Design and development of an application to collect data from an Intelligent Information Management system
Mahmud, Mohammad Ariful Islam (2020)
2020
Degree Programme in Information Technology, MSc (Tech)
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
This publication is copyrighted. Only for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2020-06-01
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202004304814
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202004304814
Tiivistelmä
When software is released, it is common that the end-user will discover some issues while using the software. Issues can occur due to the software itself, data managed by the software, configurations, integrations, or the underlying environment. For investigating these issues properly, data from the end user's environment is important. No software developer or support engineer can fix issues on the fly without having proper information on the system having the issues and knowing the use case scenario. Often the issue is that it is not outright clear which data is needed and which data is not. If the correct data is not gathered outright, resolving the issue will take a long time as more data needs to be collected later. If all the possible data is collected immediately, a lot of time and work that is not necessary may be needed to collect that data. Collecting the data may also require following lengthy instructions, and sometimes those instructions can be software version specific. Besides, it is always possible that provided information is incorrect or incomplete, which causes extra work for support engineer or developer responsible in order to debug the issue. To ensure proper information is passed to the concerned team, having a tool to collect necessary logs automatically from the system is a convenient and trustworthy way.
Customers usually send required information and logs through the ticketing tool or other interactive means. Occasionally the provided data may be inaccurate, some requested data may be omitted, and in some cases, the data might be even incorrect. It is a problem for the responsible support teams to resolve issues when the client delivers the wrong data. The primary objective of this thesis study is to collect requirements for an application that could automatize many of the data collection tasks and then design and implement a proof of concept version of such a tool. The number of requirements may be so high that implementing all of them may not be possible within the scope of this thesis. Hence the proof of concept version should have a reasonable subset of those requirements and have modularity to add new requirements later. The tool must also consider factors like performance, so that the application may use multithreading where feasible. Additionally, other factors like privacy and visibility of data collection should be considered. Requirements that cannot be fulfilled due to issues like technical limitations or performance can be omitted. However, features that can be implemented in the future should be considered in the architectural design of the tool.
Based on the objectives of the study, three research questions were set, and answering these questions would benefit both academics and industry. The implementation requirements were collected based on the responses from the responsible parties. Depending on the decisions on the subset of the gathered requirements, goals were set for the study. Moreover, the proof of concept version of the software was designed and implemented fully. During the trial run, it is found that the application may help to reduce the required time and effort for gathering the required data in comparison with the manual data collection process. From the result of the study, it is proven that having such a tool to gather required information and logs on the M-Files system is a practical track to pursue. This developed application may result in a valuable part of M-Files software in the future. Through the initial implementation and deployment of the application can result in a short time loss of resources but will benefit in a longer run.
Customers usually send required information and logs through the ticketing tool or other interactive means. Occasionally the provided data may be inaccurate, some requested data may be omitted, and in some cases, the data might be even incorrect. It is a problem for the responsible support teams to resolve issues when the client delivers the wrong data. The primary objective of this thesis study is to collect requirements for an application that could automatize many of the data collection tasks and then design and implement a proof of concept version of such a tool. The number of requirements may be so high that implementing all of them may not be possible within the scope of this thesis. Hence the proof of concept version should have a reasonable subset of those requirements and have modularity to add new requirements later. The tool must also consider factors like performance, so that the application may use multithreading where feasible. Additionally, other factors like privacy and visibility of data collection should be considered. Requirements that cannot be fulfilled due to issues like technical limitations or performance can be omitted. However, features that can be implemented in the future should be considered in the architectural design of the tool.
Based on the objectives of the study, three research questions were set, and answering these questions would benefit both academics and industry. The implementation requirements were collected based on the responses from the responsible parties. Depending on the decisions on the subset of the gathered requirements, goals were set for the study. Moreover, the proof of concept version of the software was designed and implemented fully. During the trial run, it is found that the application may help to reduce the required time and effort for gathering the required data in comparison with the manual data collection process. From the result of the study, it is proven that having such a tool to gather required information and logs on the M-Files system is a practical track to pursue. This developed application may result in a valuable part of M-Files software in the future. Through the initial implementation and deployment of the application can result in a short time loss of resources but will benefit in a longer run.