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  • iPhone CSS and Display Testing

    - by Philip Arthur Moore
    Hi All. I recently coded and launched a website that displays consistently across Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE8, IE7, and Safari. According to site visitors, though, the signup forms at the top and bottom of the site are mangled on the iPhone. I do not own an iPhone and I rarely test sites on the iPhone, and I would really hate to purchase it or an iPod Touch for the sake of occasional CSS/display testing. Question: is there a site online or a program I can use (I'm on Windows 7) for iPhone testing? An alternative question might be why the signup forms aren't displaying properly on the iPhone, when they look fine in all other browsers and a few other mobile devices that I've used? Many thanks.

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  • html5 uploader + jquery drag & drop: how to store file data with FormData?

    - by lauthiamkok
    I am making a html5 drag and drop uploader with jquery, below is my code so far, the problem is that I get an empty array without any data. Is this line incorrect to store the file data - fd.append('file', $thisfile);? $('#div').on( 'dragover', function(e) { e.preventDefault(); e.stopPropagation(); } ); $('#div').on( 'dragenter', function(e) { e.preventDefault(); e.stopPropagation(); } ); $('#div').on( 'drop', function(e){ if(e.originalEvent.dataTransfer){ if(e.originalEvent.dataTransfer.files.length) { e.preventDefault(); e.stopPropagation(); // The file list. var fileList = e.originalEvent.dataTransfer.files; //console.log(fileList); // Loop the ajax post. for (var i = 0; i < fileList.length; i++) { var $thisfile = fileList[i]; console.log($thisfile); // HTML5 form data object. var fd = new FormData(); //console.log(fd); fd.append('file', $thisfile); /* var file = {name: fileList[i].name, type: fileList[i].type, size:fileList[i].size}; $.each(file, function(key, value) { fd.append('file['+key+']', value); }) */ $.ajax({ url: "upload.php", type: "POST", data: fd, processData: false, contentType: false, success: function(response) { // .. do something }, error: function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorMessage) { console.log(errorMessage); // Optional } }); } /*UPLOAD FILES HERE*/ upload(e.originalEvent.dataTransfer.files); } } } ); function upload(files){ console.log('Upload '+files.length+' File(s).'); }; then if I use another method is that to make the file data into an array inside the jquery code, var file = {name: fileList[i].name, type: fileList[i].type, size:fileList[i].size}; $.each(file, function(key, value) { fd.append('file['+key+']', value); }); but where is the tmp_name data inside e.originalEvent.dataTransfer.files[i]? php, print_r($_POST); $uploaddir = './uploads/'; $file = $uploaddir . basename($_POST['file']['name']); if (move_uploaded_file($_POST['file']['tmp_name'], $file)) { echo "success"; } else { echo "error"; } as you can see that tmp_name is needed to upload the file via php... html, <div id="div">Drop here</div>

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  • Is there any reason why someone would want to create an Core Data model programmatically?

    - by mystify
    I wonder in which cases it would be good to make an NSManagedObjectModel completely programmatically, with NSEntityDescription instances and all this stuff. I'm that kind of person who prefers to code programmatically, rejecting Interface Builder. But when it comes to Core Data, I have a hard time figuring out why I should kill my time NOT using the nice Xcode Data Modeler tool. And since data models are stuck to a given state (except when you want to do some ugly migration operations where thinks probably go wrong and users get mad, really mad), I see no big sense in a data model that's made programmatically for the purpose of changing it all the time. Did I miss something?

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  • MySQL Cluster data nodes - slow SELECTs

    - by Boyan Georgiev
    Hi to all. First off, I'm new to MySQL Cluster. This is my pain: I've managed to setup a MySQL Cluster with two data nodes, two SQL nodes and one management server. Everything works pretty well, except the following: my data nodes are spread across an intranet link which incurs latency into communications between the data nodes. Apparently, due to MySQL Cluster's internal partitioning schemes, when my PHP application pulls data from the cluster via SELECT queries, parts of the data are pulled from both data nodes. This makes the page appear onscreen REALLY slowly. If I bring one data node offline, the data can only be pulled from that single remaining data node, and thus, the final result (HTML output) appears on the screen in a very timely fashion. So, my question is this: can the data nodes/cluster be told to pull data from partitions stored only on a particular data node?

