Usage scenarios
Sample scenario #1: accelerating the debugging and the
updating of Microsoft
Office Add-Ins in a highly reactive environment such as a
trading department of a financial institution.
The situation:
A financial institution has an IT department that develops
Microsoft Office Add-Ins for use for example by a group of traders.
One of the traders finds a bug in an Add-In or has a
particular request.
The typical workflow:
This is what usually happens in this situation, without our solution:
- The trader reports the bug to the developers.
- A developer goes to the trader's computer to see the
bug, or makes a remote connection to that computer, or
logs into another trader's computer that has the same
bug and that is not being used.
- The developer cannot debug the Add-In directly from
the trader's computer because there are no tools for
that.
- The developer goes back to his/her development computer and
tries to reproduce the bug in a test environment. This
is sometimes difficult and time-consuming because the developer
needs to reproduce all the conditions that cause the bug
to appear, such as entering specific values on a
spreadsheet, connecting to an external data source, etc.
- The developer thinks he/she has fixed the bug and
sends the new version to the trader.
- The trader quits Microsoft Office in order to
install the new version of the Add-In. During the time
that Office is closed, the trader cannot work on his/her
documents and the company loses money.
- The trader installs the new version of the Add-In.
- The trader restarts Microsoft Office and reopens the
documents he/she was working on.
- If the bug is still there (on the trader's
computer), the process starts over from step 2, with the
developer going back and forth, and submitting new
versions of the Add-In until the bug is resolved.
- When the bug is finally resolved, the developer
submits the new version of the Add-In to all the other
traders. The process may force the
traders to quit Microsoft Office, install the
update, and then reopen the documents that they are
working on.
The need:
Speed up the process described above: reduce the time
that it takes to solve the bug or to satisfy the request of
the trader.
Our proposed solution:
If the bank has adopted Userware for Office, this is
what happens when a trader finds a bug in one of the
Add-Ins developed by the IT department:
- The trader reports the bug to the developers.
- A developer goes to the trader's computer to see the
bug, or makes a remote connection to that computer, or
logs into another trader's computer that has the same
bug and is not being used.
- The developer can fix the bug directly from that
computer (no need to go back and forth between a
development computer and a computer in production).
- Directly from the computer where the bug was fixed, the
developer can instantly deploy the new version of the
Add-In to all other
traders. The update is transparent and there is no need
for the traders to restart Office or to close their open documents
in order to get the bugfix.
Main benefits:
- Improved business responsiveness (no need to go back and forth
between a development computer and a trader's computer)
- Increased productivity (no need to restart Office to
receive new Add-Ins and updates)
- Cost reduction (no need to set up a dedicated development
computer and to purchase licenses for development
tools)