TRAC 1.8.1 released

As a Christmas gift from Silverunit to all our customers we have now released TRAC 1.8.1. The beta-stage took a little bit longer than usual, mostly due to the fact that many new features was added and needed to be tested. Total number of changes commit was 75. Number of SLOC‘s added was 2663.

Key features for 1.8.1:

• Drill-down functions in reports
• Possibility to edit logs (if enabled)
• New forecast module to predict future behaviours
• Bulk management for large number of interactions
• User groups

As usual we have a myriad of minor usability improvements as well as a few bug fixes (all of them visual glitches).

Looking forward to 2012 we have many new and exciting features planned. Some of them are already being worked upon and will be released in the next version. Others are in the design phase. And then we have the really thrilling once that are floating around in the brain-storming sessions. To give a hint of the future of TRAC I would use words such as “connectivity”, “user experience”, “automation” and “customization”.

After this release we are now taking a couple of days off during Christmas and New Year holidays to recharge the batteries a bit.

Silverunit Systems would like to wish all our customers, users, and partners a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Soon…

Just as November starts, we are working really hard to finish the next version of TRAC. Most of the new key features are locked and ready for quality assurance (QA). Some last-minute features somehow found their way into the pending version and will be surprising and welcome. More on those upon the release.

Last time I checked there where about 50 committed changes for the next release.  This will probably rise as the QA-process starts – it usually does. The next release will not be as huge as the last 1.8.0, but it will come close in complexity.

Behind the doors there are happening interesting things as well. We are in the process of upgrading our development servers. Even thought TRAC is quite resource friendly, our stress-tests are not. And to be able to predict different workloads we need to scale up the hardware to be able to handle not only thousands but hundred of thousands of simultaneous users. Also we need to see how the systems handles huge amount of data. The system is designed to withstand workloads of billion of rows in the database with coherent data integrity.

More things happening behind the scenes are a new and improved documentation initiative. Even though the system is well documented we felt that the more in-depth technical documentation was not living up to our highly set standards. As a developer I must confess that writing documentation is not one of the most fun things a developer can do, but it is often underrated. It is easy to write miles of code. It is relativity easy to test it in the QA process. But what happens when a new developer joins the team? You need to have the documentation in order. Comments in the code is just not good enough.

We are now putting in many more hours than usual to sprint to the finishing line. Things are moving fast – and we love it!

Full speed ahead

After the successful release of TRAC 1.8.0 things are really moving quickly. The next release will for example include forecasting. It will now be possible to forecast customers behavior based on historical data. This has been in the works for a long time now and are finally ready for prime-time. The reason for the relative long development period for this module is due to the fact that it is fully dynamic.

More improvements in the next version includes more configuration-options for numerous parts of the system, making it more customizable for your unique needs. As a rule we want the user to be able to decide if a feature should be enabled or not. The back-side of that is that the set-up process is a bit more complicated, but the flip-side is that TRAC can be tailored to fit your work-processes more precise, removing information and options not relevant for the end user. Also, once the system is set up, you rarely need to make modifications again and all configurations are done from within TRAC.

As a part of your optimizing project we are continuously  working to improve page loading speeds and resource utilization. Because TRAC can scale and support huge numbers of users throughout a world-wide organization we need to make sure that every call to the database is done only if absolutely necessary. We also make sure to keep the memory usage on the web-server to a minimum. The payoff is lower hardware costs in a large scale scenario, faster response times and less power usage.

Finally we have usability improvements lined up. As usual these are made in concert with our users to make the work-flow as easy, distinct and smooth as possible. To use TRAC is very straight forward and our goal is to keep the need to train users to a minimum. One way to do this is to analyze user behavior and optimize the layout and visual cues for optimal responsiveness.  We do never let us lock in to a single strain of thought and do always revise work-flows if we see a benefit to the user.

Thanks to our active user base we are in constant development. We enjoy it and our users love it!

A word on browsers

Development of the browsers out there are moving quite fast right now. Implementations of HTML5 and optimizing the JavaScript engines seems to be the main focus, and all this is really good. Regardless of what brand of browser you choose today, as long as you use the latest version, any one is compatible with most of HTML5 features and very fast in parsing JavaScript.

When it comes to browsers as a private person or a small business owner it usually is no problem of choosing whatever flavor  you wish. But in a large company with business critical legacy applications there are not always so simple to just choose the newest and fastest browser.

Luckily Silverunit TRAC is developed for graceful degradation, meaning full support for all browsers from Internet Explorer 6 up to the newest and shiniest. We do take advantage of new HTML5 features if supported and the speed increase of JavaScript, but we do not leave older browsers behind.

As trivia I will mention what browsers we do use for development of TRAC. Mainly we use Firefox with many development plug-ins installed (Firebug, WebDev, PageSpeed etc). In quality  assurance we do test TRAC with most known browsers and operating systems. Making a list here will be redundant in only a couple of months as things moves fast as we always revise our QA-process.

Moving forward in tiny but secure steps

Let’s take a moment to discuss releases, versions and feature-planning here at the development team at Silverunit. As many of you already know almost all new features are based on feedback from our customers. Every time we get feedback we classify it and take action depending if the feedbacks nature. Is it a new feature request or a bug? Will the new feature fit in with the grand plan and vision of the system or is the request specific for one customer? Depending if we can make the changes to fit and benefit the majority of users, we commit to the changes and put it in our road-map with a priority and deadline. New features do always have a lower priority than bugs.

When it comes to release the new version we consolidate all changes committed and lock the new version. We decide if this is a maintenance release (increasing the minor version number by one), a major release (increasing the major version number by one) or a new grand version. We have decided that our version format for TRAC is X.Y.Z where X is the grand version, Y the major version and X the minor version. So, as we stand today, we have version 1.8.0 as the latest, stable release. Next major will be 1.9.0, next minor version will be 1.8.1, depending on what happens till the next release.