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  • How to structure a Visual Studio project for the data access layer

    - by Akk
    I currently have a project that uses various DB access technologies mainly for showcasing or for demos. Currently we have: Namespace App.Data (App.Data.dll) Folder NHibernate Folder EntityFramework Folder LinqToSql The above structure is ok as we only use Sql Server as the DB. But going forward we will be including Oracle, MySql etc. So what would be a better structure with this in mind? I thought about: Namespace App.Data.SqlServer (App.Data.SqlServer.dll) Folder NHibernate Folder EntityFramework Folder LinqToSql Or would it just be better to have separate assemblies for each database and access technology?: Namespace App.Data.SqlServer.NHibernate (App.Data.SqlServer.NHibernate.dll) Namespace App.Data.SqlServer.EntityFramework(App.Data.SqlServer.EntityFramework.dll) Namespace App.Data.Oracle.NHibernate (App.Data.Oracle.NHibernate.dll) Namespace App.Data.MySql.NHibernate (App.Data.MySql.Oracle.dll)

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  • question about learning TDD

    - by Gandalf StormCrow
    what are the best books to learn about junit, jmock and testing generally? Currently I'm reading pragmatic unit testing in Java, I'm on chapter 6 its good but it gets complicated.. is there a book for a bottom up? from your expirience which helped you get the testing concept

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  • How to set up a load/stress test for a web site?

    - by Ryan
    I've been tasked with stress/load testing our company web site out of the blue and know nothing about doing so. Every search I make on google for "how to load test a web site" just comes back with various companies and software to physically do the load testing. For now I'm more interested in how to actually go about setting up a load test like what I should take into account prior to load testing, what pages within my site I should be testing load against and what things I'm going to want to monitor when doing the test. Our web site is on a multi-tier system complete with a separate database server (IIS 7 Web Server, SQL Server 2000 db). I imagine I'd want to monitor both the web server and the database server for testing load however when setting up scenarios to load test the web server I'd have to use pages that query the database to see any load on the database server at the same time. Are web servers and database servers generally tested simultaneously or are they done as separate tests? As you can see I'm pretty clueless as to the whole operation so any incite as to how to go about this would be very helpful. FYI I have been tinkering with Pylot and was able to create and run a scenario against our site but I'm not sure what I should be looking for in the results or if the scenario I created is even a scenario worth measuring for our site. Thanks in advance.

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  • How to unit tests functions which return results asyncronously in XCode?

    - by DevDevDev
    I have something like - (void)getData:(SomeParameter*)param { // Remotely call out for data returned asynchronously // returns data via a delegate method } - (void)handleDataDelegateMethod:(NSData*)data { // Handle returned data } I want to write a unit test for this, how can I do something better than NSData* returnedData = nil; - (void)handleDataDelegateMethod:(NSData*)data { returnedData = data; } - (void)test { [obj getData:param]; while (!returnedData) { [NSThread sleep:1]; } // Make tests on returnedData }

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  • Are there any frameworks for data subscription and update?

    - by Timothy Pratley
    There is one server with multiple clients. The clients are viewing subsets of the servers entire data. If the data that a client is viewing changes, the client should be informed of the changes so that it displays the current data. Example: Two clients are viewing a list of users in an administration screen. One client adds a new user to the list and modifies the permissions of another user. The other client sees the changes propagated to their view.

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  • Software automation testing

    - by dotnet-practitioner
    I work in a .net shop where we need to automate software testing. We write ASP.net web apps, web services, windows services, scheduled console application. Back end for all these applications is SQL Server. We would like to automate testing of any bug fixes, any where from web UI change to, middle tier .net code change to sql code change. This tool would be used by programmers to do unit test and played back in different test environments to ensure that bug fix is test correctly in all the environments including the produciton environment. This test would be executed by different teams such as QA, Build, and production site testers. What tool or approach do you recommend?

