Recently, I have taken over the role as a test manager for a company. I am looking at avenues to implement agile. The team does BAU tasks and project work in parallel.
Basically, the work is shared between the team members. We have internal releases which is handled by our in house developers and external releases handled by our COTS supplier. I am planning to implement the following
Bring internal projects and BAU tasks under Agile
All external release and projects to remain waterfall as we depend on other agencies and external vendors.
Does this approach make sense or should I split the team into projects and BAU? Please share your experiences and thoughts.
I would say the big problem here is, why is there a testing team? Scrum doesn't have testing teams - development and testing is done in the same sprint, by the same team.
If there is a BAU dev team and project dev team, then think about splitting your "testing team" and inject people into each of those teams.
Related
I am interested in creating a desktop application using HTML5+webkit, and I'd like to be able to build a stand-alone executables for various target platforms like a .exe file for Windows and a .dmg image for Mac OS. I have played around with node-webkit, which seems nice except for the packaging / distribution portion. I also stumbled on TideSDK, but that project seems to be inactive. For example, the latest release I saw was a beta from November of 2012. Yet, it seems the core developers have switched to developing TideKit instead.
Does anyone here know if TideKit is intended as a replacement for TideSDK? Is TideSDK going away? etc.
Well, TIDE is now officially a dead project. I just got this email about 15 minutes ago.
TideKit.com and TideKit have been discontinued.
TideKit was software for developing apps for all platforms
simultaneously with a single base of code written in JavaScript.
The scope and complexity of the product made it difficult to
assemble the platform all at once. This stemmed from a holistic
approach to app development for all platforms. While creating a
platform for JavaScript developers, much of the core engineering is in
a variety of lower level languages that affect the speed of
development. We considered delivering parts of our platform as we
reached milestones, but this was not suitable for the start of trials.
We were widely criticized for not revealing our technical innovation
in advance of our release. In a competitive environment, revealing
advantages as you go can also mean assimilation as you go. We had
already witnessed how quickly our technical advantages could be
assimilated by competitors to our open source TideSDK product.
Therefore, we held back with a view of delaying the duplication of
features by competitors, increasing our technical barriers and working
to protect our IP and business case until we felt we were ready.
In a startup, we talk about a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). In our
case, our minimum viable product was much larger and more difficult to
achieve. In total, approximately three years of research and
development was committed with multiple developers working greater
than full time hours. A factor that extended the development was an
expansion of scope that aimed to lower friction in the app development
process.
In Feb 2014, we created a system to queue developers with
reservation system for the earliest possible access to TideKit. Our
goal was to provide an early trial when it became available. Since the
development itself was complex, we could not provide a date when
ticket holders could start the trial process – but it would be
following our betas, then moving forward as we scaled the platform.
We were clear with our language on the site concerning reservations.
As a result, we expected little confusion about what was being
purchased, our expectations of timing to market, or the terms of
purchase for a reservation ticket. Purchasers were not paying for our
product at this point, but for their position in a queue for a trial
of our new technology. We also included a refund policy to ensure the
terms of purchase for your ticket were available. The wait has been
long, but not nearly as long as other difficult engineering challenges
including Myo that pre-sold their product and were also delayed before
successfully rolling out.
Throughout the development cycle we provided updates of our status
via posts roadmap page, email to our ticket holders and communications
on our social channels. We did our best as a team to open ourselves to
questions and maintain a social presence.
At the end of May 2015, we communicated our strategy to execute a
series of focused betas that would have seen the platform revealed
publicly and incrementally. We were at a stage that parts of the
platform needed developer feedback as we rolled these out
consecutively.
In the days preparing for our first public beta, we recognized the
extent to which our brand had been poisoned by our timing to market. A
campaign of negativity that had begun several months earlier with
followers and ticket holders had taken its toll on our team, brand,
and business.
We believed the beta releases would soon bring an end to the
negative talk. On July 8 and 9 we faced further eruptions on social
media that reached the tipping point. With the discussion no longer
about the product nor its future, this was far more serious.
