Rationalising Applications Automatically (with ACE)

What is ACE?

ACE (Application Confidence Engine) attempts to crowdsource opinions on whether an application should be accepted or rejected. This results in a suggested status and a confidence percent based on how many others have either accepted or rejected the specific application. 

ACE Status

Here we can sync with the ACE Could server for the latest application recommendations and manually run an examination of our application portfolio. 

Config

Run ACE Examination Now (Schedule #1 & #2)

Starts an ACE examination that will update the rationalisation and normalisation recommendations available from the GRid Context Menu. Also, will run any automatic actions that have been enabled in the ACE Engine

Sync with MS ACE Server

Will upload a list of Applications and their Status to ACE and download a list of recommendations.

Periodically Sync MS ACE Server

Will automatically refresh the recommendations about once a week.

ACE Service

Recommendation Version Threshold

When calculating a rationalisation recommendation in the UI (i.e., the ACE Recommendations on the Grid Context Menu) this is the version threshold to use when deciding if an application that has an accepted recommendation should also be rationalised to an existing application of a similar version.

Auto Accept Recommendation

Auto accept applications that are recommended as Accept by ACE, have at least X Users, and are Y days in Pending. The Version Threshold is used to either rationalise these Apps to existing versions of applications in the accepted queue or accept them as a new application.

Auto Reject Recommendation

Auto reject applications that are recommended as Reject by ACE, have at most X Users and are Y days in Pending

Auto-Normalise

Normalisation is the process of cleaning up Applications names and making them more consistent across multiple products from the same vendor.

• Vendor:  Adobe Inc. Adobe Incorporated, Adobe Ltd. would all normalise to simply Adobe.
• App Name: The vendor and versions are removed from the app name to avoid Apps being named “Adobe Adobe Reader 11 11.2”.
• Version: The version is cleaned up into the standard version format of Major.Minor.Build.Revision e.g. 10.1.2.3. This allows for clearer versions and better comparisons in rules later.

Note: Auto normalisation is only run on applications in the Pending Queue, but can be manually run on applications in any queue using the 'ACE Recommdations' on the Grid Context menu. 

Automatic Rationalisation Rules

Rationalisation, Acceptance, and Rejection make use of rules to determine if an Application should be acted upon. It should have reasonably high ‘Days in Pending’ thresholds set to give the Apps Team adequate time to make these decisions for themselves and only fall back on these rules to keep Apps moving when the Pending queue has been forgotten or neglected.

Auto-Rationalisation

Auto-Rationalisation can rationalise (supersede) applications from Pending into the Accepted queue. There are two different checks an application can meet that will result in it being rationalised.

Rule 1. Rationalise UP

An application can be rationalised to the same or higher version in the Accepted queue for a given version threshold and must also be in Pending for X days.

e.g., Adobe Reader 10.1.0.0, 10.2.0.0, 10.3.0.0 (Pending Versions) -> 10.6.0.0 (Accepted Version)

Rule 2. Rationalise DOWN

An application can be rationalised to the same or lower version in the Accepted queue for a given version threshold and must also be in Pending for X days.

e.g., Adobe Reader 10.5.3.0, 10.5.4.0, 10.5.5.0 (Pending Versions) -> 10.5.2.0 (Accepted Version)

Note: It is recommended to set the version threshold lower for this rule so that only minor versions of applications can be rationalised to a lower version.

Auto-Acceptance

Auto-Acceptance can auto-accept applications that are X days in Pending, have over Y Users, and have no matching version in the Accepted queue.

It is recommended to keep the Version Threshold high (Major.*.*.*) so that only new major versions of applications can get auto-accepted.

For Example, it can be set to auto-accept applications that have over 10 Users, have been 3 weeks in Pending, and have no matching Major version.

Auto-Rejection

Auto-Rejection can auto-reject applications that have X Users and are Y number days in Pending.

For Example, it can be set to auto-reject applications with less than 5 Users and are in Pending for 3 weeks.

Version Thresholds 

Version Thresholds provide a way to control which versions of pending applications the ACE engine will operate on.

*.*.*.*

This setting is NOT recommended as ALL versions are matched to a single version. This is generally too "aggressive" when considering application rationalisation and other processes which use Version Thresholds.

Major.*.*.*

This setting is recommended for most scenarios as each minor version is rolled-up into the highest major version (the part in bold).

Major.Minor.*.*

Major.Minor.Build.*