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  • Best way to migrate servers without losing any data and with no downtime(?)

    - by ina
    This is a methodology question from a freelancer, with a corollary on MySQL.. Is there a way to migrate from an old dedicated server to a new one without losing any data in-between - and with no downtime? In the past, I've had to lose MySQL data between the time when the new server goes up (i.e., all files transferred, system up and ready), and when I take the old server down (data still transferred to old until new one takes over). There is also a short period where both are down for DNS, etc., to refresh. Is there a way for MySQL/root to easily transfer all data that was updated/inserted between a certain time frame?

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  • Is there an difference between transient properties defined in the data model, or in the custom subc

    - by mystify
    I was reading that setting the value of a transient property always results in marking the managed object as "dirty". However, what I don't get is this: If I make a subclass of NSManagedObject and use some extra properties which I don't need to be persistet, how does Core Data know about them and how can it mark the object as dirty when I access these? Again, they're not defined in the data model, so Core Data has no really good hint that they are there. Or does Core Data use some kind of introspection to analyze my custom class and figure out what properties I have in there?

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  • R: How to write out a data.frame so that I can paste it into SO for others to read?

    - by John
    I have a large data.frame displaying some weird properties when plotted. I'd like to ask a question about it on Stackoverflow, to do that I'd like to write the data.frame out in a form that I can paste it into SO and somebody else can easily run it and have it back into a data.frame object again. Is there an easy way to accomplish this? Also, if it is really long, should I use paste bin instead of directly paste it here?

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  • Rails Rspec testing not saving a transactional model

    - by NolanDC
    I'm currently testing my Rails controllers using RSpec. In one controller, I have a model that uses transactions, so that it will not be saved unless another nested model (whose data is filled in using fields_for) is also saved correctly. The tests hit a snag when they reach the transaction. Some debugging output proves that the model is valid and ready to save. However, upon entering the transaction block, the model does not save. Even stranger, the code never reaches the else clause of "if model.save" (It does, however, enter the transaction block). I can only assume this is a problem with my testing a transactional model. Any ideas/hints/solutions?

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  • C# or windows equivalent of OS X's Core Data?

    - by Nektarios
    I'm late to the boat and have only just now started using Core Data in OS X / Cocoa - it's incredible and is really changing the way I look at things. Is there an equivalent technology in C# or the modern Windows frameworks? i.e. having managed data types where you get saving, data management, deleting, searching all for free? Also wondering if there's anything like this on Linux.

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  • Mass data store with SQL SERVER

    - by Leo
    We need management 10,000 GPS devices, each GPS device upload a GPS data every 30 seconds, these data need to store in the database(MS SQL Server 2005). Each GPS device daily data quantity is: 24 * 60 * 2 = 2,880 10 000 10,000 GPS devices daily data quantity is: 10000 * 2880 = 28,800,000 Each GPS data approximately 160Byte, the amount of data per day is: 28,800,000 * 160 = 4.29GB We need hold at least 3 months of GPS data in the database, My question is: 1, whether SQL Server 2005 can support such a large amount of data store? 2, How to plan data table? (all GPS data storage in one table? Daily table? Each GPS device with a GPS data table?) The GPS data: GPSID varchar(21), RecvTime datetime, GPSTime datetime, IsValid bit, IsNavi bit, Lng float, Lat float, Alt float, Spd smallint, Head smallint, PulseValue bigint, Oil float, TSW1 bigint, TSW1Mask bigint, TSW2 bigint, TSW2Mask, BSW bigint, StateText varchar(200), PosText varchar(200), UploadType tinyint

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  • What is the most efficient way to use Core Data?

    - by Eric
    I'm developing an iPad application using Core Data, and was hoping someone could clarify something about Core Data. Right now, I populate my table by making a fetch request for all of my data in viewDidLoad. I'd rather make individual fetch requests in my tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:. Can anyone tell me which is more efficient, and why? In other words, is it much less efficient to make lots of small requests as opposed to one big request?

