Today, I decided to start blogging about Dashboards used in Sun Java Studio Creator.
Developing applications using Sun Java Studio Creator is like a Customer activity. I better understand the full picture, including
dealing with performance issues, defects, seeing ways Creator can be improved, ...
The Dashboards I develop are Web applications developed using Creator which help track product cycle progress through bug activity.
These applications query Sun's Bug Tracking database using various constraints depending on the product area, Quality Criteria release constraints, date, etc. Over 10 applications have been developed and are running 24x7 using Sun Java Application Server 8.0 and 8.1. Those applications which take awhile to display the data because of all the queries or the application is accessed frequently by many users. For these applications, static html pages are generated. This helps reduce server load and give a quicker response.
The previous Bug Tracking system was running on aging hardware and occassionally would be unresponsive during heavy activity. During the 1.0 release of Creator, the Dashboards were querying this older Bug Tracking system and would go down at the wrong time or would take a long time to respond. Since the Dashboards are hosted on a Sun Application Server, the Dashboards make a good test case for the server. When making enhancements to an application and redeploying, the 8.0 server would run out of memory. These 2 issues were devastating to the Quality Council (group who monitors the Quality Criteria). To do away with the misery, Dashboy got busy. First the "out of memory" errors were communicated to the Sun Application Server team. Eventually fixes were made or backported and heap size was increased and now, in 8.0, memory issues are a thing of the past.
Here's the heap increases which were made to the jvm options of Sun App Server:
Quality Criteria is a metric or goal that the Creator team strives to reach. For example, all priority 1 (most serious defects) must be fixed before the product can be released. Another criteria is to fix, say, 300 priority 3 bugs for a release
There might be 4 Quality Criteria per release, depending on whether the release is an update or full release. For 2.0, there are 4.
On the main Quality Dashboard are several numbers which include the state of the Quality Criteria and links to the bug lists (Next blog, I'll start describing the design and architecture of Dashboards).
Also the Quality Dashboard has become a 1-stop shopping where there are links to most of the Dashboards and the Quality Criteria state for each of Creator's modules. One module is the Designer which is a WYSIWYG editor for designing a Web Page. Check out Sun Java Studio Creator if you haven't already. It's a lot of fun to use and it's useful for cooking up web sites.
The previous Bug Tracking system was running on aging hardware and occassionally would be unresponsive during heavy activity. During the 1.0 release of Creator, the Dashboards were querying this older Bug Tracking system and would go down at the wrong time or would take a long time to respond. Since the Dashboards are hosted on a Sun Application Server, the Dashboards make a good test case for the server. When making enhancements to an application and redeploying, the 8.0 server would run out of memory. These 2 issues were devastating to the Quality Council (group who monitors the Quality Criteria). To do away with the misery, Dashboy got busy. First the "out of memory" errors were communicated to the Sun Application Server team. Eventually fixes were made or backported and heap size was increased and now, in 8.0, memory issues are a thing of the past.
Here's the heap increases which were made to the jvm options of Sun App Server:
-XX:NewRatio=2 -XX:PermSize=32m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled
Quality Criteria is a metric or goal that the Creator team strives to reach. For example, all priority 1 (most serious defects) must be fixed before the product can be released. Another criteria is to fix, say, 300 priority 3 bugs for a release
There might be 4 Quality Criteria per release, depending on whether the release is an update or full release. For 2.0, there are 4.
On the main Quality Dashboard are several numbers which include the state of the Quality Criteria and links to the bug lists (Next blog, I'll start describing the design and architecture of Dashboards).
Also the Quality Dashboard has become a 1-stop shopping where there are links to most of the Dashboards and the Quality Criteria state for each of Creator's modules. One module is the Designer which is a WYSIWYG editor for designing a Web Page. Check out Sun Java Studio Creator if you haven't already. It's a lot of fun to use and it's useful for cooking up web sites.
. btw, I'm not called Dash - sounds more cool and easier to say while dashing by in the hallway at work.
Dash almost missed the shuttle bus to PDC. (That was pretty incredible - Microsoft arranged to have buses arrive every 10-15 mins
at a hotel and shuttle attendees to the LA Convention Center). Since Dash was wearing a Sun PDC demo shirt, as I was about
to step on the bus, a friendly Microsoft .NET Technology Evangelist stopped me and asked me , "what do you do at Sun ?" I didnt'
want to reveal who I really was, Dash, so I told her my real job - Quality Assurance Engineer on 
