{ a blog about java web and agile software development }

2015-01-01T04:56:00.000-08:00

Hi! My name is Sunil Kumar, I am a Software Developer and Designer from London, United Kingdom. I work with Java and XML Enterprise Ecosystem Technologies and Mark Logic.

Specification Workshop: A panacea for distributed agile team

2014-12-16T12:06:00.001-08:00

In my previous job, we introduced a process called Specification workshop. This was done to improve the quality of user stories and team’s understanding about it. Specification Workshop is not yet so popular with agile teams. Our team’s experience is very good and everybody found it useful.

Next I am going to describe about - how distributed agile teams are structured, how stories are planned, what Specification workshop is and how this helps to bridge the gaps between technical team, tester and business.

Team Structure:

It is very common nowadays in globalised world that an agile team is distributed across many geographic locations across many continents. Let us imagine a case where development team is based in London (UK) and Business Analyst is located in New York (USA) and some members of Quality Assurance Team are in India and other members of Quality Assurance are in Moscow (Russia) and Project Manager being located in Oxford (UK). This is not an imaginary team but many of us have been part of such team.

It is no surprise that such teams will have challenging time ahead in the project. Team members have a common goal – development and deployment of features/project in the production. But not every team has same level of understanding of the requirement. The main challenge for distributed agile team is to have same level of understanding of requirement among technical team, testers and business.

Story Planning:

Let us have a look at how story is planned in agile team. At high level, BA will get the requirement from Business/Client and will do analysis and then create a user story from it. The user story is written on piece of card or logged on to some digital system e.g. JIRA. Next, story is either discussed in pre-planning meeting with Tech-Lead or/and discussed with the whole team in the planning meeting. There may be few questions asked by Dev team or QA Team in these meeting. The real problem with these meeting are –

1) Many stories are discussed with whole of team and meeting can drag very long,

2) Individuals may refrain from asking questions for some reason e.g. meeting is dragging or people are rushing to finish the meeting, etc.

3) Testers, in some cases, are just passive listener and does not really participate during this period.

So, some stories are not clear and not ready for Dev team but gets planned and picked by Dev team. These stories most of time initiates discussion, during the play, among Dev, BA and other stakeholders. These communications are very late in the process and delays delivery which results in extra cost to develop the software.

Specification Workshop:

Specification workshop is a same-time collaboration of technical team, testers and business to develop a requirement specification using any BDD tools e.g. Cucumber. Team members may be located at different geographical places. This process requires screen sharing facility and every participant on the conference call. There are few preparatory steps e.g. technical team will create a feature file which will contain details of technical analysis, if any technical analysis done. During the workshop BA gives a business overview of requirement whereas technical details is either provided by Tech lead or by a Dev. Then a developer or a tester starts adding scenarios to the existing feature file. Note, the term Scenario comes from BDD world. In fact, Scenario is like acceptance criteria in plain English. If any tester thinks that some scenarios are missing then he can ask to add those scenarios or can add himself once the feature file has been checked in to version control. BA can also ask to add any scenario which he thinks is missing from the list. Actually any one part of the workshop can ask any question which should be clarified then and there if possible. If there are doubts about any question then a note should be added to feature file for later clarification.

You can imagine that how technical team, testers and BA are discussing and agreeing on what need to be done to deliver the feature. In the workshop, everyone gets opportunity to clarify any query or concern about the requirement. There are no time limit on duration of discussion of a story. But it is good idea to time limit the workshop duration to one hour. And you can have as many workshop as required before the planning meeting. Once specification workshop is done for a story, story can be handed to testers so that they can to add extra scenario or review the existing scenario. At end of this process, story is quite complete and requirement is clear to everyone in the team. Devs and testers who have not participated in workshop for the story can still raise query in planning meeting. This process grows the requirement and make it more mature.

Typical flow of a user story is something like:

Benefits of specification workshop:

Well defined requirements
Upfront discussions among Developers, testers and BA
early involvement of the testing team
No or very little communication required while developing or testing the story
Less time required by tester if all scenarios are working fine in continuous integration environment
Good documentation of requirement in the form of feature file
Documentation will updated if requirement changes
Same-time query clarification, no delay due to no use of email or any other digital tool

Conclusion:

We saw that how a distributed agile team faces changes due to distance and various layer of communication. This leads to confusion about requirement among the team members. Which ends up pushing the development cost to higher side. But if we introduce the missing link, specification workshop, to the process. We find that quality of user story is very high. Understanding of user story requirement is increased many folds for technical team and testers. This helps in reducing the very late communication among BA, testers and developers. Stories which is part of the planning backlog are quite mature and of high quality.

I’ll recommend using specification workshop to not only distributed team but also to co-located teams. I have tried to give overview of specification workshop which is not very detailed but gives a fair idea about it.

First Taste of Java8

2014-12-12T12:26:00.000-08:00

Sharing with you all an old presentation which was presented by me in one of the Developer Forum at my client company, this presentation includes a brief overview of new features of Java 8.

The main Java 8 features covered in the presentation are :

● Lambda
● Interface improvement
● Streams
● new packages

Below is presentation :

Java8 from Sunil Kumar

Presentation from past

2013-09-20T04:00:00.000-07:00

This Prezi is presentation I made and delivered in my previous job.

