Plunet Summit 2018: Plunet 7.3 Unboxed! From Refactoring to Automation

Editor's Notes

• #7: Customers are adding more properties/text modules to customize quote, order and invoice formats. Need more sophisticated reporting on multiple fields at the same time led to this new development.
• #8: New icons for file types make it easier for PMs to evaluate project files quickly
• #9: Due date changes to orange when project will become overdue today, making sure PMs can act before it’s too late.
• #10: Example: gross profit report slowing everything down
• #11: One single connection to database
• #12: Parallel database access to read data
• #22: NEW FEATURES. As a software provider, you are always dealing with your customer‘s expectations. Their needs drive a big part of the future development plan. So naturally, our customers expect new, amazing, never before seen features. Something that blows their mind.
• #23: It gets very complex. And heavy. Would you enjoy using this tool?
• #24: Building software is like building a house. You are practically never done with it. There‘s always something you can improve or add to something that‘s already there. After a while, you also start replacing or removing something you don‘t need anymore! If you own a house, you can also try to avoid renovating to save time and money, but all house owners will agree that the work that needs to be done eventually catches up with them at some point!
• #25: This is you. You encounter a problem in Plunet, and turn that problem into an idea. You communicate the idea to us, and it lands on my desk. This is me, talking to other stake holders to make sure I really understand the problem behind your idea. Sometimes, your idea solves the symptoms of the problem you encountered, but not the root of it. In those cases, I come up with another idea, to make sure you don‘t just receive a „bandaid feature“, but the medicine that cures the underlying issue. Once the idea for a features has been estsablished, our magicians join the show: the developers. It may come as quite the shock to some of you, but they don‘t really use magic wands. Disappointing, I know…! The good news is: once they have done their job, your idea has been turned into a feature. Let‘s have a closer look at the family of features!
• #26: Say hello to Bernie (on the left) and Freddie (on the right)! I‘m pretty sure you have all encountered one of the little fellows on the left. He‘s very closely related to the one on the right. In our last version (Plunet 7.2) the CAT integration department has taken care of 115 bugs. The version before that (7.1), it were 105, and the one before that (7.0) we eliminated 80 of them. That sounds like the number of bugs is increasing over the time, but if you look at it in proportion to the number of features we added to the integrations, the reality is: they have turned from toddlers into children, from children into teenagers, and from teenagers into adults – in a matter of a few years. To put that into even more numbers: Since 2007, we have developed app. 1.000 features and technical improvements (for the CAT tool integrations alone). For our last three versions combined (7.0, 7.1 and 7.2), we are looking at 258. And for Plunet 7.3, we have implemented a total of 81 improvements. This number does not include code refactorings!
• #27: I mentioned earlier that since 2007, we have built 1.000 features for the various CAT tool integrations. All of them are based on code, which leads to so-called legacy code (source code inherited from an older version of the software). It‘s restructuring or „cleaning up“ old code, while making sure it still behaves the same way as before. Yes, we do indeed try to make sure features from previous versions still work. 
• #28: A mature product benefits everyone, and comes with a lot of positive effects from the development standpoint: Readability & Comprehensibility – A team of developers can work on the same code easier and quicker, and thus, analyse and fix problems faster. Testability – Or: including more automatic tests to detect issues before they can happen to a user. Maintainability & Expandability – It‘s less likely that fixing bugs will lead to even more bugs, and it will be easier to add new code (and thus, features), to the existing one.
• #29: I already mentioned that we implemented 81 integration improvements in this new version of Plunet. This includes new features, but also technical improvements as well as code refactorings. The 7.3 release notes JUST for the integrations cover a total of 20 pages. Let me summarize the key features for you!
• #38: Linking existing projects in Plunet Creating WS projects from Plunet Controlling workflows from Plunet