Patent Application
20200302365
The present disclosure relates in general to approaches for testing for and resolving in automated, complex process flows having dynamic and non-dynamic activity nodes as well as resuming broken or disrupted process flows.
This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the present disclosure, which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present disclosure. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
Organizations, regardless of size, rely upon access to information technology (IT) and data and services for their continued operation and success. A respective organization's IT infrastructure may have associated hardware resources (e.g. computing devices, load balancers, firewalls, switches, etc.) and software resources (e.g. productivity software, database applications, custom applications, and so forth). Over time, more and more organizations have turned to cloud computing approaches to supplement or enhance their IT infrastructure solutions.
Cloud computing relates to the sharing of computing resources that are generally accessed via the Internet. In particular, a cloud computing infrastructure allows users, such as individuals and/or enterprises, to access a shared pool of computing resources, such as servers, storage devices, networks, applications, and/or other computing based services. By doing so, users are able to access computing resources on demand that are located at remote locations, which resources may be used to perform a variety of computing functions (e.g., storing and/or processing large quantities of computing data). For enterprise and other organization users, cloud computing provides flexibility in accessing cloud computing resources without accruing large up-front costs, such as purchasing expensive network equipment or investing large amounts of time in establishing a private network infrastructure. Instead, by utilizing cloud computing resources, users are able redirect their resources to focus on their enterprise's core functions.
In an enterprise or organization, certain operations may be managed using one or more applications or resources running on a cloud-platform. Such operations may be associated with a lengthy chain of activities or task that may span days, weeks, months or years and that may include actions to be performed by multiple actors. Further, certain downstream actions may be conditional on decisions or actions performed prior or by other actors. In some contexts, computer- and cloud-based approaches may be employed to design, implement, and track such process flows associated with defined activities performed in an organization or enterprise. However, due to the complexity of the activity interrelationships, the lengthy time frames that may be involved, the potential number of actors, and so forth, it may be difficult to troubleshoot failures in a given flow in an efficient manner.
A summary of certain embodiments disclosed herein is set forth below. It should be understood that these aspects are presented merely to provide the reader with a brief summary of these certain embodiments and that these aspects are not intended to limit the scope of this disclosure. Indeed, this disclosure may encompass a variety of aspects that may not be set forth below.
The present approach relates to techniques that may be used to test and troubleshoot complex chains of activities (e.g., tasks), often associated with multiple actors and long time frames, in an efficient manner. In particular, functionality is provided for testing changes to a process flow comprising a complex chain of activities and/or for testing a given process flow under different circumstances, such as testing for errors when applied to individuals having certain characteristics, locations, and so forth. In addition, functionality is provided for allowing only portions (e.g., a temporal subset) of the process flow to be tested while excluding upstream or downstream portions. Further, functionality may be provided for, in a production environment, restarting a failed process flow from the point of failure, as opposed to having to repeat previously completed steps.
Various refinements of the features noted above may exist in relation to various aspects of the present disclosure. Further features may also be incorporated in these various aspects as well. These refinements and additional features may exist individually or in any combination. For instance, various features discussed below in relation to one or more of the illustrated embodiments may be incorporated into any of the above-described aspects of the present disclosure alone or in any combination. The brief summary presented above is intended only to familiarize the reader with certain aspects and contexts of embodiments of the present disclosure without limitation to the claimed subject matter.
Various aspects of this disclosure may be better understood upon reading the following detailed description and upon reference to the drawings in which:
One or more specific embodiments will be described below. In an effort to provide a concise description of these embodiments, not all features of an actual implementation are described in the specification. It should be appreciated that in the development of any such actual implementation, as in any engineering or design project, numerous implementation-specific decisions must be made to achieve the developers' specific goals, such as compliance with system-related and enterprise-related constraints, which may vary from one implementation to another. Moreover, it should be appreciated that such a development effort might be complex and time consuming, but would nevertheless be a routine undertaking of design, fabrication, and manufacture for those of ordinary skill having the benefit of this disclosure.
