The ArchestrAnaut

I spent last Friday & Saturday writing some SQL code for client to make finding historical data “outages” quicker and easier.  They wanted to know where all of the time spans where the quality wasn’t good.  I was thinking it was a little like a needle in a haystack problem, but it’s not.  It’s harder than that.  It’s more like measuring every piece of hay in the haystack.

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I read with interest a post by Michael Boor over at the WDN on Agile Development.

Link Found Here

My feeble understanding of the concept is that you don’t approach projects in the old school way.

1) Write lengthy detailed requirements
2) Spend a long time coding to those requirements
3) Have one or two review sessions with the customers to figure out all the stuff they hate and probably should have checked with them earlier on…even though they signed off on the spec
4) Update the spec with all the comments
5) Recode
6) Another round of reviews

The gist is that you do your work in almost freeform really small chunks with rapid review cycles and almost real time feedback.  Someone please correct me if I am way way out in left field.

I responded to Michael’s post asking if he had any experience with engineering groups in regulated industries like ourselves.  You’ll see my comment below the article.

Is anyone else out there approaching their automation project with Agile, or any of the other new development approaches such as XP, etc.

Thanks,
Andy

We ran into a bootstrap issue on a live system this week.  This customer can’t lose data.  On the plus side, it’s a redundant setup & everything is running fine on one machine.  The problem is that we need to wipe the platform that isn’t running the objects (use Platform Killer).

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A friend of the blog, Todd Youngblood with the YPS Group, did some really neat work at a recent CSIA (Control System Integrators Association) conference.  Briefly he setup a “radio” station at the conference and did numerous interviews with lots of movers and shakers.  One of these interviews was with Scott Kiser and Marc Vermette.  Scott is in charge of the System Integrator program for Wonderware Invensys.  Marc also works with System Integrators at a corporate level.  In other words, these guys are pretty far up the food chain on the mothership.  Anyway, close to the tail end of the interview Todd chimes in with a question to Scott and Marc if they have seen the work we’re doing at the ArchestrAnaut.  They indicated that they were very aware of us and passed our link along to numerous people inside Invensys.  Here’s a link to the interview if you are interested.

http://dreamlandinteractive.com/2011/05/scott-kiser-marc-vermette-of-invensys-on-csia-radio/

If you want to skip the corporate talk go to around the 9 minute mark.

Or, here is a shorter version with just the little blurb about us

http://www.avidsolutionsinc.com/files/archestranaut.mp3

Are we posting this to toot our own horns?  Not really.  The real purpose of sharing this with the community is to reinforce something I’ve mentioned a few times before.  There are a number of people inside Wonderware monitoring what we’re doing here… and these are people that can really make a difference.  While we won’t ever guarantee that if you make a comment or post something here it will be heard and/or acted upon by internal Wonderware personnel, what we would say is this is a pretty good platform for venting any frustrations or crazy new ideas you might have.

Finally, if you’ve got an interesting story, idea, anecdote, etc. you’d like to share, please let us know.  We think we do a fair job of keeping content fresh but more variety is always better.

- Andy

There are a number of neat little shortcuts and helpers in System Platform that you probably didn’t learn in class, or if you did you’ve forgotten.  Here are a few of our favorites.

Log Monitor
The Log Monitor gives you an overview of the number of Errors and Warnings since a Reset on all platforms in your system.  This is super convenient when you are trying to bring a system up or you want to get a sense of how your system ran overnight.  I know there are many times where we fight a problem for a long time and then when we come in the next morning we want to do a really quick check to see what happened overnight.  With this tool you can perform a reset before you go home then check on how things went the next day.

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