Xing’s last campaign for attracting new members was kind of successful …I heard. Could have been an impulse why they started to improve the platforms menu navigation.
Some of the networks users were chosen to see the new menu first: to test it and in best case to participate on a survey which was created for this reason. We are surprised about the survey’s “quality”.
First reason is, that the survey opens in a pop-up! Then it shows us the typical form of an online survey… 2-4 different questions on one site and the “continue” button at the end. The strange thing is, that you are able to click through the whole survey without answering one single question… Well, it is nice that the authors left the choice, either to answer a question or not, to the participator, but what for then?
Funny is, what you find within the question about the breadcrumbs… they translated it as “Krümelpfad” (;
And a lot of question marks remain if you recognize that after finishing the survey, you get at xing’s welcome page, shown in the pop-up. No comment.
Winter hasn’t reached Dresden too much yet. But even if there are still 3 or 4 degrees outside – it can be a pleasure to get into a warm house… I guess Tschitschereengreen pictures one of the most hottest spots in town at the moment. We are also getting warm from inside – cause we are drinking tea (:
And now.. “where is the clou…?” you may ask yourself.
The special thing is that we don’t need to wait till the tea water burns. We just grap our favourite sort of tea, put it in a cup, walkin to this old-school, silver-coloured thing, turning the tap on and: hot water comes out. Thats it.
The older generations and East-Europe-Fans under us don’t even have to think about what I’m talking about. (We could have made a riddle for the youngsters… damn. Now it is too late before Christmas…)
So yes. It is an old, original russian Samowar. Great thing. We can recommend it warmly!!
With this tea story we gonna end with the blog articles for this year. What now comes you know… We too. So we save our breaths and just say:
all the best and foremost: enjoy the spare time as much as possible (:
Last week we finished an application for a travel agency, who wished to handle Sabre, Amadeus, Travelport (the company which took over the Travel Distribution Service of Galileo and the Worldspan company ) and others from one source. Means that we built a middleware (service layer) which brings the different APIs from the CRS providers together to one API. This single interface can now be gated to a booking system.
The advantages are obvious, aren’t they?
You don’t have to decide anymore between the providers – so the offer range is growing distinctly. Respectively there’s no need to build a new API if it is decided later on to use one more reservation system. If you once installed the multiple interfaces, you can extend it as often and much as you wish to.
The application was developed with Ruby on Rails on soap4r. This assures that the middleware is stable and works fluently.
So feel free to ask if you want to benefit from our experience with CRSs.
Java, PHP and others are common at the universities curriculum.
Django and co. aren’t.
Why? Good question.
But it is the main reason why tschitschereengreen visited the HTW Dresden last Friday: To give the students some information about Django on Python. For those, who weren’t with us this afternoon, there’s a short summary:
» Jirka told us some experiences out of the practice: how tschitschereengreen organises its project management; why we prefer frameworks like Django…
» he talked about agile software - the advantages and disadvantages in general and also concerning the single development frameworks: Django vs Rails vs Symfony
» we discussed about why PHP and Java are so popular comparing to Django- although rapid development is fast, simple and stable. one statement: there’s no big industry behind Django and Python which is interested in to spread it…
» Jirka showed us the Django- coding: how it works, where the advantages hides and why it is comfortable to handle.
All in all it was a good atmosphere, and I felt that the students are interested in. And the way how Jirka spoke about these things, was bracing enough not to be bored (: - it was Friday afternoon - normally it is not the students most preferred time to be at uni… is it?
And I especially recognized one thing: when Jirka reported about the testing method we practice at tschitschereengreen:
everybody was prick-eared and the pens were crawling over the paper (: Why? Because Jirka reported, that we kicked out the unit testing in the company! why? Because it eats time… a lot of time.. and even the best unit testing doesn’t give you a guarantee that the application will work faultless. and: how we work instead? If the base for an application is set, we start testing the app manual. And if there are bugs, we fix them. So we are much faster…
After the workshop I asked the students what they think now about django and python. The feedback was positive: Sven for example finds Python and Django very interesting.. especially because there are that fast. And he would wish that it gets more importance at the universities. [That is what we require too, because then it becomes easier for us to find competent programmers for tschitschereengreen… (; ] Dominik already worked with Java. He finds it too complicated sometimes and would prefer to programm with Django. The other students also expressed a good opinion about Django… Jakob wasn’t that interested in Django, but in Python. He is convinced that companies like google wouldn’t use it if there wouldn’t be advantages. There were only two voices who said, that they prefer to work with established languages - and that they wouldn’ t like to use the console.
So, the basic statement we learned about Django is: Agile software makes a lot of things much easier. If you recognize, that something doesn’t work like you wanted, or if the client’s wishes changing suddenly.. you can go back, without altering the whole app. So you’re more flexible. The apps are stable and the codes are very short and therefore kind of “clean”. And to conclude: “Rails performes much better than Symfony. And Django performes much better than Rails” (Framework+Performance).
