System Specification Document for Warehouse Management System

In business computing, we understand that we need to capture and translate the business requirements into technical specifications in assist and understand what and how the proposed system is going to be designed.  Due to different solution for the different industries, the contents in a system specification document will vary but it should capture all the required information for the solution design.

For our warehouse management system we identify the following information to be captured into the system specification document:

1. System Architecture - A description of the network and hardware design for the solution.
2. System Design – A description of the system flow and integration with internal and external systems that includes communication protocols, formats and frequency.
3. System Process Flows – A collection of all the system process flows showing all the key points of system interaction and integration with internal and external systems.
4. Data Dictionary – Shows all the tables, primary and foreign key constraints, fields’ values, stored procedures and triggers that provides its propose and usage.
5. Message Mapping – A description of the mapping requirements between the message and the system.
6. Message Management – A description of the message execution and error handling within the system, includes staging tables, validation rules and error handling.
7. Screen Design and Execution – a description of the screen layout, field validation, database mapping/computation formula for each field and action upon clicking.
8. RF (Radio Frequency) Design Flow – a description of the RF flow and explanation of the logic including exception handling on each RF screen.
9. Reports – a description of all the reports required (operational and planning).  The details should include descriptions of all online reports, purpose/usage, intended audience, parameters and corresponding validations on screen, data extration source and logic, report format/layout and report export requirements.

Effective Meetings with Stakeholders

Most project meetings are always over-do or not following according to the agenda or the topics are out of sync from what the presenter is really trying to bring out.

We need to acquire the effective ways to bring out the points to the stakeholders to deliver and close with the maximum impacts that are to bring to the stakeholders.  Herewith are my personal tips on how to prepare for effective meetings.

1. Keep the meeting on time
2. Keep it short and sharp
3. Involve your audiences
4. Open the meeting effectively to stimulate interest
5. Communicate persuasively and effectively
6. Involve your stakeholders in discussions

When preparing the presentation materials:

• Understand your objectives for the meeting
• Understand your audience’s needs and their expectations
• Highlight key issues for discussion
• Use visual aids appropriately

Missing Data via Web Service Request

In all testing, one of the important test scope that need to be implemented in any web interface is data loading testing.  In this type of testing, mass records from a single message interface are generated to stimulate any possibility of encountering data loss and the immediate solution to rectify the problem.

Currently my project is going through SIT (system integration testing) and we recently experienced multiple records “missing” from the web service request.  We validated the total records of this message interface “A” with the Customer and gone through a couple of rounds on that testing with the same set of data and this incident still happened and the defect pattern is different (initial = 765 missing, 1st retry = 349, 2nd retry = 428).

Further analysis, we tracked our error log and realized for those missing records that we attempted to download, they flagged an error status with reason code “Timeout Error”.  The connection to the client’s web service gateway is via HTTPS and every time our program triggers to establish the connection we are to provide valid user information as provided by the Customer that will authorize us to have the access and setup the connection with the gateway.

We tackle the issue on “Timeout Error” and we includes the below codes to extend the receiving timeout:

HTTPConduit http = (HTTPConduit) client.getConduit();
HTTPClientPolicy httpClientPolicy = new HTTPClientPolicy();
httpClientPolicy.setConnectionTimeout(36000);
httpClientPolicy.setAllowChunking(false);
httpClientPolicy.setReceiveTimeout(120000);
http.setClient(httpClientPolicy);

With the above, we retry and able to grab all the records from the web service gateway.   This is not a permanent solution to the “timeout error” and the team will monitor this scenario as we go along with the project.