How to track time taken on each step in RASA chatbot - python-3.x

I am pretty new to RASA. Our bot uses a lot of custom actions on each step of the conversation. There is a new requirement in my project to track the time a user spends on each step and log it into a separate data-store.
I have tried to use a simple class lo keep a track of the steps (current and previous steps) and calculate the time between steps on each interaction.
Not sure how to scale this solution to track the time taken for multiple sessions (or whether this is a right approach in first place).
Not really sure of the life-cycle of the classes
Would really appreciate any insights/pointers on how to achieve this specially for each individual user/dialog.

The easiest solution is probably to store all of this information in the tracker. E.g. you can create an unfeaturized slot called step_times and store a dict in there with the timing for each step.
You can then configure the sessions not to erase these slots https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/core/domains/#session-configuration (or create a custom action_session_start )

Related

getstream.io How do handle activity permissions?

If a user creates a new activity and wants all their followers to see it except 1, how can this be implemented? Do we simply push the activity, and then immediately delete it from the specific follower's timeline feed? This seems like a hack.
https://github.com/GetStream/stream-js/issues/210
this use case hasn't come up before. Why would someone want everyone except one person to see a post? Do they want that person to unfollow them? Are there "rings" or levels of people to choose from when posting? If that's the case, you can create separate feeds with follows to them for those levels (and will likely need to use the TO field as well since fanout only goes 1 level deep).
There's no built in mechanism to specify which feeds to fan out to or which not to. The fanout is intended to happen as fast as possible (milliseconds) so doing those kinds of checks wouldn't be optimal. Your solution to quickly delete from that feed will work.

Wireframe for every single screen/page

I am an automated-test engineer and call it occupational hazard, I keep thinking towards making automated testing efficient and easy.
Couple of weeks back, I was thinking, in fact just wondering, if we could introduce a new process where I force designers/developers to provide me a wireframe for every single or unique screen in the web application.
Example: In a hypothetical web application, if home page displays differently for different profiles like associates, approvers, auditors and managers, I want a wireframe for each of those profiles. But if there are 2 managers (data combinations) in the organisation, I don't expect wireframe for these 2 managers as just data is changing and structure would remain same from automated-testing perspective.
This helps in automation in the following manner:
Say a sprint starts and it's decided that 2 new features shall be developed in this sprint.
Wireframes for these 2 new features shall be provided to the whole team at the begining of the sprint say in sprint-planning meeting.
Using these wireframes I would automate my testcases and when the actual screens are deployed, I would just run my automated-testcases. Of course they will fail due to some minor issues but they will be easy fixes. This is way better than not starting automation until the actual screen are deployed.
If this approach is possible, I will later demand for id and name properties of user controls (like links, buttons, edit boxs, check boxes, radio buttons etc) along with wireframes. I am aware that some teams are already sharing id and names properties of user controls with their automated-testing team upfront so that they can automate the testcases even before actual screens are deployed. You could say my idea is little enhanced version of that.
It sounded impractical so I stopped thinking towards it but later felt like I should ask the community if it's possible? if yes, what's the overhead on the overall design/development team.
Some developers reading this might think that pffhhh... we are packed with stuffs already and this would be an overhead. But trust me. Early collaboration with testers and automate-testers would really help the quality of the application. So if the overhead is well within the limit, we could think towards introducing this process.
Please let me know your views.

How to implement Commands and Events for complex form using Event Sourcing?

