Surveys

Info:

This page is intended for the administration and configuration of surveys. If you are interested in the documentation for survey recipients, please consult the documentation page Txture Surveys.

To enable on-premise installations of Txture to send emails, an SMTP connection must be configured in the txture.properties file. Txture provisioned SaaS instances come pre-configured with Txture SMTP credentials. If you wish to change these credentials please get in touch.

Surveys (Main Menu / Admin / Surveys) are a great way to collect data from experts at your company.

In cases where you need to quickly gather data about your application landscape from many different stakeholders, you should use the survey feature. Stakeholders, such as application owners, are invited via an e-mail and can then proceed to the surveys wizard via a link. Data entered into the survey is directly saved into the Txture repository.

Use Cases

There are several use cases for surveys:

1. Initially populating Txture with information about applications for the enterprise architecture module.
2. Gathering knowledge on a set of applications and their dependencies for a rapid cloud readiness assessment.
3. Periodic quality assurance of your application information by gathering data from relevant stakeholders.
4. Fetching information about used middleware to enable better modernization proposals.
5. Closing existing data gaps to ensure more accurate assessment results.

Features

• Customizable configuration to meet your survey needs
• Automated reporting on survey completion
• Collaboration among multiple stakeholders
• Survey distribution based on links, commonly used for application owners or caretakers
• Dynamic display of questions based on prior inputs or conditions
• Overview of asset changes introduced through the survey
• Reminder emails for incomplete surveys
  • Multiple email templates for reminders

Project guidance

Please note that recipients of a survey need a user account in Txture. This might influence the choice of authentication mechanism set up. For larger user groups, it is recommended to use external authentication such as OAuth in order to avoid setting up local accounts (which require an additional email upfront to set a password).

Info:

To ensure survey emails are not mistaken for phishing attempts in large organizations, consider announcing the survey via other channels: Use internal platforms like Slack, Teams, or intranets. Alternatively, send a preliminary email from a trusted sender.

It is recommended to provide guidance. Reduce user input errors by offering instructions through:

• Text: Step-by-step written instructions, which can be displayed before a survey.
• Video: Short explanation video that can be linked before a survey starts.
• Meeting: Brief meeting with a survey walkthrough.

Usage

Surveys are configured in the administration area via the Surveys tab in the Data Management section.
On the first screen, you can choose to manage existing surveys or create a new one using the buttons on the top right.

• Add Generic Survey: Creates a general-purpose survey, useful for tasks like asking stakeholders to verify information of a specific asset.
  Note that free text questions are not supported as a property to write to is required. You can create a custom property via the Structure Editor.

• Add Asset Survey: Creates an asset-type specific survey that can be reused for all instances of a specific asset-type.
  This type is commonly used for gathering structured data, especially for application assets.
  It allows retrieving additional data and dependencies from stakeholders based on links, like the owner or caretaker link.

You can manage and edit an existing survey by clicking on the survey name.

Creating a survey

The general process for creating a survey is as follows:

1. Create a new survey and configure the options.
2. Set up mandatory and optional questions.
3. Save the survey and test it to ensure it provides the desired results.
4. Select stakeholders to whom invitation emails will be sent.
5. Create email templates for reminder emails.
6. Send out the emails and schedule reminders.

Let us further examine these steps in the next sections.

Survey settings

After creating a new survey you are presented with the following options in the 'Questions' tab:

• Name: This is the name of the survey. It is visible to recipients. Provide a discriptive name.
• Introduction Text and Finished Survey Text: These are displayed to survey recipients before and after the survey and are ideal to explain the prupose of a survey and provide guidance to reduce user input errors.
• Active?: This setting allows to close a survey or reactive it. Only the survey admin can view the survey, if it is deactivated.
• Contact person: When recipeints have questions they can use the help functionality in the survey interface to contace the person specified here.
• Enable delegation: Enabling this setting will show a button at the beginning of the survey, asking whether the user wants to delegate answering this survey to a another Txture user. Using the button will directly invite the other user.
• Enable comments: Properties and assets can be commented on in Txture. This setting controls whether commenting is allowed in the survey. When leaving a comment, the survey recipient can choose whether or not to notify the admin (set to FALSE by default).
• Enable completion confirmation: This displays a confirmation question at the very end of the survey. It allow the respondent to mark a survey as completed despite having open mandatory questions.

In case of asset surveys to you must further specify the Surveyed Asset Type, this is the origin asset type for the survey. All 'Main Questions' will resolve around this asset type. 'Follow-Up Questions' can be used to gather information about underlying assets. In most cases the application asset is chosen.

Editing survey questions

You can edit your survey questions within this section. For asset surveys two tabs are present:

• (1) Main Questions: These questions always refer to the surveys asset type. You can ask for 'propery values', 'link generation' or the 'review' of assets or lists. More information about the question types can be found here.
• (2) Follow-up Questions: Here you get an overview of the follow-up question that you have linked to main questions. Once they have been created you are able to view and edit them here.

Info:

Note that 'Follow-up Questions' are in BETA and this documentation article might be slightly outdated based on continous improvement.

Within the 'Main Questions' tab the following view is present:

• (3) Sections: Multiple questions should be grouped in sections.
• (4) Questions: Specify the name of the section using the 'Heading'. You can hide entire sections based on restrictions, which can be set by using a filter query.

Clicking on a question opens the editing menu for that questions (in the screenshot below the question asks to for the application owner).

Apart from setting the heading and description and the decision to make the question mandatory, you can set four important things in this card:

1. Since this is a question regarding a link to another asset, you have to set the link type. In this case it is a link between an application and its database(s).
2. You can also add restrictions using a query, such that the question only appears under specific prerequisites.
3. Set questions regarding the property of this link (Notes that this does not refer to asset properties). For example, you could ask for the description of this link (more infos at link property questions).
4. For link generating questions you have the option to set up follow-up questions. You can use this to survey more information about the linked or created assets. In this case you might interested in the technology that the database is using and the underlying server. More information in the next subsection.

Link property Questions

A link property question allows the user to define properties of a newly created link (like "name" or "description"). The field Property selects the property of the link which should be defined, and with Heading it can be renamed to a more meaningful name. Link property questions are by default mandatory and activated and are therefore part of the global survey progress. A link creation question can have multiple link property questions.

Follow-Up Questions

Follow-up questions are defined globally for a survey based on an asset type. This means you can define follow-up questions for an asset type like 'Database' once and upon further use of follow-up questions these will be reutilized.

In the example above we ask for the underlying server of the database that was previously linked to the application. These chains of questions allow us to build comprehensive application stacks from surveys within Txture.

As stacks will likely go deeper than one level, you have the options to utilize follow-up questions within follow-up questions.

To enhance understanding the following examplatory application stack is provided:

• Initially within the Main Question menu a link generating question about the utilized database is used
• During the follow-up question regarding the database another follow-up question is used to ask for the connection between the server (that the database is hosted on) and its storage.

Markdown support

Texts within the survey can be formatted using the Markdown syntax. For information about how to use Markdown, you may use the Markdown Guide.

Inviting users to surveys

Please refer to the dedicated documentation page about Survey Invites.