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  • What happens if a user jumps over 10 versions before updating, and every version had a new data mode

    - by dontWatchMyProfile
    Example: User installs app v.1.0, adds data. Then the dev submits 10 updates in 10 weeks. After 11 weeks, the user wants v.11.0 and grabs a copy from the app store. Assuming that the app has got 11 .xcdatamodel versions inside, where ***11.xcdatamodel is the current one, what would happen now since the persistent store of the user is ages old? would the migration happen 10 times, step-by-step through every migration iteration? Or does the actual migration of data (lets assume gigabytes of data) happen exactly once, after Core Data (or the persistent store coordinator) has figured out precisely what to do to go from v.1.0 to v.11.0?

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  • Iterating over a large data set in long running Python process - memory issues?

    - by user1094786
    I am working on a long running Python program (a part of it is a Flask API, and the other realtime data fetcher). Both my long running processes iterate, quite often (the API one might even do so hundreds of times a second) over large data sets (second by second observations of certain economic series, for example 1-5MB worth of data or even more). They also interpolate, compare and do calculations between series etc. What techniques, for the sake of keeping my processes alive, can I practice when iterating / passing as parameters / processing these large data sets? For instance, should I use the gc module and collect manually? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

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  • WCF – interchangeable data-contract types

    - by nmarun
    In a WSDL based environment, unlike a CLR-world, we pass around the ‘state’ of an object and not the reference of an object. Well firstly, what does ‘state’ mean and does this also mean that we can send a struct where a class is expected (or vice-versa) as long as their ‘state’ is one and the same? Let’s see. So I have an operation contract defined as below: 1: [ServiceContract] 2: public interface ILearnWcfServiceExtend : ILearnWcfService 3: { 4: [OperationContract] 5: Employee SaveEmployee(Employee employee); 6: } 7:  8: [ServiceBehavior] 9: public class LearnWcfService : ILearnWcfServiceExtend 10: { 11: public Employee SaveEmployee(Employee employee) 12: { 13: employee.EmployeeId = 123; 14: return employee; 15: } 16: } Quite simplistic operation there (which translates to ‘absolutely no business value’). Now, the data contract Employee mentioned above is a struct. 1: public struct Employee 2: { 3: public int EmployeeId { get; set; } 4:  5: public string FName { get; set; } 6: } After compilation and consumption of this service, my proxy (in the Reference.cs file) looks like below (I’ve ignored the rest of the details just to avoid unwanted confusion): 1: public partial struct Employee : System.Runtime.Serialization.IExtensibleDataObject, System.ComponentModel.INotifyPropertyChanged I call the service with the code below: 1: private static void CallWcfService() 2: { 3: Employee employee = new Employee { FName = "A" }; 4: Console.WriteLine("IsValueType: {0}", employee.GetType().IsValueType); 5: Console.WriteLine("IsClass: {0}", employee.GetType().IsClass); 6: Console.WriteLine("Before calling the service: {0} - {1}", employee.EmployeeId, employee.FName); 7: employee = LearnWcfServiceClient.SaveEmployee(employee); 8: Console.WriteLine("Return from the service: {0} - {1}", employee.EmployeeId, employee.FName); 9: } The output is: I now change my Employee type from a struct to a class in the proxy class and run the application: 1: public partial class Employee : System.Runtime.Serialization.IExtensibleDataObject, System.ComponentModel.INotifyPropertyChanged { The output this time is: The state of an object implies towards its composition, the properties and the values of these properties and not based on whether it is a reference type (class) or a value type (struct). And as shown above, we’re actually passing an object by its state and not by reference. Continuing on the same topic of ‘type-interchangeability’, WCF treats two data contracts as equivalent if they have the same ‘wire-representation’. We can do so using the DataContract and DataMember attributes’ Name property. 