I would like to implement CQRS and ES using Axon framework
I've got a pretty complex HTML form which represents recruitment process with six steps.
ES would be helpful to generate historical statistics for selected dates and track changes in form.
Admin can always perform several operations:
assign person responsible for each step
provide notes for each step
accept or reject candidate on every step
turn on/off SMS or email notifications
assign tags
Form update (difference only) is sent from UI application to backend.
Assuming I want to make changes only for servers side application, question is what should be a Command and what should be an Event, I consider three options:
Form patch is a Command which generates Form Update Event
Drawback of this solution is that each event handler needs to check if changes in form refers to this handler ex. if email about rejection should be sent
Form patch is a Command which generates several Events ex:. Interviewer Assigned, Notifications Turned Off, Rejected on technical interview
Drawback of this solution is that some events could be generated and other will not because of breaking constraints ex: Notifications Turned Off will succeed but Interviewer Assigned will fail due to assigning unauthorized user. Maybe I should check all constraints before commands generation ?
Form patch is converted to several Commands ex: Assign Interviewer, Turn Off Notifications and each command generates event ex: Interviewer Assigned, Notifications Turned Off
Drawback of this solution is that some commands can fail ex: Assign Interviewer can fail due to assigning unauthorized user. This will end up with inconsistent state because some events would be stored in repository, some will not. Maybe I should check all constraints before commands generation ?
The question I would call your attention to: are you creating an authority for the information you store, or are you just tracking information from the outside world?
Udi Dahan wrote Race Conditions Don't Exist; raising this interesting point
A microsecond difference in timing shouldn’t make a difference to core business behaviors.
If you have an unauthorized user in your system, is it really critical to the business that they be authorized before they are assigned responsibility for a particular step? Can the system really tell that the "fault" is that the responsibility was assigned to the wrong user, rather than that the user is wrongly not authorized?
Greg Young talks about exception reports in warehouse systems, noting that the responsibility of the model in that case is not to prevent data changes, but to report when a data change has produced an inconsistent state.
What's the cost to the business if you update the data anyway?
If the semantics of the message is that a Decision Has Been Made, or that Something In The Real World Has Changed, then your model shouldn't be trying to block that information from being recorded.
FormUpdated isn't a particularly satisfactory event, for the reason you mention; you have to do a bunch of extra work to cast it in domain specific terms. Given a choice, you'd prefer to do that once. It's reasonable to think in terms of translating events from domain agnostic forms to domain specific forms as you go along.
HttpRequestReceived ->
FormSubmitted ->
InterviewerAssigned
where the intermediate representations are short lived.
I can see one big drawback of the first option. One of the biggest advantage of CQRS/ES with Axon is scalability. We can add new features without worring about regression bugs. Adding new feature is the result of defining new commands, event and handlers for both of them. None of them should not iterfere with ones existing in our system.
FormUpdate as a command require adding extra logic in one of the handler. Adding new attribute to patch and in consequence to command will cause changes in current logic. Scalability is no longer advantage in that case.
VoiceOfUnreason is giving a very good explanation what you should think about when starting with such a system, so definitely take a look at his answer.
The only thing I'd like to add, is that I'd suggest you take the third option.
With the examples you gave, the more generic commands/events don't tell that much about what's happening in your domain. The more granular events far better explain what exactly has happened, as the event message its name already points it out.
Pulling Axon Framework in to the loop, I can also add a couple of pointers.
From a command message perspective, it's safe to just take a route and not over think it to much. The framework quite easily allows you to adjust the command structure later on. In Axon Framework trainings it is typically suggested to let a command message take the form of a specific action you're performing. So 'assigning a person to a step would typically be a AssignPersonToStepCommand, as that is the exact action you'd like the system to perform.
From events it's typically a bit nastier to decide later on that you want fine grained or generic events. This follows from doing Event Sourcing. Since the events are your source of truth, you'll thus be required to deal with all forms of events you've got in your system.
Due to this I'd argue that the weight of your decision should lie with how fine grained your events become. To loop back to your question: in the example you give, I'd say option 3 would fit best.

