efficiency
• Permanently add hard-won insight to corporate
  memory
• And replay it on demand
• Essential for managing change in complex systems
• Active testing catches problems early
• Load testing often very important
• Some bugs can only be "teased out" under load.

7
Testing with JMeter
Load testing part of same test script
Use TN database to help test document transforms

• Multiple such test scripts are run by an
  automated regression test harness

8
Monitoring and Administration

• Separate developers from day to day server
  administration
• Better staff productivity, better server
  stability
• Create monitor services specific to your needs
• For eg Can clients can access B2B resources? Is
  B2B thread count approaching dangerous levels?
• Integrate monitor services with external
  monitoring tools (eg Nagios, OpenView)
• Quantify system availability
• Unified system monitoring interface makes it easy
  to administer systems

9
Change DeploymentProcess

• A defined process is important
• Implementation Plan
• Reviews and approval signoffs
• Post Implementation Actions
• Test Plan
• Rollback Pan
• Currently, some deployments require webMethods
  development skills

10
CECM Deployment Verification Tool

• CECM CE Configuration Management
• A B2B package used to collate and compare package
  configuration information from an arbitrary
  number of webMethods B2B servers.
• Calculates md5 checksum of package files
• Shows package level differences
• Ability to drill down to file level differences
• Essentially, a Server-Diff tool

11
Choose servers to Diff
12
Package level issues
Drill down to file differences
Hatched pattern means package missing
13
Different colours mean file has different
checksums
Similar colours mean file has same checksum
Hatched pattern means file missing
14
CECM - Usage

• Used in detecting and correcting incorrectly
  setup B2B environments
• For e.g. a change that failed to deploy on one
  node in a cluster
• Used to assure correct deployment of B2B packages
  in a Develop/Test/Release cycle.

15
CECM - Details

• Option to exclude package manifests file
• Manifest.v3 file contains package creation
  timestamp
• No session data persistence need to use Mozilla
  for file-level drill-down
• Arbitrary limitation in IE 5.5 GET URLs clipped
  to 4096 bytes
• Which files are included for package comparison?
• Simple All files documented as needing source
  control
• /manifest.v3
• /pub/
• /widls/
• /templates/
• /code/jars/
• /code/libs/
• /code/source/
• /ns/
• Excludes /data/, /config/, and other directories

16
wM Deployer?

• Deployer - a good idea
• Still maturing
• Seems to lack rollback functionality(?)
• Some bugs
• Package version number promotion bug
• Problem with ACL assignments
• Questions about TN promotion ability
• Can it link profiles and document types to
  processing rule changes? (i.e. Can it remove need
  for TN Console in change deployment?).

17
Some Feature Requests

• Deployer is a good idea - improve and extend its
  functionality
• Eg Give it CECMs ability to diff servers
• Give it functionality to version a server state
  and rollback the entire server to a known state
• Create functionality or build hooks for
• Source code management systems
• Automated documentation generation
• (including TN rules)
• Automated Testing