1: [DataContract] 2: public struct Person 3: { 4: [DataMember] 5: public int Id { get; set; } 6:  7: [DataMember] 8: public string FirstName { get; set; } 9: } 10:  11: [DataContract(Name="Person")] 12: public class Employee 13: { 14: [DataMember(Name = "Id")] 15: public int EmployeeId { get; set; } 16:  17: [DataMember(Name="FirstName")] 18: public string FName { get; set; } 19: } I’ve created two data contracts with the exact same wire-representation. Just remember that the names and the types of data members need to match to be considered equivalent. The question then arises as to what gets generated in the proxy class. Despite us declaring two data contracts (Person and Employee), only one gets emitted – Person. This is because we’re saying that the Employee type has the same wire-representation as the Person type. Also that the signature of the SaveEmployee operation gets changed on the proxy side: 1: [System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute("System.ServiceModel", "4.0.0.0")] 2: [System.ServiceModel.ServiceContractAttribute(ConfigurationName="ServiceProxy.ILearnWcfServiceExtend")] 3: public interface ILearnWcfServiceExtend 4: { 5: [System.ServiceModel.OperationContractAttribute(Action="http://tempuri.org/ILearnWcfServiceExtend/SaveEmployee", ReplyAction="http://tempuri.org/ILearnWcfServiceExtend/SaveEmployeeResponse")] 6: ClientApplication.ServiceProxy.Person SaveEmployee(ClientApplication.ServiceProxy.Person employee); 7: } But, on the service side, the SaveEmployee still accepts and returns an Employee data contract. 1: [ServiceBehavior] 2: public class LearnWcfService : ILearnWcfServiceExtend 3: { 4: public Employee SaveEmployee(Employee employee) 5: { 6: employee.EmployeeId = 123; 7: return employee; 8: } 9: } Despite all these changes, our output remains the same as the last one: This is type-interchangeability at work! Here’s one more thing to ponder about. Our Person type is a struct and Employee type is a class. Then how is it that the Person type got emitted as a ‘class’ in the proxy? It’s worth mentioning that WSDL describes a type called Employee and does not say whether it is a class or a struct (see the SOAP message below): 1: <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" 2: xmlns:tem="http://tempuri.org/" 3: xmlns:ser="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/ServiceApplication"> 4: <soapenv:Header/> 5: <soapenv:Body> 6: <tem:SaveEmployee> 7: <!--Optional:--> 8: <tem:employee> 9: <!--Optional:--> 10: <ser:EmployeeId>?</ser:EmployeeId> 11: <!--Optional:--> 12: <ser:FName>?</ser:FName> 13: </tem:employee> 14: </tem:SaveEmployee> 15: </soapenv:Body> 16: </soapenv:Envelope> There are some differences between how ‘Add Service Reference’ and the svcutil.exe generate the proxy class, but turns out both do some kind of reflection and determine the type of the data contract and emit the code accordingly. So since the Employee type is a class, the proxy ‘Person’ type gets generated as a class. In fact, reflecting on svcutil.exe application, you’ll see that there are a couple of places wherein a flag actually determines a type as a class or a struct. One example is in the ExportISerializableDataContract method in the System.Runtime.Serialization.CodeExporter class. Seems like these flags have a say in deciding whether the type gets emitted as a struct or a class. This behavior is different if you use the WSDL tool though. WSDL tool does not do any kind of reflection of the data contract / serialized type, it emits the type as a class by default. You can check this using the two command lines below:   Note to self: Remember ‘state’ and type-interchangeability when traversing through the WSDL planet!

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  • Data management in unexpected places