CQRS aggregates

I'm new to the CQRS/ES world and I have a question. I'm working on an invoicing web application which uses event sourcing and CQRS.
My question is this - to my understanding, a new command coming into the system (let's say ChangeLineItemPrice) should pass through the domain model so it can be validated as a legal command (for example, to check if this line item actually exists, the price doesn't violate any business rules, etc). If all goes well (the command is not rejected) - then the appropriate event is created and stored (for example LineItemPriceChanged)
The thing I didn't quite get is how do I keep this aggregate in memory to begin with, before trying to apply the command. If I have a million invoices in the system, should I playback the whole history every time I want to apply a command? Do I always save the event without any validations and do the validations when constructing the view models / projections?
If I misunderstood any part of the process I would appreciate your feedback.
Thanks for your help!
You are not alone, this is a common misunderstanding. Let me answer the validation part first:
There are 2 types of validation which take place in this kind of system. The first is the kind where you look for valid email addresses, numeric only or required fields. This type is done before the command is even issued. A command which contains these sorts of problems should not be raised as commands (for belt and braces you can check at the domain side but this is not a domain concern and you are better off just preventing this scenario).
The next type of validation is when it is a domain concern. It could be the kind of thing you mention where you check prices are within a set of specified parameters. This is a domain concept the business people would understand, do and be able to articulate.
The next phase is for the domain to apply the state change and raise the associated events. These are then persisted and on success, published for the rest of the app.
All of this is can be done with the aggregate in memory. The actions are coordinated with a domain service which handles the command. It loads the aggregate, apply's all it's past events (or loads a snapshot) then issues the command. On success of the command it requests all the new uncommitted events and tries to persist them. On success it publishes the new events.
As you see it only loads the events for that specific aggregate. Even with a lot of events this process is lightning fast. If performance is a problem there are strategies such as keeping aggregates in memory or snapshotting which you can apply.
To your last point about validating events. As they can only be generated by your aggregate they are trustworthy.
If you want more detail check out my overview of CQRS and ES here. And take a look at my post about how to build aggregate roots here.
Good luck - I hope they help!
It is right that you have to replay the event to 'rehydrate' the domain aggregate. But you don't have to replay all events for all invoices. If you store the entity id of the root aggregate in the events, you can just select and replay the events that with the relevant id.
Then, how do you find the relevant aggregate root id? One of the read repositories should contain the relevant information to get the id, based on a set of search criteria.

Does it ever make sense to have multiple assignees for an issue in an issue tracker?

