Git, als verteilte Versionsverwaltungssoftware, ist eine gute Alternative zum bekannteren SVN. Wir setzen Git seit einigen Jahren und mittlerweile durchweg in allen Projekten ein.

Jirka fasst die Inhalte auf Xing wie folgt zusammen:
* GIT Basics, die wichtigsten Befehle für die tägliche Arbeit mit GIT
* GIT Trouble, wir kamen von SVN und scheiterten an… – Konkrete Beispiele, an denen man als SVNler immer scheitert
* Heavy Branching – wie manage ich 15 verschiedene Branches? Wie verwende ich das Branching in meinen Release-Cycles? Warum sind Topic Branches sexy?

Anmeldungen sind via Xing möglich. Allerdings habe ich das Event ungewollt als “privates Event” angelegt, heißt: in der Event-Suche taucht es nicht auf. Der Status lässt sich im Nachhinein leider nicht mehr ändern.
Falls jemand Interesse hat und mit keinem Tschitscheringrün auf Xing verknüpft ist…. Schreibt uns trotzdem an! (gerne auch via Twitter, z.B. über ulrike_uk).
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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.

» 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

Scrum is a procedure modell with focus on simple and straight working methods especially concerning agile software developement.

Some advantages of Scrum are:

• It controls the process of conflicting needs and interests in the daily workflow
• Scrum is teambased and helpful to improve communication and cooperation but it’s also important for each single team member for the fullfilling of their tasks
• The strenght of this project management method is the simplicity of it’s operating principals

To the central functions of Scrum belongs the Sprint, which is completely organized by the team. It concerns scetchily the major technical and administrative tasks of the projects and also the requirements which are necessary to fullfill the tasks.

Also important – the daily Scrum Meeting (max. 15min.) which we will extend by a phone call with the customer. The topics should be short and precise.

In the review-phase of scrum the costumer controls the result of the sprint, can synchronise with the developers and can make improvement suggestions.

The retrospective phase follows after a completed sprint to improve the next sprint. The teammembers “look back” and note down important events in the last sprint. It is also possible to use something like a timeline to order events.

All in all in scrum is a really simple method for the organisation of complex structurs. It works with small and also really big teams and can be implement at every point of the project.

As of April, 1st we will start our first scrum-meetings and sprints.

[written by Corii, published by Jerk]

One of our current jobs this week is building a prototype for a new kind of webbased social network. Our customer intends to have a very small but working prototpe of his future web application to gain first experiences during a closed beta. Furthermore he aims to demonstrate this prototype and the user feedback to potential investors.

The prototype will be developed by two developers, getting the whole thing done in as much as 5 days. The current state after day 2: main functionality is done except search and internal messaging system. And lastly the nice layout is missing…

[Update 17:49] Search is done too.

Here is my quotation from the letter I send him:

Dear, after spending lot’s of hours reading about paradigms and experiences with Erlang I found the following quotation which describes significantly the position, where Erlang resides:

„Any sufficiently advanced concurrent C program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug ridden, slow implementation of half of Erlang“

Erlang is way closer to the machines roots then Python is and eliminates such things as concurrent locks (deadlocks). So the conclusion of the research is that I recommend heavily using Erlang instead some Python derivatives. Furthermore Erlang is much better in scaling and has one of the best reliability statistics in the server market.
Furthermore is Mnesia (the native Erlang database) adjusted to this programming language and resides completely in the memory allowing extremely fast data access.
Based on our experience and the extensive research we did in the last days I would like to recommend a system (e.g. used too by SlideAware) where the main web application is developed in Django and the …. are managed and coordinated by the custom Erlang server engine. Furthermore we recommend implementing EUnit which is the Erlang UnitTest Framework.
Regarding Erlang we discovered that there are a lot of very good developers out there and Erlang is especially in web application environments catching up. Some people even refer it as a hype. So it seems like that Erlang will be a big issue in web application development in the next years.

So to me Erlang looks pretty much promising. Especially when thinking about future applications for the web I do have the feeling, that Erlang has the potential to become very very important for managing highly interactive user driven web applications.

[Update]: read this introduction.

I simply used the Django-Admin interface, created a nice model and adjusted the Interface.

The CRM is capable of managing Company and Person Objects as well as tracking passed communication and the integration of a followup-flag which indicates what kind of action should follow at which date.

I attached this to this blog post. Feel free to use it: Download

The duration of development was 4h.