    - by Ashok_Ora
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Data management in unexpected places When you think of network switches, routers, firewall appliances, etc., it may not be obvious that at the heart of these kinds of solutions is an engine that can manage huge amounts of data at very high throughput with low latencies and high availability. Consider a network router that is processing tens (or hundreds) of thousands of network packets per second. So what really happens inside a router? Packets are streaming in at the rate of tens of thousands per second. Each packet has multiple attributes, for example, a destination, associated SLAs etc. For each packet, the router has to determine the address of the next “hop” to the destination; it has to determine how to prioritize this packet. If it’s a high priority packet, then it has to be sent on its way before lower priority packets. As a consequence of prioritizing high priority packets, lower priority data packets may need to be temporarily stored (held back), but addressed fairly. If there are security or privacy requirements associated with the data packet, those have to be enforced. You probably need to keep track of statistics related to the packets processed (someone’s sure to ask). You have to do all this (and more) while preserving high availability i.e. if one of the processors in the router goes down, you have to have a way to continue processing without interruption (the customer won’t be happy with a “choppy” VoIP conversation, right?). And all this has to be achieved without ANY intervention from a human operator – the router is most likely to be in a remote location – it must JUST CONTINUE TO WORK CORRECTLY, even when bad things happen. How is this implemented? As soon as a packet arrives, it is interpreted by the receiving software. The software decodes the packet headers in order to determine the destination, kind of packet (e.g. voice vs. data), SLAs associated with the “owner” of the packet etc. It looks up the internal database of “rules” of how to process this packet and handles the packet accordingly. The software might choose to hold on to the packet safely for some period of time, if it’s a low priority packet. Ah – this sounds very much like a database problem. For each packet, you have to minimally · Look up the most efficient next “hop” towards the destination. The “most efficient” next hop can change, depending on latency, availability etc. · Look up the SLA and determine the priority of this packet (e.g. voice calls get priority over data ftp) · Look up security information associated with this data packet. It may be necessary to retrieve the context for this network packet since a network packet is a small “slice” of a session. The context for the “header” packet needs to be stored in the router, in order to make this work. · If the priority of the packet is low, then “store” the packet temporarily in the router until it is time to forward the packet to the next hop. · Update various statistics about the packet. In most cases, you have to do all this in the context of a single transaction. For example, you want to look up the forwarding address and perform the “send” in a single transaction so that the forwarding address doesn’t change while you’re sending the packet. So, how do you do all this? Berkeley DB is a proven, reliable, high performance, highly available embeddable database, designed for exactly these kinds of usage scenarios. Berkeley DB is a robust, reliable, proven solution that is currently being used in these scenarios. First and foremost, Berkeley DB (or BDB for short) is very very fast. It can process tens or hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. It can be used as a pure in-memory database, or as a disk-persistent database. BDB provides high availability – if one board in the router fails, the system can automatically failover to another board – no manual intervention required. BDB is self-administering – there’s no need for manual intervention in order to maintain a BDB application. No need to send a technician to a remote site in the middle of nowhere on a freezing winter day to perform maintenance operations. BDB is used in over 200 million deployments worldwide for the past two decades for mission-critical applications such as the one described here. You have a choice of spending valuable resources to implement similar functionality, or, you could simply embed BDB in your application and off you go! I know what I’d do – choose BDB, so I can focus on my business problem. What will you do? /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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  • Metrics - A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing (or 'Why you're not clever enough to interpret metrics data')