We failed to bring the product quickly enough for you. As a result,
we came to the serious decision to discontinue TideKit and dissolve
our company.
We wish to thank everyone involved that worked on the product and with
our team. This includes businesses, entrepreneurs and supporters of
our vision for app development.
Your TideKit Team
you are right, TideSDK is aging and pretty inactive today. And you're also right, we as a core team completely focus on TideKit now. TideKit is the future!
If you want to know the full story about why we stopped working on TideSDK and started TideKit, I recommend you to read our first Q&A. There you'll also find an answer about how we compete with node-webkit:
https://blog.tidekit.com/post/your-questions-our-answers-01
We've just reached the highest HTML5 score any app development platform ever achieved. If you want to know more about builds, like the ones you mentioned for Windows and OS X, you should read this
Desktop Builds
https://blog.tidekit.com/post/from-a-desktop-perspective-tidekit-for-tidesdk-developers
There is a new kid on the block for this sort of projects: atom-shell Based in nodejs and used to create the great Atom editor
Technical differences with node-webkit: https://github.com/atom/atom-shell/blob/master/docs/development/atom-shell-vs-node-webkit.md
Presentation at JSLA about "Native NodeJS Apps": http://vimeo.com/97881078
If you look at this blog post, they talk about how unsustainable the economical situation is
http://www.tidesdk.org/blog/2013/04/11/tidesdk-in-numbers/
and I can't find the tweet that was stating the reasons behind the transition from one project to another. But I guess that the blogpost speaks for itself.
Anyway, I'm delivering a project written in node-webkit ( because I starded on Tide but for the obvious reasons I had to switch ) and I'm using grunt for packaging and in the end is not that bad.
Electron (http://electron.atom.io/) is the new way to go.
I also had an app running on TideSDK (https://github.com/vinyll/worktimer.titanium) and I'll have to migrate it to Electron.
I recently took on the responsibility for managing our company's builds and releases. We ship our products as both a web service and as a licensed product that customers can install on their internal servers.
My job involves making sure QA has the builds they need for testing, which may come from the main development branch or feature-specific branches, depending on their current focus, and may be for one of two different products. It also means releasing our products internally for dogfooding, which means we deploy to an internal server. Finally, I cut official builds for our customers by creating new versions of the installer for those who install internally, and pushing updates to the website for our hosted customers.
So far, I've picked up the Pragmatic Programmers' Ship It! and Release It!, both of which seem useful. What other books I should pick up and read? Are there communities or well-known bloggers I should follow that deal specifically with the challenges of building, deploying and shipping web services to our own servers and to customers internal servers?
I really liked Pragmatic Project Automation
CM Crossroads is an excellent resource.
This question is for ASP.NET and SQL Server developers. What are your best practices with respect to setting up your development and test environment? I'm interesting in the following issues:
How many tiers do you recommend and what goes on on each tier? Just dev, test, and production or perhaps dev, test, staging, and production?
Which types of applications and/or servers should run on actual physical hardware and which can get away with a VM?
What are your strategies for loosely coupling users from web sites, web developers from their web/app/DB servers, and DB developers from their DB servers?
How do developers stay "DRY?" (no deodorant jokes, please ;)
What are the pros and cons to putting web, app, and DB servers on their own machines? Does putting servers on separate machines in order to minimize contention for a machine's resources trump any NIC and network latencies that might be introduced by putting them on different machines?
How do you configure your web apps to minimize contention for resources (e.g. virtual directories, separate application pools, etc.)
How and how often do you refresh your databases on each tier? Do you just refresh the data or both the data and objects?
Thanks.
I can't comment on all of these but here's what i've found to work best in my experience.
1) Depends on your resources but ideally i like to have 4.
Dev is hyper flexible and owned by your dev team. It can get updated whenever they feel is best or as features are completed.
QA is updated on a scheduled or delivery basis depending on your process. If you do waterfall its updated when your in the testing phase, if you do iterative agile its updated each iteration. It should mimic prod as closely as possible but you may be able to get away with some compromise (see #2)
Staging should be identical in every way to prod. It should even use real production data if possible (potentially restored from a recent backup of the true production environment.) It should be used for acceptance testing prior to any release.
