A product capability is synonymous with product features. Product features are comprised of many product functions. When implementing Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) software there is thinking that you do not need to test all the functions of the COTS because 1) it was already tested by the software manufacture and 2) typical project constraints (time, money & scope). I used to think similarly. However, since implementing Content Management Systems (CMS) for a decade, I found that not testing more of the functions in a system can be harmful to the end solution. In testing terms, we would say we want to increase the function / test coverage ratio.

Typical testing on a project is called functional testing. Functional testing, tests business documented features, e.g. create content, that are written into some sort of systems documentation. During the content creation scenario, we test a variety of functions, e.g. menu -> file -> new, WYSIWYG editor and a save function. In addition, we probably tested some immediately ancillary functions like a cancel link. As a side note, the ancillary tests are called alternative scenarios. As I have noticed this is usually where testing stops. Bearing a positive test result, the testers and business believe that the feature they tested acts as expected. However, we did not test other ways the systems allows for content creation.

Very relevant with content management systems, many product functions perform similar actions against content. For example, there can be several ways to perform a content creation function, e.g. “My Work area,” “My workflows,” “My Content” and “Watched Content.” Each navigation to the content create function may act differently, e.g. “My Workflows” may produce a new piece of content form with limited form fields while the “My Work area” content create function may display workflow options. Stakeholders of the content management process will expect that if the software allows for the edition of content through these multiple ways that each content create function would perform similarly. Testing all these “extra” function is called capability testing. Capabilities are functions available to users that were not explicitly written in the system specifications. There are some testing techniques that can help increase your testing coverage, e.g. combinatorial and pairwise testing but that is a start of a different post.

Even though, I used a simple example there are some extreme results to not testing all capabilities. For example, deployed content to production websites that was not reviewed by the correct persons. This deployment could have posted a 10-k without CxO approval.

Capability testing is difficult to test because testers will need to hunt for these special forms of product features. It is important that test scripts are written to cover many if not all capabilities of the system not just the ones including in functional testing as per system specification. This thoroughness has implications to both the test process and the entire project. Project teams need to work with stakeholders to make sure that capabilities in the system are appropriate. It is not uncommon for the project team to discover these “extra” capabilities and then turn them off. The trick is to make sure you find them all because if you don’t the users will.

Here is an image from the my play breakdown

save some money in 2009: Cancel your maintenance and support (M&S) contracts with your CMS and enterprise portal vendors

I very much agree with his analysis and perspective on the value of these contracts. These contracts are nowhere near an insurance policy. I’ll also agree with his view on finding a local company that can assist you in your time of need. All that said Janus’ analysis is meaningful for organizations that have a solid support infrastructure. I have not found too many organizations that contain the type of support organization required to support these enterprise systems without an M&S contract. If you do not have a solid support organization then you may be stuck with M&S contracts because your support group doesn’t contain the necessary skills required to sustain these complex systems.

For those that do have a good and reliable support organization, over the years I’ve learned that some vendors have been known to prorate your M&S contract to get your licenses valid if you want that next major upgrade. So, if your M&S contract costs 100k per year and your contract has lapsed for 3 years and you want that next 10.1 upgrade, then vendor may charge you $300k to get your license valid. This is good because new licenses could cost $1M. However, I’d highly recommend that if you feel you support organization is solid enough to do without M&S contracts then you should look at the great open source portals and cms’s. Take a look at the Java CMS report and the CMS Watch’s open source portal report.

You know what to do! So do it!

If you’d require some assistance with your Web 2.0 initiatives and are considering Drupal please contact me.

Here is the session details:

Drupal recently became a winner of CNet’s Webware 100 award in the publishing category. Drupal is a Free and Open Source Web Content Management software and a web application framework. It is highly used and has been included in the Google Summer of Code (SoC) project. The Google SoC reference’s Drupal as being the poster child for Web 2.0 community driven web site software. I will describe and demonstrate some of the major features of the software as well as some of the limitations. Some specific features we’ll look at are the Content Construction Kit, Views, Taxonomy, and some Content Management functions.

Drupal adheres to some good content management practices. During the discussion we will look and modify some configuration areas for the more technical savvy as well as look at the content managers and content authors interfaces. Although, a computer isn’t required if you bring you laptop you will be able to log on to the site and manage content.

