Download - Attrice

Harvest
Administrator
Assistant
Product perspective
May 2006
Product opportunity
Computer Associates AllFusion Harvest Change
Manager is one of the leading CM solutions on the
market.
While satisfying all needs of developers, CM
administrator tasks are somewhat neglected, which
impacts productivity and ease of maintenance of the
whole system.
Harvest Administrator Assistant purposes to
improve and enhance Harvest administrator user
experience.
Environment management scale
In typical Harvest mid- to large-sized environments
there are hundreds of projects, each having tens of
states and tens of processes within each state.
To estimate number of entities managed:
100 projects
100x10 = 1,000 states (10 in each project)
1,000x10 = 10,000 processes (10 in each state)
And we are considering lower-bound estimates
without even taking linked processes into account!
Environment management problem
Processes are the smallest building blocks of
business logic enforced in Harvest environment.
As we have shown, even middle sized installation
leaves the administrator with 10,000 processes to
manage!
And enterprise business logic is dynamic, making
change of process definitions everyday task for CM
administrator.
Current means of process management
To change process definitions, CM administrator users may use
Harvest Administrator application. While well-suited to handling
changes for a single process, the task of changing access
permissions for 20 processes in different states of different
projects will require significant time, effort and is quite error-prone
(for example, it takes 11 mouse clicks to perform access
modification for a single process )
Current means of process management
To decrease time and effort needed to modify
process definitions, CM administrator users often
resort to low-level methods such as direct database
modification using SQL. While fast, the method is
prone to critical errors and requires steep learning
curve.
The solution
To illustrate how Harvest Administrator Assistant
increases productivity and eliminates errors, let’s
have a look at example mentioned before.
To change access definitions of 20 processes the
following steps are required:
1) Select processes to modify by specifying custom
filter on project, state, process properties
2) View and modify selected processes access list
And that’s instead of 200+ mouse-clicks required in
Harvest Administrator, saying naught of complicated
SQL queries!
The features – Change processes
Harvest Administrator Assistant tool allows CM
administrators conveniently change process
definitions.
User may change process properties in batches
according to her selection, including:
* Common properties (name, note)
* Access list (execute grant/revoke)
* Process-type specific properties
For User-Defined Processes (UDP) and Notify
processes extended user-interface is available.
Process change
Search
Change
…
and more
and
common
access
process
select
for properties
UDP/Notify/linked
type
properties
processes
specific to
properties
change
processes
The features – Change processes for
linked processes
It is possible to change linked processes common
properties both by searching parent processes or by
searching for specific linked processes.
User may change linked process properties in
batches according to her selection, including:
* Common properties (name, note)
* Process-type specific properties
Extended user-interface for User-Defined Processes
(UDP) and Notify process types makes changing
linked process properties effortless and convenient.
Linked process change
Search and
Change
process
selecttype
linked
specific
processes
properties
to change
The features – Create processes
Harvest Administrator Assistant tool allows CM
administrators to create new processes from
definitions of already existing processes.
Create processes from existing process, duplicating
process properties including:
* Process properties
* Process access list
* Linked processes
Users may create both ordinary and linked
processes.
It is also possible to create linked processes from
ordinary ones and vs. (for UDP and Notify processes
only)
Process duplication
Select
Set
duplication
project,definitions
project
and
state
advanced
state
andto
process
parameters
duplicate
to duplicate
process to
from
Process
duplicated!
The technology
Harvest Administrator Assistant was developed
using C#. on Microsoft .NET platform for Windows.
The data are retrieved and modified by direct
database access using proprietary data access
components, that support range of databases
(currently Oracle only is supported, Microsoft SQL
Server and Ingres are planned in future releases).
Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the application is
consistent with Windows XP look and feel.
Supported versions
The Harvest Administration Assistant was originally
developed for Harvest version 5.0.
At the time of release, the product supports Harvest
versions r7 and r7.1 on Oracle database 10g.