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Delft-FEWS Product management 2022 look back

Delft-FEWS Product management 2022 look back

In this blog Delft-FEWS Product Management looks back to 2022. "Last year, the development team was finally able to get back to work in the office. A good time to reflect on our way of working and make some improvements." says Nadine Slootjes. "For me personally, one of the highlights of this year was the Community Strategy Board meeting in November. Most members were in Delft and we discussed the changes that every organization sees coming. It was very valuable that everyone was very open and we saw many similarities between the challenges that the different organizations face. It was very valuable input for our strategy."

The community

The first community meeting of 2022 was held online, a webinar featuring Delft-FEWS in the cloud, later followed by the two regular New Features webinars. All the regional user groups met either online, in-person, and even in a hybrid setting: the American/Canadian users (twice), the German-speaking group, the Austrian clients, the Dutch users and the Australian community. A new online initiative was introduced and very well-received: the FEWS Community Talks, short online sessions of 1 hour, initiated by the Community Strategy Board (CSB). An extensive list of topics for the next meetings was collected at the Delft-FEWS User Days in Delft, where the International Delft-FEWS community celebrated its 18th birthday.

Roadmaps 2022

We focused our roadmap activities on: Code clean-up, code quality, automated and release testing and security & cloud. Next to that we continued with the development of the first version of a Web Operator Client ("web OC") and developments regarding the Computational Framework to be able to run scenarios. An update of all activities can be found on the roadmap page on the portal. This blog gives you some highlights.

Security is of great importance. A Security Matrix document for Delft-FEWS is ready. We will discuss this with end users and their IT departments or responsible persons. In addition, OWASP vulnerability scans are taking place daily and appropriate actions (logging, upgrading libraries or mitigating measures) following our procedure are in place.

The development of the first version of the "Web Operator Client" has made substantial progress in 2022. It is expected to reach product level in 2023. Currently it is possible to test and play with it with a Stand Alone which has been demonstrated during our international user meeting back in November.

In order to improve maintainability of the software code, we have taken good steps to remove old parts of it and develop better, modern and more modular alternatives. If you haven't looked into the impact of this for your system and its configuration, please run a check in your Stand Alone or Operator Client. Check the Delft-FEWS end of life modules wiki for more information on how to do that.

Two releases

The first release (2022.01) contained about 100 new features ranging from a new interactive double-mass display to new spatial transformations. Spell checker functionality with the ability to add your own language and jargon for input fields has also been added. 

In the fall release (2022.02), the new, standard icons are the most eye-catching. As a result, the icons also remain nice and tight with higher resolution (4K) screens. In addition, you can start the FEWS web service from your Stand Alone, which is ideal for testing. The Open Archive has been expanded (again), e.g. with the possibility to easily update time series that are already in the archive with edited (or validated) data. 

Details can be found in the release notes or have a look at the "New Feature Webinar 2022.01" on the 2022.01 release. Do you know that in February 2023 there will be a webinar about 2022.02?

Support and Maintenance

In 2022, we worked on making patches for supported software versions available on the Deltares software download portal. That process has now been completed and from now on the first patches with software bugfixes can be downloaded from our portal. The patches can only be downloaded with a password, that you can obtain when you have a support and maintenance contract with Deltares (or through you intermediary that has a contract with Deltares). If you have any questions on this then please contact fews-pm@deltares.nl.

Delft-FEWS Product Management
Nadine Slootjes
Ilonka ten Broeke
Marcel Ververs
Gerben Boot