As used herein, the term “computing system” refers to an electronic computing device such as, but not limited to, a single computer, virtual machine, virtual container, host, server, laptop, and/or mobile device, or to a plurality of electronic computing devices working together to perform the function described as being performed on or by the computing system. As used herein, the term “medium” refers to one or more non-transitory, computer-readable physical media that together store the contents described as being stored thereon. Embodiments may include non-volatile secondary storage, read-only memory (ROM), and/or random-access memory (RAM). As used herein, the term “application” refers to one or more computing modules, programs, processes, workloads, threads and/or a set of computing instructions executed by a computing system. Example embodiments of an application include software modules, software objects, software instances and/or other types of executable code.
The present approach relates to techniques that may be used to test and troubleshoot complex sequences of activities (e.g., a process flow), which may be provided as tasks to one or more individuals or groups. Such activities are often associated with multiple actors and long time frames and may be difficult to test or troubleshoot in an efficient manner. In particular, approaches are discussed herein for testing changes to a process flow comprising a complex chain of activities and/or for testing a given process flow under different circumstances, such as testing for errors when applied to individuals having certain characteristics, locations, and so forth. In addition, functionality is provided for allowing only portions (e.g., a temporal subset) of the process flow to be tested while excluding upstream or downstream portions. Further, functionality may be provided for, in a production environment, restarting a failed process flow from the point of failure, as opposed to having to repeat previously completed steps.
In order to provide useful, real-world perspective, certain of the examples of process flows discussed herein may be put in the context of lifecycle events. Such lifecycle events are examples of complex process flows comprising milestones and associated activities or tasks that may be designed and tracked in an organization using suitable applications related to and/or impacting human resource management, accounting, information technology management, and so forth. Examples of such lifecycle events include, but are not limited to, employee on-boarding, employee off-boarding, employee relocation and/or reassignment, employee promotion or other changes within an organization, and so forth. It should be appreciated however, that while such lifecycle events are useful examples of real-world process flows, the present techniques are suitable for use with various other types of complex process flows, and are not limited to use in the context of such lifecycle events.
With the preceding in mind, the following figures relate to various types of generalized system architectures or configurations that may be employed to provide services to an organization in a multi-instance framework and on which the present approaches may be employed. Correspondingly, these system and platform examples may also relate to systems and platforms on which the techniques discussed herein may be implemented or otherwise utilized, though other system implementations, including on a stand-alone local area network, wide area network, or even on a stand-alone computer, are also possible. Turning now to
For the illustrated embodiment,
In
To utilize computing resources within the platform 16, network operators may choose to configure the data centers 18 using a variety of computing infrastructures. In one embodiment, one or more of the data centers 18 are configured using a multi-tenant cloud architecture, such that one of the server instances 26 handles requests from and serves multiple customers. Data centers 18 with multi-tenant cloud architecture commingle and store data from multiple customers, where multiple customer instances are assigned to one of the virtual servers 26. In a multi-tenant cloud architecture, the particular virtual server 26 distinguishes between and segregates data and other information of the various customers. For example, a multi-tenant cloud architecture could assign a particular identifier for each customer in order to identify and segregate the data from each customer. Generally, implementing a multi-tenant cloud architecture may suffer from various drawbacks, such as a failure of a particular one of the server instances 26 causing outages for all customers allocated to the particular server instance.
In another embodiment, one or more of the data centers 18 are configured using a multi-instance cloud architecture to provide every customer its own unique customer instance or instances. For example, a multi-instance cloud architecture could provide each customer instance with its own dedicated application server and dedicated database server. In other examples, the multi-instance cloud architecture could deploy a single physical or virtual server 26 and/or other combinations of physical and/or virtual servers 26, such as one or more dedicated web servers, one or more dedicated application servers, and one or more database servers, for each customer instance. In a multi-instance cloud architecture, multiple customer instances could be installed on one or more respective hardware servers, where each customer instance is allocated certain portions of the physical server resources, such as computing memory, storage, and processing power. By doing so, each customer instance has its own unique software stack that provides the benefit of data isolation, relatively less downtime for customers to access the platform 16, and customer-driven upgrade schedules. An example of implementing a customer instance within a multi-instance cloud architecture will be discussed in more detail below with reference to
Although
As may be appreciated, the respective architectures and frameworks discussed with respect to
By way of background, it may be appreciated that the present approach may be implemented using one or more processor-based systems such as shown in
With this in mind, an example computer system may include some or all of the computer components depicted in
The one or more processors 202 may include one or more microprocessors capable of performing instructions stored in the memory 206. Additionally or alternatively, the one or more processors 202 may include application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and/or other devices designed to perform some or all of the functions discussed herein without calling instructions from the memory 206.