Agile Software Development Overview

2012-03-01T15:10:00.000-08:00

My client company decided to move development center from London(United Kingdom) to Philadelphia (United States). My role in the project is of the lead developer from outsourcing company. I have been assigned the very importent role of migrating our development setup to states. As, many of client company employees decided to leave the company than to move to US. This created the opportunity for adding new recuite to our project who had no prior experience to Agile software development.

Project manager asked me to mentor the team and making them aware about out development practices.
I took a session for all the new team member on Agile methodologies we followed in our project.

The presentation for the session can found here: Agile Software Development Overview

Agile Software Development Overview

View more PowerPoint from sunilkumar_

Test Driven Development for Beginners Part 1:

2012-03-01T13:12:00.000-08:00

When a developer embraces agile methodology the number one challenge for him is learning Test Driven Development(TDD). TDD is very different from traditional software development. When I started my agile journey, during initial months , found TDD very interesting skill to expertise on. A quality code base can only be developed by quality test code base.

Test driven development literally means writing tests first to develop a piece of code. Remember Test First. Every Newbie agile developer will ask a common question “How can we test something That doesn’t exist yet“. I think this question seems very true too. But, before the actual implementation code is written , one can think of what will be the implementation code's behaviour and the state of the objects manipulated by the piece of code which is subjected to test.

Then start writing test for you imagined implementation code. The pattern of developing a new class in test driven way will be something like :

So, Three important Questions need to be asked :

What is to be tested?
How to test that?
Do you want to test behaviour or state?

And, If one gets answers of these question then writing test code will be easier.The right approach is to break problem into small chunks.For example, if you are creating a Math Class then first think of add , then think of multiply or divide.So tasks involved in developing a Math class will be:

1. Write test first for add method and then implementation.
2. Write test for multiply method and then implementation and so on....

In agile it is believed that test code is the part of documentation. As a agile developer one has to really understand that writing tests properly and meaningfully is very important. Well written tests help code maintenance. Through well written test cases developer can pass thier ideas very effectively to other developers.

Free iPhone apps I like : Flickr

2009-09-08T15:42:00.000-07:00

Finally an official Flickr iPhone app. After seeing countless third-party efforts, Yahoo decided to have an iPhone app. And this is free.

It has a gorgeous home screen. Its a very attractive design. You open it up and it shows you Ken-Burns-style slideshow of images from the site.It does one time authorization via Safari and it sets you up to do all the usual stuff like add to favorites, share via email, comment, tagging, etc.

You can also search for photos across All Uploads, From Your Contacts or Your Photostream based your selection from search drop-down option.

The main cool feature of it is uploading: snap and upload a photo on the fly or choose an existing snapshot from your library like Facebook iPhone app.

You can assign the photo to a set, add tags, title, description, choose a privacy level and Geo Location

If you have multiple Flickr account then you can log-out and can login with new account.

Please share your experience of this app. You can also use m.flickr.com if you don't want to install this app.

Free iPhone apps I like : ATM Hunter

2009-09-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

This iPhone App is a Must-have application for your iPhone. With more than a million ATMs in over 210 countries, you're never far from ATM. This app uses iPhone’s GPS to locate nearest ATM to your current location. You can also search by any address or by Airport code.iTunes Link for ATM Hunter.

Master Card has developed this app. They also have equivalent website for this app. You can use below link if you want to find out ATMs from you desktop or laptop.
Master Card ATM Finder

I wish Master Card improve their website to include the feature of NextGen browser like Firefox 3.5 which has integrated HTML 5 Geo Location API . This will let user find nearest location by click a single button like any mobile app which similar feature. Preview of Master card Global ATM Finder :

The website is also integrated with Google Maps like iPhone app. I hope this app helps you being caught without cash :).

For Visa Card holder:
Desktop : Visa ATM Locator
Mobile : Visa ATM Locator

Free iPhone apps I like : Samachar

2009-09-06T06:42:00.000-07:00

If you are like me who is an Indian with an iPhone then let me tell you about an iPhone app which you are going to like.
Samachar.

This app gets you latest happenings from India. This allows you to customize your choice of News. I hope you will like it.

The online version of this app is www.meehive.com, which allows you to have a personalized version of online News paper. This is developed by Kosmix team which is doing some wonderful work on online data mining.

Hello Agile World

2008-04-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of task of presenting agile process that we follow in our work place and came up with idea of setup of this blog. Where I can dump my experiments with agile.The world of Software Engineering is very strange and infect any new branch of science is like it. Every now than we can hear some new methodology, technology, framework and many more etc. When I started using Agile methodology , I found it very-2 smartly designed process.It has great advantage over traditional waterfall model.
The first advantage will be communication.We all know the importance of communication in software development. In waterfall software development main challenges are poor communication among team member and poor interpretation of the communication.

In waterfall model we :

collect and document requirement from customer,
prepare a design document,
start development (write alone code of any module of project and have telecon with customer every now and then)
Integrate all the different modules into a piece of software (and work hard so that its works after integration)
Deliver software to customer.

In Agile (Xp based) :

Customer will tell his vision about the product and team will be on board with customer.(Remember : customer's requirement will be keep changing.). A rough estimate for total development cycle.
BA will start writing small set of task in the form of Stories.
Team will do a planning meeting and estimate stories for available budget for a iteration(one unit of total development cycle).
Pair will write test code for a story and then implantation code for the same.
When pair is done with code then will integrate story to continuous integration system(Cruise Control).Checking only working code otherwise Lava lamp will go Red.
Always have a working software.
plan and release software any time.

We can see how contrasting these two models are.