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joel.larin
Employee
August 31, 2023

Applications for Improving Appian Delivery

The tables below provide recommended tools to help delivery team members based on their roles.

Design Tools

Roles: Designers, Analyst, Product Owner

Name Description
Visio or Dia Diagram Editor
  • These tools are useful for building system level diagrams of your Appian solution. Note: Use Appian to diagram process flows.

Productivity Tools

Roles: All Roles

Name Description
7-zip
  • Tool for creating and opening archive files (e.g., zips, jars, etc).
CutePDF
  • Tool for creating PDF documents.
Notepad++ or Sublime
  • Text editor for editing text documents and viewing logs.
Beyond Compare, Araxis Merge or WinMerge
  • Tool for merging changes between two versions of a file.
  • WinMerge is free and great for basic diff functionality.
  • Beyond Compare and Araxis Merge require payment but provide more advanced features.
ShareX
  • Screen sharing tool for recording demonstrations.
  • ShareX is also useful for capturing and reproducing defects for Appian product support.
Stories On Board
  • Useful online tool that can be used for effective story mapping

Integration Testing Tools

Roles: Designers

Name Description
XML Schema Validator
  • This is a useful tool for debugging errors in processing XML documents (i.e. torecord() or toxml()).
  • This tool also helps eliminate the document as the source of an integration incompatibility by testing the validity of the XML response.
Apache Directory Studio
  • This is an LDAP client which is useful for testing LDAP queries before building your LDAP Synchronization process model.
SQL Developer
  • Tool for working with Oracle databases.
SQL Server Management Studio
  • Tool for working with SQL Server Databases.
IBM Data Studio
  • Tool for working with DB2 Databases.
MySQL Workbench
  • Tool for working with MySQL databases.
phpMyAdmin
  • Web-Based tool for working with the cloud instance of MySQL.
pgAdmin
  • Tool for working with postgreSQL Databases
SoapUI
Postman
  • A web service testing tool to test integrations
jwt.io
  • Useful for inspecting JWT Tokens.
PuTTY
  • SSH Client for testing connections to external systems or to remotely connect to your Appian instance.
  • PuTTY also includes an SFTP client which is useful for testing SFTP connections.
WinSCP
  • Tool for file transfer. This is useful for uploading plugins to Appian Application Servers.
  • Additionally this is helpful for testing file based integrations.

Testing and Diagnostic Tools

Roles:  Designers, Testers

Name Description
Appian Selenium API
  • The library contains methods which allow you to interact with Appian components in a browser. It can be used in a Java application or integrated directly into any Selenium or Java-based testing tool.
  • Best practices for automated testing
Browser Diagnostics
JMeter
Database Load Generation Tool

Plug-in Development Tools

Roles: Developers

Name

Description
Quick Start Installation.
  • Use a local Appian install for plug-in development.

Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers or 

IntelliJ

  • This is for writing Appian plug-in code.
Git or SVN
Visual Studio Code
  • Source code editor for writing Appian component plug-ins

Usability and User Experience Tools

Roles: Designers, Analysts, Product Owners

Name Description
Undraw
  • Illustrations you can change based on needed colors.
ThisPersonDoesNotExist
  • Generates random user images
Contrast Checker
  • Check if the contrast of two colors is readable or not
Coolars or  ColorCombos
  • Useful to help generate a color palette
Balsamiq
  • Useful to create wireframes and mockups for Appian Application