With respect to other components, the one or more busses 204 include suitable electrical channels to provide data and/or power between the various components of the computing system 200. The memory 206 may include any tangible, non-transitory, and computer-readable storage media. Although shown as a single block in
With the preceding in mind,
With the preceding in mind, the present approach relates to techniques that may be used to test and troubleshoot complex sequences of activities (e.g., a process or workflow, such as may be associated with a series of tasks to be performed for a lifecycle event). Such activities may be provided as tasks to perform by one or more individuals or groups (i.e., fulfillers). Such activities are often associated with multiple actors and long time frames and may be difficult to test or troubleshoot in an efficient manner. In particular, approaches are discussed herein for facilitating such testing and troubleshooting operations, as well as for resuming broken process flows in an efficient manner.
With this in mind, and turning to
In the depicted example, the workflow is related to “New Hire Onboarding” and includes milestones 354 based on “Pre-Hire”, “Pre-Boarding”, “Day 1”, “Week 1”, “Week 2”, and further into the future. For each milestone 354 appropriate activities 352 are listed underneath as separate cards that describe the task to be completed and the respective fulfiller of the activity 352. Options to add (control 360) or delete (controls 362) are also provided to add or delete activities for the respective workflow. Similarly, additional milestones 354 may be added (or existing milestones 354 removed) if needed.
In practice, certain activities 352 may be conditional on other activities being completed, such as in a preceding milestone 354. In addition, certain activities 352 may not apply to all individuals (such as based on age, gender, job title, educational background, citizenship status, and so forth), or may have different applicability based on geographic location or jurisdiction (i.e., different cities, states or countries may have different laws or regulations). As a result, the interrelationship among activities can be complex not just due to a logical interrelationship between activities, but also due to factors such as individual demographics or characteristics, geographic location, and legal jurisdiction.
In the depicted example, the workflow illustrated is a personalized workflow and illustrates activities and milestones associated with a designated individual (in this example, an individual being onboarded as a new hire). Thus, as activities 352 are performed and milestones 354 reached, the personalized workflow may be updated to reflect the milestones 354 being reached, activities 352 being completed (or not being completed) and so forth).
An aspect of the personalization of the workflow is that only applicable activities should be triggered for completion for a given individual. Thus, each activity 352 may have an associated trigger or condition that determines if it will apply. By way of example, an activity related to providing information related to retirement account catch-up contributions may be applicable only to individuals age 50 or older in a given year, and thus may not be included as an activity for those not meeting this age requirement. Similarly, other activities may be specific to a geographic location or legal jurisdiction, so that an individual's location determines whether certain activities 352 apply and are shown.
With these considerations in mind, it may be appreciated that the variety of possible workflow activity combinations for a given process (e.g., employee onboarding in the depicted example) may be large and it may be difficult to test all possible flows for logical continuity and possible errors. The present approach addresses this difficulty by providing simplified test functionality to that a given set of condition and a given workflow can be tested, either in its entirety or from a specified time or milestone 354.
Turning to
To facilitate the testing process, a set of testing options 370 may be toggled to display (or be hidden) by selection of a testing icon 372. The testing option 370 in the depicted example include a slider 376 that controls whether inapplicable activities are displayed (where inapplicable activities are those that, for a given subject, are known not to apply) and a slider 378 that controls whether indeterminate activities are displayed (where indeterminate activities are those that, for a given subject, are conditional and may or may not apply depending on an event or answer provided earlier in the workflow).