& Prod
2) Dev can be on a VM usually. QA can too most of the time. Staging and prod should match. I've seen folks run prod on VMs before, it depends on your resources and the demand for your app.
3) Our devs use a backup of prod on local SQL servers for development. This keeps everyone off of a central dev SQL server. Dev web and dev sql are separate boxes (just out of necessity they manage a bunch of projects.) same with QA, Staging and Prod.
4) A lot of testing and communication. If you have one small / medium team this isnt that hard. If you have lots of teams look at something like scrum, formal code reviews, something to keep communication going between teams. Don't treat DRY issues like suggested fixes, treat them like bugs, that need to be fixed. You'll spend way more time maintaining the code than writing it up front so treat maintenance as a 1st class citizen and make sure management is on board with that.
5 & 6) Not really qualified to comment
7) Dev whenever the teams need to, QA and up on a schedule depending on deployments. QA is every iteration / sprint, Staging and Prod is every release.
I started as a software engineer at the company I'm currently at. Over time, I was either the only one willing to or capable of taking responsibility for various systems, and so I was "promoted" to being IT Manager. Now, during my time as software engineer, I would create functional tests for the various software modules I would build, and as a result, even today I am able to quickly test various parts of the system that I have worked on. However, there is a large large code base with little to no coverage from the other various developers who have been working here.
Now, as IT Manager, I want to be able to test that all the parts of the system are working, but there is:
A) no budgeted time dedicated to creating code test coverage
and
B) No desire from the "chief software engineer" to start creating testing suites to help me monitor that the software is functioning.
I don't expect the software team to drop everything they are doing and spend 2 weeks creating test suites, but it would be nice if they started expanding the test suite
coverage over time so I can confirm that the various parts of the system are working.
So boiling it down, how do I get the software team to start building test suites?
Other caveats:
A) I'm still asked to do software projects in addition to managing our IT dept (a unix engineer, desktop support guy, and related office and production equipment)
B) My unix admin has a really hard time getting production systems up running the full code base, and we aren't getting good help from the software team. He can't run any kind of diagnostic to see where the web app is failing on the new installs. The VP of the company keeps telling me to go in and do print_r's in the code to see what is happening. This sucks!!!
First, you need to investigate Test Driven Development so that you are comfortable explaining it in terms that your developers will understand, as well as your management. Since you seem to be developing web applications, and you have technical skills, I suggest that you take the plunge and choose an open source tool for testing web applications, get it installed, and start building tests for anything that you develop yourself.
Twill is an example of the kind of testing tool that you would need.
Then, as manager, you need to entice developers to follow your example, and reward them for doing so. And punish them, when they don't use the testing framework and it leads to preventable problems. As soon as you get one such incident, you should be able to get your boss on board, and pick up some momentum.
Overall, remember that the objective is to do less work to get a good result. Cutting corners is a way of doing less work, but leads to the risk of bad, or spectacularly bad results. Keep management informed of the risk levels and potential costs at risk.
Don't just force people to do testing for testing's sake. It has to help them be more productive so choose the first projects for it carefully.
That's a good question. And if there was one correct answer to it, much more software projects would be successful and deliver high quality.
I don't think, that it is a good idea to make such a change top-down. It has to be driven from the developers themselves. So trainings in TDD direction would be good, but that is a long time invest, which takes time.
If you want a faster solution you should consider functional-, acceptance-, and systemtests. With these test you test pretty much the whole application through all layers. If you are developing web applications you should consinder using Selenium to automate your test. It is easy to create test with it (Selenium IDE).
But using only such tests (not Unit-tests) don't give you the advantages coming from TDD.
Automating your tests is crucial.
Do you have a Test or QA team?
I would first start to see if they have Test Cases that they use to qualify the build. If not you will have to develop these test cases to test the core functionality of your product.
The next step would be automating the test cases.
If the application is poorly developed without any troubleshooting tools or debugging features it would be tough until these are added as requirements for next release.
My 2 cents.