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We went from content silos to content management silos to enterprise silos. But by necessity, our need to share information is pushing us to collaborate beyond any arbitrary boundaries. What does this mean for our profession? By going to content management systems, are we just catching up with today, or preparing for tomorrow? Will Content 2.0 catch up to Web 2.0? Strategy A is bringing the first content management conference to Vancouver that covers content management from both the Web and XML structured authoring perspectives.

Looks like it could be an interesting conference. Check out more details at confabb.

Sometimes we implementers of Content Management software take this mantra a little too much to heart. We try and design content solutions that will strictly enforce the Customer to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. When I say strictly I mean we programmatically implement software that enforces the “rules” with immediate actions taking place. For instance I was handed a requirement once that said every piece of content on a web site needs to be review every quarter or face removal from the web site. So as the developer of the system I write code that sends a note to the content manager of the piece that is 3 months after the last time it was modified or reviewed. A week later the same code removes the piece from the web site if the content wasn’t reviewed. For the most part this could be ok but we all know that this rule will execute on something like the contact us page or the legal disclaimer. Oops, my bad, I just coded what you asked for right? Well not really, but this is a poorly analyzed requirement. This is where the solution and project leads need to proof the requirement and make sure that the developers can’t infer requirements or implement risky unrefined requirements. When I proofed requirements in the past I’ve been passed over by others saying well Travis you just need to think a little more high-level. Well sorry I know that requirements like the one mentioned above happen every day and there are real ramifications because of vague or “high-level” requirements going to the implementers of content management software. So beware of vague and unproofed content requirements.

The first thing I was concerned with was the look and feel of my site. So after looking around a bit for a free theme that I liked I gave up. Most of the free and for pay themes are just variations of the same ole stuff that every WordPress blog has. I wanted something a little bit different, (un)fortunately, nothing surfaced. So I decided to create my own theme. I got some ok stuff developed working then I was point to free theme. Wow, this one is a cool one named Hemingway. At first it seemed a bit funky (but still very usable) but as I watched a few people use it, I realized that it’s simple, consistent, and reliable. So I just created my own css and put my own colors palette in it. I now have a theme in place.

In a nut shell, Hemingway puts the main focus of the page (read: content) on the top. On the bottom there are these blocks installed in the “Hemingway’s Bottombar^tm“. A block is a container for html snippets and php code. If you have a WordPress plugin that writes out html, eg. the blogroll on this site, then you would have to create a corresponding block for that plugin. Blocks are easy to create for people that have a minimal knowledge of PHP. Here is what the block looks like:

<ul class="blogroll">
	<?php get_links_list(1, '<h2>', '</h2>'); ?>
</ul>

The code above is fairly straight forward for those slightly familiar to WordPress plugins. The “Hemingway’s Bottombar^tm” offers a neat layer of abstraction between the theme and your plugin displays. This is advantageous because as the theme and the plugins needs to upgrade with the WordPress application your blocks and therefore your blocks and your html structure shouldn’t have to change.

Next, I knew I wanted to be able to print and email blog entries, some extra tagging functionality, SEO assistance, and comment spamming concerns. So the search started for plugins.

David Linthicum’s podcast of the importance of data in your architecture, http://weblog.infoworld.com/realworldsoa/archives/IFW_SOA_12-12-06.mp3.

Dave Kellogg writes about content being at the center of your architecture, http://marklogic.blogspot.com/2006/12/whats-at-center-of-your-content.html.

James McGovern writes a nice note about ECM vendors and their stubbornness, http://duckdown.blogspot.com/2006/12/enterprise-content-management-and.html.

All these writers explain about the need for the enterprises content to be flexible and robust. Most of the larger ECM vendors don’t like this flexibility because, smugly, they already have figured that out and they have the answer for you. We the customers have been asking for content centric applications for so long and now some products, mixed with some healthy technology guidance, can give us the content dexterity that we require.

