Siebel Consultant Diary of a Siebel Consultant

Development environment down

Today, the most unbelievable thing happened. We are in a very critical stage of the project since we are trying to make a release without issues in order to go live next week. Therefor we are working very long days.

Today around 5 o’clock I wanted to checkout a project from the server when I received an error that the connection with the Oracle database could not be established. I thought I was maybe related to the fact that my tools had been open for several days so I exited from tools and restarted it. But the same error occurred.

Then I tried to connect via Toad to the dev database and got the same error. When asking my colleague about it, he told me he got the same problem. After complaining to somebody internal, she called to the DBA who told her that several UNIX machines were being patched and that he was only informed about this 5 minutes before. He had no idea how long this would take.

So we spent there 3 more hours working on projects that were already checked out and did some investigation for the development work for tomorrow. When I left the building at 8h30, the database was still down. I sincerely hope that everything will be up and running because otherwise we will have a very big problem.

13

Yesterday I was telling that is was a slow day with nothing much to do and that I did not like it. Well, today was the complete oposite. It started as a slow day, but then completely changed.

The day started with retesting all bugs reported by our team, because the testers did not know how to test those bugs. Nothing too difficult so I seemed that it would be a slow day.

But during a meeting some other issues came up and we had to go through the list to see if we could reproduce them and assign a priorty to them. We also had some performance issues which required some time to look at.

Around 17h30 we got a call that all issues that could be resolved should be in the new release before going live. So after al, it ended up being a very long day. But I’m not complaining. The reason that I quited my previous job was that I had nothing to do – I was giving support on a Siebel application. So for me, working from 7 in the morning untill 8 at night it not a problem at all. I’m happy to do it.

Slow day

Last Friday we’ve made the (hopefully) last compile before going live next week. All major bugs and some small change request reported by the testers are included in this compile so we had a busy week last week.

Today was rather slow. I only had to do two minor issues and look into a problem with data quality (which was set up by my colleague, so I don’t have experience whit that).

Bottom line, it was a slow day today. And I don’t like it. Ok, it was more relax that the previous weeks, but I like it when there is some pressure. You always know what to do and that was not the case today.

I hope I can soon start on developing on release 1.1 but first I hope off course that we go live on the planned date. That would be a great achievement since we did this entire project in a very small timeframe.

Why not to make a read-only field required

This action can be filed under stupid mistakes.

On opportunities we have some calculated fields which are read-only. Somewhere in the system requirements was said that one of those fields (revenue) should be required for a certain sale stage. Of course this was not a good requirement because you can’t fill in a read-only field.

For some reason, I made the field required (don’t ask why) and the changes where put in the SRF which was launched today in the UAT environment. Of course this was a blocking issue. I never felt more stupid then today.

Last week

We’re at the last week of development on the current project. This means the last week to develop the requirements and bugfixing the requirements from last weeks. This week will be as busy as the three previous but at least we are on schedule.

Today I spent most of the time on bugfixing previous built requirements an developing a tricky part (at least for me). Business would like the users to be able to change the primary of the sales team for an opportunity trough a pick applet.

My first try was to do this just by creating some joins and filling in the necessary fields with a pick map but that seemed not possible. So now I’m trying to do it via eScript. When I left the office, I was close to finding the correct way to do it, so I hope to get it working tomorrow morning.

Dataload successful

Today I successfully completed my first dataload ever. In a previous project I also did the dataload, but there the SQL files to fill the EIM tables and .ifb files where already written. This load I had to do from scratch.

The project started last week, and I had one week to complete the load since we only got 4 weeks to deliver a working application. With complete and accurate data that is.

I have to admit that it was not the most difficult load ever, but every first time is hard. The data that need to be loaded where accounts with addresses and positions linked to it and segments and industries, contacts – linked to the accounts and also with addresses and entities in the S_CONTACT_XM table.

The first task was to get the data from .csv files in temporary tables. This worked like a charm with the use of SQLLoader. Next step was filling the EIM tables. This was a process of trial and error to find out what columns where needed.

I ran into some difficulties when trying to link the positions and the accounts but found the solution in the end. Last night I started the first big batch (170.000 accounts) and this morning I loaded the rest of the data. This week, the data will be checked.

The rest of the week I will configure the application together with my two colleagues. It will be some several busy weeks to come but the reward will be big I guess.

No more long drives

This week is my last week at the project in Roeselare. Starting Monday, I will be working on a new project in Brussels. So no more long drives in the morning and at night but a relaxing train ride to and from work while reading a good book.

On the new project I will be part of the development team and I will also do some technical stuff like the data load.

I’m really looking forward to start on the new project en learn lots of new stuff and proof myself as a good Siebel developer.

Aligning two environments

Today I have to align the production environment with the test environment. Normally, I would use ADM to do this for the list of values, but they told me that ADM was not active and that I should do it manually, which is not the most easy job.

My technique was going through the appilcation, looking where a picklist used LOV’s, exporting the LOV type to a csv file, comparing the files from test and prod with ExamDiff and modifying any changes to production.

Busy week ahead

This week will be very busy. The project where I’m working on at the moment is a 165 km drive for me. Therefor I work 4 days of 10 hours so I have my 40 hours and have one extra day to stay at home.

But this week I have to go to another project for 1 day. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem but the teamleader on the other project wanted me to come for 4 days. So I have a week of 48 hours in front of me. But hey, I’m not complaining. I like the work so I’m going to enjoy it.

New project

Next week I will be working on a second project.

This new project is a big on and – most important – is in Brussels, so I don’t have to drive as far as the current project I’m working on.

Next week it will be one day and the after two days. After that it’s not sure how many days I will be on that project but I hope for lots of days.