16 Jun 2022
Ghent, 16/06/2022 – Four Pees has recently released its “Buggy” app on the Enfocus Appstore. The main goal? To reduce the amount of testing time for Switch workflow creators. This app is part of a series of apps that Four Pees has been creating over the past couple of months for the Enfocus Appstore to help enhance the various possibilities in Enfocus Switch, based on feedback from Switch customers and their own experiences with flow design in projects done with customers.
David van Driessche, CTO at Four Pees: “Let’s be honest, how much of the time making Switch flows is spent testing? Probably quite a lot if you’re building more complex workflows. This is time-consuming for most flows, with the deactivating the flow, finding test jobs, dragging them on Switch, reactivating… And if your flow is more complex, and especially if it’s part of a multi flow setup, it becomes even more challenging, because often you can’t test one flow in isolation as it will expect jobs to already have private data defined, or datasets attached, or email addresses present, and so on.
With all the projects we do where we use Switch, this is pain we felt acutely ourselves. Buggy was born from a set of internal scripts that aimed at alleviating that pain. It turns the ‘develop, test, correct, test, correct…’ cycle into something manageable and reduces our stress level. We thought we should share that outside of Four Pees as well.”
Buggy is a bundle app. This means that you install it from the Enfocus Switch Appstore and in Switch you find three separate apps to use in your flows, all responsible for a different part of the testing of your workflows.
The Buggy Input app is designed to be used at the beginning of a workflow (though technically jobs can be injected using it at any point in the workflow as well). The app can be configured to inject jobs (files or folders) into the workflow and those jobs can be configured so that they match what the flow expects in terms of metadata. So each time you activate the workflow you’re building, Buggy can inject the proper job or jobs, and make sure they have the correct hierarchy information, user details, private data, data sets… set up.
Getting test jobs into a flow is only part of the problem of course. The other part is trying to figure out whether what happens in the flow is expected and correct. To make that easier, Buggy reporting can export a wealth of information for each job passing through a flow (whether it is a test job, or an actual job doesn’t matter). Buggy Reporting is designed to be attached to any folder element in a Switch flow. Jobs do not flow “through” it but are inspected “while they pass the folder”. This was an important design goal; you do not have to modify a flow to insert Buggy Reporting. Simply attach it at the point in the flow where you want to inspect jobs.
Buggy Reporting saves the job itself (as it it as that point in the flow), any datasets that are attached to it, an overview with all job information (including things like private data) and a “job trail” which shows the different steps this job went through to get to that point in the flow.
Very similar to Buggy Reporting, Buggy Reception focuses on the end of a flow. At the end of the flow, you also want to be able to see all the metadata, and Buggy Reception gives you the same capabilities as Buggy Reporting on that front. But you also would like to be able to clean up the jobs that reach your output folder. Maybe not all of them, because having some live jobs in the flow makes it easy to use the variable designer window in Switch ; Buggy Reception will automatically take care of this for you.
The Buggy app is available in the Enfocus Appstore. You can purchase it or start a 30-day free trial from the Enfocus Appstore. Click here to get started. This page also contains the full documentation for Buggy, with all details on how it can be configured or used.
Buggy is sold for $500 per year.
Four Pees will showcase Buggy during their upcoming Four Pees Café.
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