I think that through a solid implementation of flexible products like Marklogic’s xml db, IBM’s Information Integrator, BEA’s Service Bus and BPM, and someone’s portal (insert OSS portal of choice) we can have a content centric architecture that can host many requirements of the business. We can satisfy the various requirements of the business (virtually) regardless of the underlying system that stores the data. Of course there are some other products that can assist the optimization of content throughput like datagrids and grid computing but I think those products are still maturing through the enterprises content systems.

Stay tuned for my C³ plan (content to consumer, content’s business processes, and content composition) which should cover initial steps to capturing content requirements to start a content centric solution.

I presented a split session with Dr. Thomas Vogel. He presented on his company’s multi year application roll out (not really a project but more a program of many parallel on-going tasks) called a portal. I thought it was a great topic and he shared some real insight to how to sustain and grow this type of enterprise application in the large companies.

My presentation went well. I got some good questions afterwards and not so surprisingly I had some rather in-depth conversation on the topic during the many networking and social events.

I attended rather enjoyed Jim Hobart’s tutorial on designing web 2.0 applications. Luckily it wasn’t a worship service with Ajax being the master of all but more trying to remind us that web applications have users and users get frustrated with poor interfaces and that frustrated users are inefficient. He explained at a 10000 foot view that there are now better development tools for developers to build more usable sites. I felt the focus of the talk really evolved around trying to design a better user interface, testing the design with real users, and all to make business more efficient. Why do you test your usable designs with real users? The answer given to us is so that you make the business process more efficient. I can’t think of any better answer; Can you?

Aarhus is a nice quaint city (“probably the biggest little city in the world” is what I was told) and everyone we ran into in the city was very friendly. The conference was organized well with lots of time to actually meet others and lots of time to attend many insightful presentations. Anyone that struggles with their content management that are in the area (i.e. the globe) and are able to attend next year should seriously consider attending cmf2007.

• A podcast (presentation at a conference) by Dan Shaffer
• Information Architecture survey results posted by Louis Resenfeld
• Peter Morville’s podcast via IT Conversations
• Steve Krug speaks to developers from Devsource
• Contentology hosts an Accessibility guide that is actually from Dive into Accessibility.

Then on Thursday I attended a networking event with some people from the DC area involved with User Experience, Information Architecture, and Content Management communities.

So you ask yourself why would someone who is more software development inclined be spending so much time on reviewing User Experience content. Answer: I believe that that a poor User Experience is a large reason why IT projects can fail. Failure can be classified in many different ways and where from the product/project being completely dead, to a year after the initial rollout the majority of the users still complain that they don’t know how to use the product.

In the past I’ve been involved with a few content management projects at a variety of levels, and I believe that a large majority of them that failed (although they are still in production) because of poor usability. It is unfortunate that in this day and age that the CM industry allows this usability issue to initiate the demise of well intended projects. Many of the, shall I say most, of the CMS vendors have heard that their product has usability discrepancies but few try and resolve them. I can only imagine that vendors see the usability issues as secondary to the actual software code being to complex, which btw most are. So what are we to do since, most the CMS vendors have horrific user interfaces? I say we start purchasing the software without a UI. Let’s purchase everything but the UI and let’s design and build our own. Although, it feels good to get that off my chest and it out there to you, I realize that this will be nearly impossible because of how much application logic is actually built into the User Interface layer. Step one in cleansing the UI I suggest removing as many menu choices and links where you can in the CMS UI.

Case and Point: I was involved with a project where we concluded that 80% of the UI requests to the content management system were to create and edit the content and a large percentage of the users were only performing these tasks. We were using a CMS that had (and still has) a horrific user interface. So we built a custom application that was used to create new content, review content, edit content, and most of the basic workflow transition tasks. The other 20% of the functionality was used by the publishers or more the power type users of the content system and knew that they could toggle between the two interfaces, if needed, to do their jobs. It didn’t take long for us to build a modified, featureless, but more usable, user interface, and the system became a lot more successful. Unfortunately, for the new interface, it was acceptably too little but it was too late and a $150k CMS implementation was being brought in to replace the $1M CMS implementation. That said the project was not considered a failure because it did get a content management acceptance in a large organization that didn’t want to change.

Complete Enterprise wide IT solution acceptance in any large organization is something fairly unique to accomplish in a single project. However, User Experience and Software Design should not be what hinders that acceptance.