Frequently Asked Questions

Undraleu Functionality

  • There are various rules that Undraleu provides. These are a result of constant collaboration between our customers and our research and interaction with the ETL Development community. We typically classify the rules into categories (for Qualitative Impact) and criticality (for Severity Impact). Undraleu rules address a range of categories and criticalities including data loss, error handling, performance, maintenance, documentation and show stoppers, critical, major etc.

  • Yes, this is a common requirement for all our customers who have done an evaluation and moved to a production version. We provide two paths to production installation of Undraleu:

    1. Fresh Install (First time install)

    2. Upgrade from Evaluation Version.

    We can help you follow the path #2 and preserve your evaluation environment and migrate your evaluation environment to a production environment very easily, at no additional cost.

  • The upgrades are independent of the customization done by the users hence will not affect any of the existing rules and their customization.

  • Yes. There are some rules that can be customized e.g. naming convention. There are other rules that are looking for a selected option e.g. “Aggregator Sorted Input Enabled”. We appreciate that each organization may have adopted different standards and also within each organization different code sets/projects may adopt different standards. Undraleu allows you to customize as per your projects' requirement. Let us go over an example to illustrate the naming standards for mappings. We provide a default prefix of "m_" for a mapping name. You may want to adopt a "MP_" across your organization. You can override our value to apply instead "MP_" as your standard. Yet, there may be some legacy projects that may have used a naming convention of "MAP_" for mappings. You can allow a further override at the legacy project level to accept "MAP_" as the standard and still allow the rest of the organization to conform to "MP_". This allows you to embrace your own standards seamlessly yet allow enough flexibility in a controlled manner.

Undraleu General

  • Most organizations have been using ETL Tools since a long time and have a lot of legacy code that undergo maintenance along with more recent code. From our experience, we realize that most companies have challenges in production environment. One quick win in having Undraleu run on production environment is to identify and learn from the findings and not repeat those mistakes in new deployments. This will ensure stemming any new issues from cropping up in production environment.

  • While there are development shops which are very well structured and conduct code reviews thoroughly, in all possibility it is a manual review. Such shops which pride themselves in their personnel and code reviews can benefit even further by automating their code reviews and spare themselves with at least a few hours of the time they spend in performing the code reviews and deliver more projects and improve their overall value from their stake holders’ perspective. In short, using Undraleu, you can develop more of the good code you have been developing without Undraleu.

  • Anybody or everybody who has an interest in the quality of the code being developed, maintained or supported. Some of the roles' of folks who are currently using Undraleu are:

    Developers

    Technical Leads

    Administrators

    Project Managers

    Application Managers

    Quality Assurance

    Deployment Managers

    Operations/Platform Managers

    Architects

    CTO’s

  • Off-shoring has been embarked by various organizations for multiple reasons. Some reasons have been questioned and some proven. One pain-point we see in off-shoring, outsourcing, near-shoring, right-shoring or whatever the arrangement is, there is no transparent definition and monitoring of quality. Undraleu was built to bring in code quality monitoring in a self-service manner. This allows everybody and anybody to monitor the code quality. Through Undraleu, you can now make it mandatory for your offshore service providers to enforce quantified, measurable and consistent code governance. The standards can be decided by your team and communicated to the offshore team. The offshore team can scan the code against the agreed standards to ensure they are in conformance to them before they deliver the code. The client can double check to ensure what has been delivered meets the standards agreed. In a multi-vendor arrangement Undraleu can be also used to evaluate the quality of the different vendors and take a decision to continue or discontinue a vendor’s services using facts.

  • There are some clear benefits from using Undraleu® that include all the benefits you expect by following set best practices. However, there are some hard to measure benefits that we can’t quantify examples include reduction in support, maintenance and on-call costs. Please contact us and we can help quantify the benefits and help build a business case for you.

  • While building Undraleu, we kept simplicity as the core objective. We can’t dispute the findings of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle but in our goal to make ETL in general and Informatica Development in particular more productive, this tool does cause one extra step (i.e. login and select the code to review) but the outcome of the review should improve the long term code quality, supportability, maintainability and other key aspects of code quality.

  • Rules

    A rule is a single best practice. You can pick the rule or group of rules you want your code to be checked against and create a rulelist.

    RuleLists

    A rulelist is a group of rules or checks that you would like to use to measure your code against. A rulelist can have one or more rules. This is a good way to group rules that perform a particular set of checks. For example a rulelist can be created for Development activities of a project. Another rulelist can be created for Production checks or for performance etc. This enables checking different aspects of code for more insight into specific anomalies. Rulelists can be managed at site, project or user level. Site level rulelists are also referred to as Shared Rulelists. Shared rulelists are available to all projects and all users.

    Category

    Each rule or best practice has a reason or area that it will impact if not followed. Undraleu refers to them as Category. Examples of Categories are: Maintainability, Readability, Supportability, Complexity etc. Each rule or best practice may belong to one or more Category. For example not following naming conventions may make the code not easy to maintain and not easy to read.

    Criticality

    Criticality is a way of assessing the impact of violating a best practice. Undraleu allows managing the Criticality level of each rule (it can be user defined). Examples of Criticality are: Show-Stopper, Severe, Major, and Minor. By marking a best practice to one level of criticality allows a quick assessment of the code to be of a certain level of quality.

    Criticality levels can drive whether the quality of the software is meeting expected standards and whether the code should promoted to production or refactored.

Undraleu Technical Requirement

  • Yes, we recommend it and are happy to provide it. Please contact us and we can work towards it

  • Undraleu is developed using very simple and mature technology stack. It needs a JRE, a small database to manage itself, a webserver and finally read only access to Informatica Repository objects. While Undraleu can be installed on the same server as other Informatica components, it is not a pre-requisite. Undraleu can be installed on a separate server with connectivity to the Informatica Repository database. Undraleu supports most Operating Systems including Windows, Linux and Unix (most variants).

Still have questions?

We are always happy to help, if you have any question please get in touch.