Launching Pega How-to Guide Series

Pega How-to Guide Series will be launched this weekend. The 1st book would be:

Debunkum Beaver How-to Guide: Installing and Testing AES

In view of contributing back to the online community, I will be posting chapters of the book here. Since this is the 1st book of this series, I will post all the chapters of this book, so that you can better appreciate the value, and my purpose, of doing the How-to Guide series.

Before going to the next section, a quick reminder: 
The 40% discount for May Day promotion is ending on 18th May 2019. This is your last chance to get it at the discounted price:
Debunkum Beaver Pega CLSA Guide - Preparing for Pega CLSA 7.3/7.4 Certification (Book 1)
 

Why Create a How-to Guide?

Actually, information on Pega how-to can be found in Pega Community, Pega Academy, as well as throughout the Internet.

Even if the information is not available, all that is needed is simply to create a new Pega Community post; and somehow, after some time, there would be people from the community, Pega GCS or even Pega Engineering, jumping in to provide the answer, so isn't such a How-to guide unnecessary?

Well, technically, you could argue in that way. However, in any engagement, one of the most challenging things is "deadline". Often, a go-live date would be defined well before requirement specification is signed off.

Therefore, there is basically no time to search for information, wait for replies, or learn and explore how to implement various features in an actual project scenario when it is required.

Apart from that, the replies are often not an end-to-end, step-by-step guide, complete with screenshots and do not include validation and testing steps. Thus, it would require prior Pega knowledge and additional effort to clarify, test and finally implement it.

To add on to the challenges, the profile of the team members often creates another dimension of issues. This problem has 2 extremities:

1. New Users of Pega: Those who are totally new to Pega
2. Senior and Experienced Pega SSA/LSA: Those who have many years of experiences, some even spanned across Pega V5.x and V6.x

For New Users of Pega, they do not know how to do a lot of things in Pega, thus a lot of hand-holding and samples are required to guide them along and get them to be efficient.

There is technically not much issues with them, just the need to provide them with some examples and they would be able to get started and replicate the implementation across the application.

The downside is that a lot of time is required to create relevant samples and help them to debug any issues that occur.

On the other hand, Senior and Experienced Pega SSAs/LSAs, although are self-starters and able to start implementation without much guidance, they introduced another kind of problem – their solutions to all problems are often “activities” and “agents”!!!

Any other issues that cropped up along the way, would often be yet another activity, custom Java codes or some HTML and JavaScripts; Worst, creating new Boolean variables to do a When condition throughout the whole application to handle difference scenario and business changes!!!

With all those issues, in order to understand the whole logic (and ensure it is correct), you need to kept track of all the Boolean variables that are set/unset in all activities, data transforms, flows, UIs, button clicked, etc.. Worst, the final decision is a mesh of logics of all of the above! ☹

Technically, they can implement the required features, but whatever they had touched, can no longer be easily modified by another SSA/LSA without the corresponding number of years of experience, not to mention about the underlying performance and maintenance issues that were introduced! ☹

 In view of all these challenges, Debunkum Beaver has decided to embark on this path: A How-to Guide for Pega.

For New Users of Pega, this series provide a step-by-step guide to implement any given feature; for Senior and Experienced Pega SSAs/LSAs, this guide shows the best practices and a standardised way of implementing the intended features, leveraging on the newer Pega capabilities to simplify the implementation (as much as possible).

With the Debunkum Beaver How-to Guide series, you would have an arsenal of tools at your disposal. Whenever there is a new project or new feature required, all you have to do is just to pull out one of these guides. Cool right? 😎

Can you visualise a situation, where all similar features have the same way of implementation, with the same sequence of steps and number of rules; and anyone who looked at the rules knew exactly how and why each rule was implemented as such; any deviations and bugs that were introduced due to carelessness would simply stand out by itself, easily identifiable and easy to fix, wouldn't this be a wonderful Pega World? 😊

Well, that is the core objective of the Debunkum Beaver How-to Guide series!

I will talk more about that in the upcoming chapters! Remember to follow @DebunkumBeaver at Twitter for updates!