Chameleon Overview
Chameleon is a data automation tool developed by Black Knight Technology in support of one of our Government contracts. Notice that I said 'data automation' tool and not testing, analysis, or validation tool. That is because Chameleon is a plug-in based, general purpose tool. Chameleon itself only facilitates automation through a common user interface. Plug-ins can do almost anything including but not limited to testing, data conversion, data validation, and metrics calculations.
Key Features
- Openly adaptable via plug-ins written in .Net or Python
- Intuitive graphical user interface
- Efficient command line client
- Highly scalable
- Automatic updates on your LAN
- Full documentation
- Mature and stable - over 750 unit tests run automatically on every source code commit.
Chameleon has been in development and use since April 2005. Over this time, Chameleon has evolved into a stable and mature product capable of handling a wide variety of tasks. Chameleon itself is only limited by the plug-ins it has to run. Black Knight strives to provide complete, concise, and coherent documentation that makes using Chameleon and writing plug-ins for Chameleon as easy as possible.
Benefits
- Save on development - use Chameleon instead of rolling custom user interfaces for tools
- Common user interface reduces training and complexity
- Three degrees of automation come free (multiple files, multiple plug-ins, run automatically) - save time and reduce errors
- Easily leverage existing technologies and code
Chameleon makes your team better by not requiring that you reinvent the wheel. Let your developers concentrate on the hard stuff: developing algorithms, tests, and metrics. Chameleon supplies you with a ready to use, stable user interface. By framing the context of your project as a plug-in instead of a program, you can cut your work in half leaving more time to concentrate on the business logic and not the development (and headaches) of designing and implementing a full-fledged application. Further, the open plug-in architecture lends itself to sharing information (and work load) by sharing plug-ins. Now, others can easily benefit from your work, and you can benefit from the work of others.