Konveyor enhancement – https://github.com/konveyor/enhancements/pull/136

Main features

• Pathfinder is removed and the assessment capabilities are now part of the hub.
• Support for multiple questionnaires to consider an application assessed.
• Custom questionnaires authoring using a YAML syntax.
• Assessment of archetypes
• Tighter integration with the application inventory.
• Import and export questionnaires.
• Render existing questionnaires.
• Define which questionnaires are required for the assessment: which questionnaires should be presented to the users and answered by the for an application to be considered assessed?
• Enable questionnaire authoring and versioning through a YAML syntax.
• Enhanced capabilities:
  • Conditional questions.
  • Autotagging of applications based on answers.
  • Automated answers based on tags present on the assessed application or archetype.

What is the problem?

Based on the feedback provided for the assessment module, it has been determined that, although useful, its capabilities don't fully cover the differences that organizations might have between them. The general aspects of application containerization are addressed, but sometimes organizations have some particularities that can be key for assessing the suitability of a given application or application type/archetype. The very fact of assessments only covering application containerization matters has also been deemed insufficient by some users, that would like to have the flexibility of putting together their own questionnaires or expand on what the tool provides out of the box.

Another aspect, affecting UX, is the fact that assessments have a one to one relationship with applications. As large scale application modernization/migration projects are all about classifying application in different application types or archetypes to then come up with suitable migration strategies, it feels cumbersome that the assessment process has been designed to only have one application in sight. Copying assessments is also seen as clunky, and has problems when making changes to assessments at scale, which could be a situation when new information or stakeholders appear in the modernization lead's radar.

Finally, there have been some voices requesting more intelligence in the way questions get asked. For some users, there is a feeling of detachment between the information that gets collected in the application inventory and the assessment questionnaire. The general feedback is that if an application has been tagged in a certain way, the questions that get asked should be aligned to that, and if important information gets surfaced during the assessment, that should revert back to the inventory as well.

Why is this a problem?

The Konveyor user experience should be fully centered in allowing users to manage applications and surface information about them at scale, which is not the case with the current assessment module. Pathfinder was build based on a Red Hat consulting tool with the same name that didn't include the notion of an application inventory, thus the detachment described before. The tool wasn't conceived with scalability in mind, and was more oriented towards providing guidance on the early stages of a modernization/migration project. Nevertheless, the possibility of loading custom question was available in the original tool, but got lost somehow in the refactor that ported it to the Konveyor suite. This has led to users having to hack their way through the Pathfinder API or even the database to load their own questionnaires, which is far from the fully integrated and seamless user experience that Konveyor aims to have. In some extreme cases, users have opted to not use the assessment module at all, which led to the requirement of being able to review an application without running an assessment.

Proposed solutions to consider

A new assessment module needs to be implemented, taking the following requirements as guidelines:

• The module should be able to import questionnaires using a custom YAML syntax for questionnaire definition.
  • The syntax should support way of skipping questions if a certain tag is present on the application or archetype.
  • The syntax should support a way of defining tags to apply to applications if a certain answer has been provided.
• The module should be able to export existing questionnaires to YAML as well.
• The concept of application archetypes needs to be implemented, so both individual applications and archetypes can have an associated assessment.
  • Archetypes should be defined by a group of tags.