At last here we go with a video from Friday.. and guys! I will train myself concerning the video making competence!!! PROMISED! (:
We tried using the Scrumburndownplugin along with trac (0.11stable-r7507) and PostgreSQL. We got some problems to get it running, therefore here is our soulution:
1) Create manually in PGAdmin3 the table
-- Table: burndown
-- DROP TABLE burndown;
CREATE TABLE burndown
(
id serial NOT NULL,
component_name text NOT NULL,
milestone_name text NOT NULL,
date text,
week text,
"year" text,
hours_remaining integer NOT NULL
)
WITH OIDS;
And use our Plugins: burndown.zip + timandestimation.zip
[Update]
I just ran into some more errors:
in the burndown table you have to remove HOURS_REMAINING and create it anew as a float8 data type.
Upon a request of a customer, we started creating a screencast for him. This was a pretty good experience for us, because it saved hours of time for the usual creation of a documentation. So what we are going to do in the future is using screencasts for explaining the app to our customers
When I opened my google adwords account this morning… I was suprised:
9 of 10 variations of my published ads for iPhone apps, were declined.
Why? These 9 ads contain the word “iPhone”- and if I use it, I infringe Apple’s trademark rights.
The thing is: I already activated them one week ago!! No restrictions happened within these days. And: they “worked” really well…
The keywords are not restricted yet. But.. who knows what Apple tries to interdict tomorrow.
Why does Apple always needs to control anything? And often in a very nonproductive way… Foremost we don’t harm them with these ads. Far from it!! If we campaign for iPhone apps in a serious way, it shows that their product is popular, that companies are interested in… It could be so easy..
But hej: Did anyone of you discovered anything about this topic in the web? (blogs, news, …)
If yes, please let me know!!
During the past few month we pushed all of our projects on with near time testing. As already mentioned, I phased in this method since a project in july and after working the 1st time with tis method, we noticed following pros and cons of near time testing:
» Developers had a faster feedback and therefore less context switches
» The Quality of the feedback was really high, due to my knowledge about the customers expectations
» I 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
After working, developing, testing in this manner for more than 3 month ,the time has come to talk about our constistent further development of the near time testing and to phrase some rulez for the projectmanager of such kind of projects:
Over the time, we realized: Projectmanagement is not only the coordination and mangement of individuals (developer, customer, executive board of our company) but also a kind of public relation. Testing and debugging is the ubhorrent part of a project by developers. Tickets/bugs are not welcome, so the 1st step to realize a sucsessful near time testing: Overwrite the current opinion! The primary objective of testing is the optimization of the code and the workflows of an application. While testing, the team will come to know the mentality of the customer, his wishes and desires. So you are in the position to make a person happy - this is great! So bring to mind: Testing is not merely finding bugs but rather a part of conception. This point of view makes the importance of testing clearly. The deeper meaning beside finding bugs is to phrase enhancements, which simplifies your work.
To assure the quality of the QA, we build for every project a dedicated Tester team, who are also managed by the projectmanager. The projectmanager introduces the guys in the system and also in the intellectual world or business case of the customer. He writes the testcases which are similar to the use cases of the application and gives the tester a sense of the future user. It is really important to have motivated dedicated testers, who are able to project the customer thoughts and understand the use cases of the application. If you are able to build such a team, you have not only a enormous power in testing and conception, but also a group of qualified persons for heated and output-driven discussions for the UI of the application.
It is clear, that a lot of tickets will be wrote during a project which is driven by near time testing, enhancement will be phrased and defects will be found- and this is stress for the developers, who are sensitive beings. To minimize this stress , we interpole the projectmanager as owner of every ticket. He decides at which time which ticket will be reassigned to every developer and how many defects and how many enhancement will be showed.
With this in mind, we’ll see: It is important to have a well balanced ratio between enhancements and defects – the motivation of a developer team is a fragile property – so be carefully!
Concluding, I’m really happy to see: We were able to improve the system. And by the way, it is really great to suprise the customer with a great UI and easy workflows. So have the courage to try the approach of near time testing 
Looking at the number of downloads and the turnover of the app shop.., I would say it was a very good deal for Apple to open it this summer- .. is this the kind of information you’ve been waiting for… yes (; ?!
Why do we think about this? Because we also are specialists in developing this kind of software… And we wouldn’t do this, if we wouldn’t be convinced, that there is a good chance for companies to position themselves in this market: they can reach an interesting target group through the iPhone apps – a group full of young or at least young at heart, dynamic, and also sometimes freaky fans of this stylish, multi-functional hightech-product.
One point you should check out first: Make sure that you don’t copy an already existing Apple application – including the use of more or less similar functions. Otherwise Apple could ban your software (like Nullriver; Podcaster) from the app shop getting you into trouble: because of wasting time and money for developing.
The problem is: If there’s no access for you to the app shop- there’s no legal way to distribute your app anywhere else. So always keep an eye on possible conflicts. Apple’s the boss. Always remember this (;
Nevertheless, the app shop can be a fine marketing tool for your company: If you’re in any way interested in presenting your company as trendy as the iPhone-users – just try it out!
I’d find it cool to meet my favourite companies, packed as a brainy game for the iPhone…. don’t tell you which my favourite ones would be.. hah (=
We’re receiving more and more video applications. Though sometimes the content ist not that exciting it gives us a chance to get a better understanding of the personality of the applicant. And even a very simple video concept leads to an invitation for an interview…