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Impact, Urgency, and Priority of a case

July 21, 2008 One of the best practices that ITIL brings to the party within Incident (case) Management is prioritization.   ITIL calls out 3 separate attributes: impact, urgency, and priority.   Impact: the measure of how business critical it is.   Urgency: a necessary speed of resolving an incident.   Priority: formulated from the combination of impact and urgency. Some formulate it as Priority = Urgency + Impact. Others use Priority = Urgency * Impact.   They key difference that ITIL presents with the concept of Priority versus the classic usage of Severity is that severity alone does not provide enough context for Prioritization. The urgency factor needs to be added to severity in order to provide an accurate understanding of how to prioritize activity.   Example of a priority coding system   Impact, Urgency, and Priority within Dovetail   Within Dovetail (and Clarify/Amdocs), Severity and Priority…

When Clarify grids go bad

July 18, 2008 For the most part, Clarify is pretty easy to customize. Occasionally, you run into Clarify forms that just don't behave as you would expect. In particular, the "old" Clarify forms, that were all written in C, long before ClearBasic was considered - those can be problematic. ClearLogistics forms are also typically problematic - the initial ClearLogistics development team seemed to have their own way of doing things back then.   We recently assisted a customer with such an issue, and I'm sharing it here so hopefully it may help others in a similar situation. Customizing the "Select Inventory Parts" form   The requirement at hand was to exclude inventory parts from a certain inventory location when selecting inventory parts - specifically, on Form 519 (Select Inventory Parts).   Here's the form, showing all inventory parts:   Lets say that we…

ITIL certification

July 17, 2008 I've been diving into ITIL in more detail lately, understanding IT best practices, and how our products and processes match up with the guidance set forth by ITIL. What is ITIL? ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is a public framework that describes Best Practice in IT service management. It provides a framework for the governance of IT, the "service wrap", and focuses on the continual measurement and improvement of the quality of IT service delivered, from both a business and a customer perspective. Certification On occasion, people have mentioned ITIL certification, asking if our products are ITIL certified. So I started doing some exploring of ITIL certifications. The predominant company doing ITIL product certifications is PinkElephant. Their certification program is called PinkVerify. From their website: PinkVERIFY is a service Pink Elephant has provided to the IT Service Management (ITSM) community since…

Scenario Testing With Watin

July 16, 2008   We are starting to use WatiN to automate the testing of a web application. So far it is working pretty well. One of the things I found confusing was handling confirmation alerts like this:       Pop-ups like this need to be handled by Watin. The code for handling this looks like this.   //setup a handler with Watin var confirmDialogHandler = new ConfirmDialogHandler(); browser.DialogWatcher.Add(confirmDialogHandler); //click the button that causes a confirmation pop-up browser.Element("buttonId").ClickNoWait(); //Clickon the ok button of the confirmation window. confirmDialogHandler.WaitUntilExists(); confirmDialogHandler.OKButton.Click(); browser.WaitForComplete(); //You may want to test that the message is correct. //cleanup browser.DialogWatcher.RemoveAll(confirmDialogHandler);   There is a lot of setup and teardown for the simply clicking a button. Using some .Net 3.5 goodness I created an extension method to make this a little more terse.   //usage Browser.OkButtonClickedOnConfirmDialog(ClickOnUnMarkMasterButton); //could use a lambda but this utilty method…

jQuery = Simplification

July 11, 2008 I came across this code today, and it took me a second to figure out what it was doing: strSortOrder = document.getElementById("ad").options[document.getElementById("ad").selectedIndex].value; To break it down, it locates a Select control on the page (FindElementById), finds the element again and gets its selected value's index (selectedIndex), and sets the variable to the value of the option at the specified index (options[index].value). There is a jQuery plugin that really simplifies this process. Using jquery.selectboxes.js, the code now is as simple as this: strSortOrder = $("#ad").selectedValues(); This code now does the same thing, but it is also easy to read, and understand. It shortened from 86 characters to 26, and now requires no explanation. There are many different cases where jQuery can simplify the code.

App.ShowSolution in ClearBasic

July 7, 2008 I'm sure most of the ClearBasic brainiacs already know this (and I may have at one point), but the parameter to App.ShowSolution is a record of type "workaround", not a record of type "probdesc". I probably knew this at one time, but its been a long time since I've done ClearBasic coding. I'm blogging this so that I can find it again in the future, with Google's help, of course.   If you call App.ShowSolution with a probdesc record, you get this ever-so-helpful pile of joy: Cannot map specific relation (type 1 with relation -3). Uh, yeah. Thanks. No, really. That was a helpful message. I'm in awe of your ability to render something so utterly useless. Freakin' programmers.   Working code example: Sub ShowObject(objectType As String, idNumber As String)     If objectType = "solution" Then objectType = "probdesc"    …

Manage Queue Membership: Making It Easier

July 1, 2008  Dovetail Software, Inc. recently recently received a request from one of our customers to make Queue Membership Management easier and more efficient to use. The screen image to the left shows the Manage Queues form in Dovetail Admin, Version 2.5. When a queue is selected at the top of the form, its current members and supervisors are displayed at the bottom right of the Membership tab.     Adding or changing members and supervisors was done one by one, and with only the login name for each user to determine the identity of each user. The login names are unique, but it can be hard to tell users apart based on login name alone. The new requested functionality to make queue management easier includes adding the first and last name for each user, and allowing multiple users to be added or removed…

Manage Queue Membership: Behind the User Interface

The first step in making the changes was to add the first and last names to each of the membership grids. This simply required changing the data source for the user information from the user table to the empl_user view in both of the user grid pages. The grid_queue_mem.asp and grid_queue_mem2.asp pages each retrieve a list of records from the database, and build a table of user information from the results.   Adding multi-select capability required much more change, so it was time to look for a better way to get the job done. This is where jQuery enters the picture. There is an excellent jQuery plugin available for grids, called jqGrid. There is a lot of capability available, and it allows us to simplify the code.   In the previous version of the form shown above, there is an…

Highlighting Priority Cases

June 30, 2008 A common customization within Clarify is to highlight priority cases in a wipBin or queue by setting their color. For example, make High Priority cases really stand out by coloring them red. Clarify Classic Client The ClearBasic Customization Guide has a couple of examples on how to do this with the Clarify Classic Client. However, the customization was commonly applied to the Queue and wipBin forms - not the console. As a reminder: to view the wipBin form, simply double-click a wipBin from the list in the left side of the console. Similarly, for the Queue form. However, since about Clarify version 4, no one typically used these forms - the new console form was what was used. However, the console form can't be customized. I did a search on this to confirm my memory, and found my own post…