In addition, the testing options 370 in the depicted example include a start selector 374 through which an activity, date, or milestone, may be selected or otherwise specified and from which the test process will proceed from. That is, activities and/or milestones occurring before the selected start time/activity are not processed as part of a test run. This helps increase efficiency of the testing process as known good portions of a workflow can be skipped and/or a known bad portion can be more closely focused on. In addition, though not shown, an option may additionally or alternatively be provided to specify an end time or activity so that testing is terminated after testing a portion of the workflow without processing the remainder of the workflow.
A subject person may also be specified (field 380) having one or more characteristics consistent with the testing to be performed. That is, if the workflow is to be tested for continuity with respect to individuals from a certain location or having a certain demographic characteristic, a subject person may be selected who has the desired characteristics or location so that the corresponding personalized workflow is appropriate for the contemplated test. A suitable subject person may identified by performing a search of available individuals. In the depicted example, such a search may be invoked using a search button 382, which invokes a search customization screen, as shown on
Turning to
Turning to
Once the criteria are deemed satisfactory, a user of the interface 390 may select (i.e., press) the indictor 412, causing a list 420 of matches 422 to be displayed, as shown in
Once the test subject and associated personalized workflow are selected, a user of the interface may selected an option to perform a preview (e.g., selecting preview button 440) of the selected lifecycle (e.g., workflow). An example of such a preview operation being performed is shown in
Once the preview step is completed, preview results are provided, as shown in in
A user of the interface, based on the preview results, may opt to include or exclude inapplicable activities 352B from the actual testing process. For example, as shown in
Once a user adds any indeterminate or inapplicable activity 352B that are to be included, the test button 46 may be selected, prompting the test process to run for the active and selected activities 352, from the date or time specified (field 374), and based on the characteristics of interest of the subject. In particular, the test process tests the logical interconnections and activity triggers based on the specified activities, as discussed herein. Upon completion of the test process, a test result file 490 may be created, as shown in
The test result file 490 may be opened, as shown in
With the preceding in mind, the above-described testing functionality provides several advantages over conventional approaches. In accordance with the present techniques, a workflow can be simulated during development or design with particular test cases or individual circumstances in mind so as to confirm that needs tasks and activities activate as intended. Likewise, testing can be limited based on dates or milestones so as to avoid testing portions of the workflow that are not at issue or otherwise not of concern.
The preceding relates to testing or troubleshooting, which may be done in a test or other non-production environment. Certain of the above-described concepts may also be leveraged in a production environment to provide certain benefits with respect to recovering or restarting a workflow in the event of a stop or break in the flow.
By way of example, in a production environment where a personalized workflow has been performed up through a given activity and milestone, and error or break in the workflow may occur that results in subsequent activities not being triggered. In conventional approaches, the entirety of the workflow would be canceled and restarted, resulting in wasted time and resources.
In contrast, aspects of the present approach would instead allow a personalized workflow to be resumed at the point where the workflow stopped. Unlike the test scenario outlined above, a test case is not created. Instead, in the resume context an existing case with activity data and feedback is already present in the production environment. The resume action can re-run activities and milestones in the personalized workflow while checking for the corresponding data in the production environment (e.g., the corresponding task or activity tables in the relevant databases) until an activity is reached in the workflow for which the data is not present, i.e., the point at which the workflow stopped. The first activity in the workflow for which data is missing may then be used to trigger that activity, automatically resuming the workflow at the point at which it was disrupted.
The specific embodiments described above have been shown by way of example, and it should be understood that these embodiments may be susceptible to various modifications and alternative forms. It should be further understood that the claims are not intended to be limited to the particular forms disclosed, but rather to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of this disclosure.
The techniques presented and claimed herein are referenced and applied to material objects and concrete examples of a practical nature that demonstrably improve the present technical field and, as such, are not abstract, intangible or purely theoretical. Further, if any claims appended to the end of this specification contain one or more elements designated as “means for [perform]ing [a function] . . . ” or “step for [perform]ing [a function] . . . ”, it is intended that such elements are to be interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f). However, for any claims containing elements designated in any other manner, it is intended that such elements are not to be interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f).
