Just a few days ago, WebManager 9.6 was released. With this new release it was also time to "update" the certification process. These improvements are a direct result of the experience of performing many audits by GX Professional Services. In this Blog I will address the changes.

Certification levels

As you might have noticed using the guideline audit tool, in 9.6 the concept of a "Certification Level" has been introduced. The certification level provides a more fine-grain definition of how important a guideline really is.

In the past a guideline was only "required" or "recommended", something like buying a very expensive car or none at all. The leveling is tuned to the actual purpose of the WCB. There are 3 levels of certification:

• Level 1 - Project specific. This level is suitable for WCBs that were designed to run on a specific installation and reusability never came up as a possibility. Most presentation WCBs will fall in this category; they tend to be very customer specific and the probability that another customer wants reuse that same presentation is very small.
• Level 2 - Reusable. The WCB is suitable to be reused on several other installations. WCBs exposing generic functionality like Google maps integration fall in this category.
• Level 3 - Product ready. This basically means 'as good as any other WCB that is part of the WebManager platform'. A WCB might be reusable, but that does not necessarily mean that it could become part of the WebManager platform as-is. A reusable WCB may support only MS SQL, but a WCB contained by the WebManager platform must always support all three databases mySQL, MS SQL and Oracle. A reusable WCB may not support content migration, a WCB that is part of the WebManager platform must. Level 3 certification is the highest quality level.

In the 9.6 guidelines document for each guideline the certification level is mentioned for which the guideline is required. Note that a guideline might still be recommended, which means that is not required for any of the levels above.

Scope

Another issue we experienced during performing the audits was that although about 140 guidelines exist, many of them actually do not apply on the WCB the audit is performed on. GUI related guidelines for example are never applicable for headless WCBs (i.e. containing only service components) so the audit report usually contained a lot of "Not Applicable" comments.

For that purpose the "scope" of a guideline was introduced. The scope defines for what WCBs the guideline is relevant. The scope is a direct reference to the component types a WCB contains:

Guideline scopes

A	Guideline applies to all component types or to the WCB or WCA as a whole
P	Guideline applies to Panel components
E	Guideline applies to Element components
M	Guideline applies to Media item components
C	Guideline applies to Service components
D	Guideline applies to Page metadata components
L	Guideline applies to Servlet components
R	Guideline applies to Presentation components
F	Guideline applies to Form components

In an audit report only the guidelines that are within the scope of the WCB will be evaluated.

Pre-audit

The guideline audit tool (downloadable from http://www.wcmexchange.com/guidelineaudit/) supports automatic validation of several guidelines. The tool is continuously improved and the latest version validates already more than 50% of the total amount of guidelines. It turned out that many disapproved audit requests could be prevented just by running this tool in advance. For that reason, running the tool before requesting a WCB audit has become mandatory. If your WCB is not validated successfully by this tool, you will have to explain why this still is allowed in that particular WCB. Otherwise, the WCB audit will be rejected immediately.

Running the tool in advance will not only save the auditor’s time, but it will save you time as well! The earlier you run this tool on your WCB the better, refactoring your code afterwards is a horrible job to do and eventually cost you much more time...