    - by Jason Crease
    At RedGate Software, I work on a .NET obfuscator  called SmartAssembly.  Various features of it use a database to store various things (exception reports, name-mappings, etc.) The user is given the option of using either a SQL-Server database (which requires them to have Microsoft SQL Server), or a Microsoft Access MDB file (which requires nothing). MDB is the default option, but power-users soon switch to using a SQL Server database because it offers better performance and data-sharing. In the fashionable spirit of optimization and metrics, an obvious product-management question is 'Which is the most popular? SQL Server or MDB?' We've collected data about this fact, using our 'Feature-Usage-Reporting' technology (available as part of SmartAssembly) and more recently our 'Application Metrics' technology: Parameter Number of users % of total users Number of sessions Number of usages SQL Server 28 19.0 8115 8115 MDB 114 77.6 1449 1449 (As a disclaimer, please note than SmartAssembly has far more than 132 users . This data is just a selection of one build) So, it would appear that SQL-Server is used by fewer users, but more often. Great. But here's why these numbers are useless to me: Only the original developers understand the data What does a single 'usage' of 'MDB' mean? Does this happen once per run? Once per option change? On clicking the 'Obfuscate Now' button? When running the command-line version or just from the UI version? Each question could skew the data 10-fold either way, and the answers only known by the developer that instrumented the application in the first place. In other words, only the original developer can interpret the data - product-managers cannot interpret the data unaided. Most of the data is from uninterested users About half of people who download and run a free-trial from the internet quit it almost immediately. Only a small fraction use it sufficiently to make informed choices. Since the MDB option is the default one, we don't know how many of those 114 were people CHOOSING to use the MDB, or how many were JUST HAPPENING to use this MDB default for their 20-second trial. This is a problem we see across all our metrics: Are people are using X because it's the default or are they using X because they want to use X? We need to segment the data further - asking what percentage of each percentage meet our criteria for an 'established user' or 'informed user'. You end up spending hours writing sophisticated and dubious SQL queries to segment the data further. Not fun. You can't find out why they used this feature Metrics can answer the when and what, but not the why. Why did people use feature X? If you're anything like me, you often click on random buttons in unfamiliar applications just to explore the feature-set. If we listened uncritically to metrics at RedGate, we would eliminate the most-important and more-complex features which people actually buy the software for, leaving just big buttons on the main page and the About-Box. "Ah, that's interesting!" rather than "Ah, that's actionable!" People do love data. Did you know you eat 1201 chickens in a lifetime? But just 4 cows? Interesting, but useless. Often metrics give you a nice number: '5.8% of users have 3 or more monitors' . But unless the statistic is both SUPRISING and ACTIONABLE, it's useless. Most metrics are collected, reviewed with lots of cooing. and then forgotten. Unless a piece-of-data could change things, it's useless collecting it. People get obsessed with significance levels The first things that lots of people do with this data is do a t-test to get a significance level ("Hey! We know with 99.64% confidence that people prefer SQL Server to MDBs!") Believe me: other causes of error/misinterpretation in your data are FAR more significant than your t-test could ever comprehend. Confirmation bias prevents objectivity If the data appears to match our instinct, we feel satisfied and move on. If it doesn't, we suspect the data and dig deeper, plummeting down a rabbit-hole of segmentation and filtering until we give-up and move-on. Data is only useful if it can change our preconceptions. Do you trust this dodgy data more than your own understanding, knowledge and intelligence?  I don't. There's always multiple plausible ways to interpret/action any data Let's say we segment the above data, and get this data: Post-trial users (i.e. those using a paid version after the 14-day free-trial is over): Parameter Number of users % of total users Number of sessions Number of usages SQL Server 13 9.0 1115 1115 MDB 5 4.2 449 449 Trial users: Parameter Number of users % of total users Number of sessions Number of usages SQL Server 15 10.0 7000 7000 MDB 114 77.6 1000 1000 How do you interpret this data? It's one of: Mostly SQL Server users buy our software. People who can't afford SQL Server tend to be unable to afford or unwilling to buy our software. Therefore, ditch MDB-support. Our MDB support is so poor and buggy that our massive MDB user-base doesn't buy it.  Therefore, spend loads of money improving it, and think about ditching SQL-Server support. People 'graduate' naturally from MDB to SQL Server as they use the software more. Things are fine the way they are. We're marketing the tool wrong. The large number of MDB users represent uninformed downloaders. Tell marketing to aggressively target SQL Server users. To choose an interpretation you need to segment again. And again. And again, and again. Opting-out is correlated with feature-usage Metrics tends to be opt-in. This skews the data even further. Between 5% and 30% of people choose to opt-in to metrics (often called 'customer improvement program' or something like that). Casual trial-users who are uninterested in your product or company are less likely to opt-in. This group is probably also likely to be MDB users. How much does this skew your data by? Who knows? It's not all doom and gloom. There are some things metrics can answer well. Environment facts. How many people have 3 monitors? Have Windows 7? Have .NET 4 installed? Have Japanese Windows? Minor optimizations.  Is the text-box big enough for average user-input? Performance data. How long does our app take to start? How many databases does the average user have on their server? As you can see, questions about who-the-user-is rather than what-the-user-does are easier to answer and action. Conclusion Use SmartAssembly. If not for the metrics (called 'Feature-Usage-Reporting'), then at least for the obfuscation/error-reporting. Data raises more questions than it answers. Questions about environment are the easiest to answer.

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