One of the most prolific CA Smart Partners (Jumar Solutions ) has updated their website with complete new look - Go and check it out !!
Why am I “plugging” a company in this blog entry rather than waxing lyrical about Gen ?
First of all, let me say that I have no connection with the company, save from experiencing them as a client (they have performed several tasks and delivered many training courses for the company that I work for).
Ok - down to the real stuff - I recently had reason to examine the complexity of a bunch of Gen procedure steps.
We looked at a number of mechanisms to determine the complexity of the code - using CRUD matrices, lines of code, etc etc. None seemed to give the right results. By “right” results, I had a feeling for what should turn out to be complex, what should be medium and what should be regarded as being simple. None of the metrics that I used effectively measured complexity and ranked the procedure steps in the order that I was expecting. One could argue that:
a) I should be using a tool to measure complexity and relying on what the tool says rather than “fixing it” by using my own intuition
b) Complexity is a very subjective term anyway, so what’s the use
In fact, the reason we wished to categorise the transactions in this way was to simulate loads on a new system by taking a small number of procedure steps and simulating a load of small, medium and complex transactions, slowly ramping up to a break point.
The reason that I mention Jumar here is that they have a tool which does EXACTLY what I wanted.
Jumar:Xtras has a model reporting module which we looked at an yes - it does what it says on the tin - it reports on your models!
It uses MS-Access and MS-Excel to store data which it culls from your model. It allows an analyst then, to look at the data and compile it and cross-reference it in many ways. Thus, you have a flexible, non-intrusive (i.e. it doesn’t tie up your encyclopedia) mechanism for reporting.
Anyway, the complexity of a procedure step can be analysed in whichever way you need - for exmaple:
CRUD
Number of Action Blocks called
Levels of nesting
Number of loops
Number of views
Number of entity types
Number of mathematical operations
….
….
and many others besides.
The point here is that the analysis is not down to the tool - the tool provides the raw data (which is so difficult to get from a CSE - note that it also works on a HOST CE too) and then the analysis can be done in a way that suits the organisation.
In summing up, then - Gen provides a model which contains all the code, definitions, window designs etc. This is a good thing as a single repository for a “system” is then accessible in a SINGLE way using toolsets. This lends itself to add-on tools, since ALL the information that you need to analyse when looking at that system is there in ONE PLACE - this is where Gen scores above most other development environments. To get back to the complexity question then, we developed a notion of what contributes to complexity which worked for us - maybe other things work for other organisations - whichever way you go, the model is the place to start, and there ARE tools out there to analyse it in MANY different and unexpected ways.
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