Regarding to our guideline for application, we received the first video application these days. It was just great and we will call this guy today to ask him vor an interview…
Building web apps for a large publisher, a CRM system for the worlds largest car manufacturer, working on projects for Germanys Top Business Angels, improving internal workflows and infrastructure, thinking about better deployment processes, reworking the General Terms and Conditions, thinking about: testing, especially near-time testing, future growth, general strategy, a new office kitchen
During Iteration 1 of a project run for a big German Publisher, Tina (Project Manager) introduced a new way of testing to our project.
What she did for the first time was near-time testing.
In all projects before, we always used to have the software tested by the developers during the development process as well as the project manager right bevore the delivery to the customer.
The experience Tina made with the near time testing was very interesting. Once a developer reported to her that he finished a functionality (via Trac), she was instantly looking at the application and started testing the functionality with extreme and unexpected values.
The result of the testing can be summarized as follows:
» Developers had a faster feedback and therefore less context switches
» The Quality of the feedback was really high, due to Tinas knowledge about the customers expectations
» Tina was able to improve the application by using it constantly and making it therefore much better usable by the customer then it was planned on the contractual paper
» the only odd thing was that during this time (2 weeks) we had about 200 tix at all, which (when coming in constantly) are not very motivating to the developers
So as a final conclusion, we saw that near-time testing adds a lot of speed and value to the project, though it creates some additionally felt stress for our developers based on constantly incoming tickets.
[Update]: Just as a note: the customer filed 4 tickets while testing the app. We never had a better feedback before…
While the names of our clients are getting bigger and bigger and our projects volume grow we figured out that testing as we used to do till now (developers do raw testing and the customer does the final testing) does not work anymore. Therefore we were looking around in our company for people who might fill this gap in our work flow.
Fortunately we discovered months ago that Corinna, one of our honored back office team members, is really good at testing and very creative regarding doing things, the programmer did not expect. Therefore we sat together with her and discussing her new tasks inside the projects.
The new workflow we created based on our SCM Trac is that every ticket finished by the software developer will be marked as “to test” (a new item of resolution). Then Corinna has an RSS feed subscribed which shows her the tickets marked as “to test”. If the testing returns some errors, the ticket is reopened and a comment describing the symptoms is added. If the ticket was solved without any errors, the ticket resolution will be set to “fixed”.
Furthermore Corinna is now taking part in all relevant Standup Meetings to be able to coordinate the testing demands of the different teams.
Yesterday, I tried a hint from Seb for reanimating the old yoosic system by accessing the db directly from Django. The problem was that it is an MyISAM-MySQL-System which is not really cool for the Django way of coding.
The hint from Sebastian was trying the legacy database access provided by django, which enables you to override naming conventions and to access any already existing db.
This worked very fine, so that we do have admin page for the yoosic system now and are able to create an xml-rpc based function to replace contents of the yoosic site.
In the passed week, I was able to initiate a cooperation with a really cool 20-year-experience-IT-professional.
He will be coming into our office once a week and beeing available as a coach and discussion partner for our partially really young, highly talented guys…
I’m really positive about this and hope that both partys will be living an high level experience exchange…
more news about this here in the next weeks.
just repaired some minor issues this morning on yoosic.com. And in the next days I will be inserting a new flash player for replacing our current mp3-stream solution.
Furthermore I’m thinking about a way, where I can use Django or Symfony to start replacing functions in our current nasty-code-wasted yoosic-app while accessing the current yoosic database.
The only possibility I see is using Symfony by remodelling the current MyISAM-DB-Structur in the schema.yml and the generating the model. Afterwards I will be able to create Ajax-Views, which I can access from yoosic to have it replacing current modules…
Do you see a way using Django? I really would like to prefer this!
Just ran into errors with Lighttpd 1.5, PostgreSQL, Django (trunk) Admin and using memcached for accellerating the page.
The 500er error I got when accessing /admin looked like:
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/core/cache/__init__.py",
line 60, in get_cache
cache_class = getattr(__import__('django.core.cache.backends.%s' % BACKENDS[scheme], {}, {}, ['']), 'CacheClass')
File "/srv/www/www.tschitschereengreen.com/tts/django/core/cache/backends/memcached.py", line 12, in ?
raise InvalidCacheBackendError("Memcached cache backend requires either the 'memcache' or 'cmemcache' library")
InvalidCacheBackendError: Memcached cache backend requires either the 'memcache' or 'cmemcache' library
I tried several solutions, like the forums and other sources recommended (installing memcached-python bindings, install in cmemcached, etc.). The only thing which worked was replacing memcached by using the “file:///” cache. *Grml!*
After trying several tools for making the translation of a symfony project convenient for our customer, I found the following best practice:
[Update] I missed something. You have to have to change the language code of the English file in the menue. IMPORTANT!