Today I actually fired up Guidewire Studio. It was an elusive app, buried somewhere down in the bowels of my applications—oddly, it’s an application with no desktop icon. With my mentor and The Alum’s help I finally figured out how to set up everything correctly. It involved Environment Variable manipulation and server setting adjustments (fun fact: always best to denote the port you want), but I finally typed “gwb studio” in the command prompt and THE APP LAUNCHED! At last! The server was a bit more of a problem, due to errors in compiling—I was missing some more settings. Once that was fixed, the server fired up.
The Alum kindly spend a good chunk of time with me this afternoon, showing me all the settings within the application and how to launch the local front end (and how to connect a database so I had some data). The really cool thing was when she showed me how to click CTRL-ALT-E from the front end to bring up the code and wireframes. I’m still fuzzy on what the code all does (still wading through the tutorials), but at least I can find it in relation to the front end location affected.
I asked if there was any documentation for how all the code is connected and what relates to what, but there really isn’t any. The Alum said they mainly know which jobs to change for enhancements by tracing back the code, determining which jobs and data feed the job they’re looking at. We have wads of requirements documents (as a former BA, I know this only too well), production support documentation, data mapping documents, etc. However, nothing that shows how the many, many, many (I can’t stress “many” too many times) jobs relate and work together. It seems odd. Even my rinky-dink one-department Easytrieve Plus operation back in 1992 had documentation on which jobs called which jobs and what data fed each. There has to be something SOMEWHERE explaining all this.
On a more cheery note, I finally have all my vacation time back!
Now I just need a damned docking station…