I've been a JIRA and Bugzilla admin in past jobs, and have quite often had users ask for the ability to have more than one assignee per issue.
I know this is possible in JIRA, but to my mind it never makes sense; an issue should represent a piece of work, and only one person can do a piece of work (at least in software, I've never used an issue tracker for a 2-man bobsled team ;-)) A large piece of work will obviously involve more than one person, but I think in that case it should be split into subtasks to allow for accurate status reporting.
Does anyone have any use cases where it's valid to have multiple assignees ?
The Assignee field means many things to many people. A better name might be "Responsible User". There are three cases I discuss with my clients:
A. number of assignees = 0
JIRA has an Allow Unassigned issues option but I discourage use of that because if a work item isn't owned by anyone it tends to be ignored by everyone.
B. number of assignees = 1
The default case
C. number of assignees > 1
Who is responsible for the work item represented by the issue? The best case I've seen for this is that when an issue can be handled by any one person in a team, so before triage the issue is assigned to everyone in that team. I think a better approach is to create a JIRA user with an email address that sends to the whole team, and assign it to that user. Then a member of the team can have the issue assigned to them in particular.
Changing the one assignee case has the history recorded in the History tab. Nothing is lost in that case.
I'll often have a story / feature that can be split across multiple developers. They will have individually assigned subtasks but it would make sense to assign the parent to all involved, unless there's a lead developer. I wasn't actually aware that I could do multiple assignments, so thanks for the tip!
The other case I can think of is pair programming.
I hit upon this question while looking for solutions to doing this. Since I want to do this, I'm guessing my use case counts as an answer to your question: I only really want one assignee in the sense of someone currently working on a problem, but I want to track the whole lifecycle of an issue. For us, that can mean:
A support person receives a report from a customer, creates an issue
An issue-wrangler reviews the issue to make sure it's valid, not duplicated, has all appropriate details, etc.
A developer implements/fixes the issue
A tester performs whatever tests are appropriate (in our case, mostly extending our automated testsuite to additionally test the feature/fix)
An operations person rolls out the new version to a test environment
A support person informs the customer, who does his own tests with the new version in the test environment
An operations person rolls out the new version to production
Not all issues necessarily go through all steps. Some issues have more steps (e.g. a code review between step 3 and 4). Many issues will also move backwards among the steps (developer needs more information, we go from step 3 to 1 or 2; tester spots a problem, we go from 4 to 3).
At each stage, only one person is actually responsible for whatever's got to be done. Nevertheless, there are a whole bunch of people who are associated with the issue. Tracking systems we've used are happy to offer easy changes to previous owners of the issue (shown as a list), but I'd ideally like to go a step further, with the owner automatically reverting to the correct prior owner depending on the issue's status. At step 6, the original support person from step 1 should ideally contact the customer. At step 7, the ops person from step 5 would ideally be the assignee.
In other words, while I don't want multiple assignees for a given step, I do want there to be a "support assignee", a "developer assignee", a "testing assignee", etc.
We can do this with subtasks and we can do it by manually selecting previous owners when changing statuses, but neither is ideal and I think the situation above is one where multiple assignees would make sense.
In my company, we have a similar workflow to Nikhil. We work in a scrum model, with developers, testers and a technical writer on each team.
The workflow of a development task is
Development -> Developer review -> QA testing -> PO Acceptance -> Done
The workflow of a QA task is
QA writes test case / automated test -> QA review -> Done
We had a tool which JIRA replaced that allowed us to assign multiple people to a task, which we found very useful for our workflow. On a QA task, I could easily see if the other tester on my team had already done work and I needed to do the next step.
Without this, I am finding it difficult to quickly identify tasks written by the other tester on my scrum team which are ready for me to review (versus the ones I wrote which they need to review).
So many people have asked for the ability to have multiple assignees since at least 2007. They have varying, valid use cases. I was disappointed that the JIRA development team unilaterally said they won't implement this and would ask them to reconsider.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-12841
While pair-group working (pair programming etc..) it would be nice to assign both persons to the issue.
Tasks move through different steps through development (example: Development, review, testing). Different persons can be responsible for each step. Even though the task may be in review or testing, the reviewer will have stuff fore the developer to fix. Having different roles to assign to would help organizing the work.
In our team we usually develop 1 or 2 persons together.
Then the code is reviewed by around 2-5 persons in individually or in pairs
Then it is tested by 1-2 persons initially, finally tested by the whole team.
Currently our system allows us to assign a single person at a given time. That limits our ability to follow who is working on what without looking through the log for the issue. The benifits of beeing able to assign multiple persons would be good for us.
What happens if John is assigned a task and cannot finish it, and it is moved to Jane's list because John was a slacker?
Are you OK with losing history of who it was originally assigned to, and the hours that were spent / billed on it?
In an e-Learning scenario, it makes sense to have an issue assigned to multiple users.
Here is what I want to do:
I have a storyboard which I want to assign to 3 people at the same time - the animators, the recording artists and the graphic designers. Once these people finish their tasks, they will pass it on to a common reviewer, who will review and close the issue.
Graphically it would look something like this:
Storyboard
/ | \
graphics animator recording
\ | /
reviewer
|
done
The three job roles depend only on one storyboard. The compilation of the three have to go to a reviewer. I'm racking my brains to get this working on redmine. Haven't found a solution yet.
Got this answer from an Atlassian partner https://www.isostech.com/solutions/
and then later from Atlassian
Objective:
Want to set who does the works for each step on an issue
Summary:
Use a plugin to copy values from custom fields into the assignee field whenever the issue transitions to a new step.
How:
1. Install the Suite Utilities plug-in:
This plug-in adds a bunch of new functionalities to workflows.
You will use the plug-in to copy the value of a custom field to the assignee:
Create a custom field as single user picker for each role i.e., dev, tester, reviewer to be assigned at different steps in the issue
Add these fields to the issue type's screen
Modify the post-function on the workflow transition between each step
Add a "Copy Value From Other Field" post function and set it to copy the value from the appropriate user custom field into the assignee field.

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