I'll have to disagree with michaelkebe- these changes need support from the executive level, in addition to a few key developers, in order to fully succeed.
Without that support, you'll just be some developers who look like they are 'wasting time on writing tests for stuff that already works.'
There needs to be a clear vision, and it needs to be repeated loudly and often.
I'm not necessarily advocating for Agile here, but often times it clicks for business owners.
If you can sell them on that, the things that you're excited about (delivering software fast, easy maintenance, automated testing, etc.) will fall into place.
My company (a large organization) is developing a "road-map" for evolving their rather old, tangled confederation of systems to an SOA model. A few people are pushing hard for using Websphere Integration Developer and Websphere Process Server as the defacto platform for developing future applications...because they feel IBM is a stable vendor, the tools are made for the enterprise, they drank the "business agility" BPEL kool-aid, etc.
Does anyone have positive or negative thoughts on this platform? Do the GUI tools help eliminate monotonous/redundant coding...or just obscure things and make things harder to maintain? Basically, do the benefits justify the complexity?
My experience with the IBM Java tool set is pure pain. Days to install lots of different versions of different components all incompatible with each other, discover a bug in component A get told to update to see if it fixes, updating component A breaks component B and C, get told to update these etc.
I find Eclipse with out the IBM extensions far more stable and quicker and provides more features (as its stable versions are a couple releases ahead of WID/RAD).
I would advise against going the IBM way for development tools. As for process server I have less experience but the people in my team using it seemed to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed WID. not a lot.
So far I havent been impressed by any tools with the "SOA" and/or "BPM" labels on them. My "roadmap" would be very very iterative to see some results with the archetecture as fast as possible while trying to grab some of the easy fruits. That way you gain your feel for what works for you and your people.
I would never let any vendor push me anywhere in the "scuplturing" of the architecture.
I agree with other users complaining about WID. The only reason we are using WID is that a decision was made a while back to use IBM products across the board by our sales department.
That's right, our sales department made the decision to use IBM products.
Development has been painful and frustrating. We have lots of stability problems with Process Server, sometimes it doesn't want to start or shutdown properly. Yeah you can easily draw processes in the IDE, but most any toolset provides that functionality these days. It is nothing special or unique to WID or IBM. IBM is a few iterations behind mainstream.
There are plenty of open source implementations out there that offer great support. Checkout JBoss or RedHat, they are pretty good. If that doesn't float your boat, you can always use Apache tools.
Walter
Developers don't choose WID, WMB, or WPS. Managers do, because IBM is a "stable vendor".
Look at JBoss, or K.I.S.S.
WID/WPS is actually pretty simple. The original intention was for analysts and business people to "compose" services (DO NOT LET THEM DO THIS!) so the UI is simple and easy.
Most of the work will be in defineing and implementing the back end services which depending on the platform will mostly involve wrapping existing code in SOA service.
The most important thing to bear in mind is that SOAP is technoligy and SOA is an architecture and a state of mind.
There is a zen to a succesful SOA implementation. Its all about "business services", if you have a service that you cannot describe to a business user in less than six words you have done it wrong! Ideally the service name alone should be enough to describe the functionality of the service.
If you end up with a service called "MyApp.GetContactData" described as "get name, addresses tel fax etc." then you are there. If You have a service called MyAppGetFaxNoFromOldSys" described as "Retrieve current-fax-nmbr from telephony table in legacy system" you are doomed!
Incidently most of the Websphere tooling for WS* is pretty nice. But I would recommend the very wonderful SAOPUI tool from http://www.eviware.com which is very good for compsing/reading WSDL based messages and also function as a useful test client or server.
Do the GUI tools help eliminate monotonous/redundant coding...or just obscure things and make things harder to maintain? Basically, do the benefits justify the complexity?
As a Developer, I find the tools at varying levels of being bug free. 6.0.1 was a pain, 6.2 is so much better. But once you develop with the tool, there is minimal effort to maintain it. I develop in hours what java developers take days to do. It is also easy to maintain as changes can be made very quickly. I cannot answer your question from the perspective of an architect or a Manager but i would agree with comments of some others here.