The Tech Jungle

Scrum - Performance Reviews/Appraisals for agile team

2012-01-09T12:38:00.000-08:00

http://runningagile.com/2008/01/22/review-process-for-agile-team-members/ http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2006/11/agile-performance-reviews.html http://jeffsutherland.com/review_template.html

Accomodate Bug fixing in a scrum sprint- (Scrum or Kanban)

2012-01-08T11:31:00.000-08:00

A scrum sprint entirely devoted to bug fixing is very bad. But such situations are not very rare. Scrum works perfectly with known feature deployment. Bug fixing works better with kanban. Bugs are unknown entity; unless team do some sort of exploration/spike work, they cannot commit on it. http://www.agileweboperations.com/scrum-vs-kanban. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)

Scrum : Non functional requirements testing in scrum sprint

2012-01-08T11:07:00.000-08:00

The NFR’s and technical requirements should be part of the user story. These can be added as constraints to the story or along with the definition of “done”. Most of these NFR’s can be tested with unit test framework or automated test scripts. Sometimes the process cannot be tested directly. Suppose software requires triple encryption of bank transactions or such things then it will be very

Scrum : How to accommodate the infrastructure tasks at the beginning of the project?

2011-12-26T11:57:00.001-08:00

Anu is a new scrum master. After the project kick off meeting on further discussion she realized that for a successful delivery as a pre-requisite the team needs a lot of infrastructure work to be completed. PO wanted the feature development work to start as soon as possible. Team had serious concerns about the delivery if they start the actual work without the required infrastructure. What can

Scrum Sprint duration – which is ideal; 4 weeks or 2 Weeks or 1 Week? Checklist

2011-12-24T12:24:00.000-08:00

The CTO heard about SCRUM. He asked the PMO to implement it. We got a big training. Everyone is happy. We know everything about scrum- product backlog, sprint backlog, daily scrum, sprint review, retrospective. Wow so cool. But no one told me the duration of a sprint. How can my trainer not know about this? This seems familiar? There should be many yeses. There is no definite duration for

What is scope creep? How can we prevent it?

2011-12-24T09:47:00.000-08:00

I have faced this many times. Due diligently I follow the requirement documents and create software. But on many occasions testers/customers will discover new requirements from the existing ones. They may be doing this with right intention but imagine the waste when we have to continuously redo our work every time. Apart from the rework imagine the chaos it can create. If this creates so many

SCRUM- Who should write a user story

2011-12-24T08:08:00.000-08:00

Traditionally user stories (or requirements) were written by Business analysts. They used to prepare big documents after months of study. It was a herculean task. I used to get such UI/Functional specification documents. I have fixed a lot of bugs because I missed few text in such 1000 + pages document. This is not the only interesting part. Some of the requirements were so weird that I often

SOA-based WCF architecture

2010-03-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

The WCF architecture is based on the design principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA is a framework that is used to design service-based distributed systems. In an SOA-based system, platform-independent services communicate across networked computers or computer processes. WCF implements. Explicit boundaries WCF services function using defined interfaces to identify

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) - Glossary

2010-03-25T11:55:00.000-07:00

WCF Fundamentals Service are applications that wait for clients to communicate with them and respond to that communication. They expose the functionalities to client. Client initiate the communication. They consume the service offered by Service. Message: A message is a self-contained unit of data that may consist of seveal parts, including a body and headers. Clients & Service communicate

Windows Communication Foundation - overview

2010-03-24T11:26:00.001-07:00

WCF is a framework ( yep another framework :D ). It is a unified programming model for building service oriented applications The WCF architecture uses message-based communication. This involves messages being sent between endpoints generated by either a service or a client. A service is an application that responds to a request, and a client is an application that initiates a

Asp.Net – Creating a new custom HTTP Module

2010-03-03T07:17:00.000-08:00

An HTTP Module is a .NET class that executes with each and every page request. You can use an HTTP Module to handle any of the HttpApplication events that you can handle in the Global.asax file. You are already familiar with some of the HTTP Modules likeFormsAuthenticationModule handles the Forms authentication WindowsAuthenticationModule handles the Windows authentication

ASP.net - implementing Asynchronous HTTP handler

2010-03-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

Asynchronous programming has its own benefits. It helps in better usage of resources. In ASP.net when a user request for a resource which is to be processed by HTTP Handler a thread is created an allocated to the handler file. The thread will be idle till the file finish it’s processing. So as to minimize this “idle” period using asynchronous programming we can release the thread back to pool

ASP.net - Http handlers - implementing IHttpHandler

2010-03-01T10:10:00.000-08:00

Implementing a generic HTTP handler has its own limitations. To give more power to handle request in any URL we can create our own HTTP handlers using the interface IHttpHandler. This interface defines the contract that ASP.NET implements to synchronously process HTTP Web requests using custom HTTP handlers. You can create HTTP handler in any of the .net language which can run in the framework

SQL Server: GETDATE() & GETUTCDATE() & different time zones

2010-02-28T00:13:00.000-08:00

Most of us will use GetDate() function for providing default value in SQL server columns. This function Returns the current database system timestamp as a datetime value without the database time zone offset. This value is derived from the operating system of the computer on which the instance of SQL Server is running. This works perfectly if you don’t have to show reports and such stuffs for

ASP.net - Http handlers - Generic Hander

2010-02-27T07:26:00.000-08:00

An HTTP Handler is a .NET class that executes whenever you make a request for a file at a certain path. Each type of resource that you can request from an ASP.NET application has a corresponding handler. When you request an ASP.NET page, the Page class executes. The Page class is actually an HTTP Handler because it implements the IHttpHandler interface. Other examples of HTTP Handlers are the

C# Thread Synchronization

2010-02-20T23:35:00.003-08:00

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C# Thread Synchronization

2010-02-20T23:35:00.001-08:00

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Why do we need a design pattern? Some FAQ's

2010-02-19T23:26:00.000-08:00

Why do we need pattern? cant we just code?Well we need it for ourselves. It just like constructing a new house and you go to some engineer for the blueprint. Nobody stops you from creating your house but most of us will take the advice of the people who has sufficient knowledge in this area. Similarly a design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software

Extension Methods - add methods to class

2010-02-13T09:34:00.000-08:00

Consider the following class public class Person { public string FirstName { get; set; } private string LastName { get; set; } protected string Email { get; set; } public int Age { get; set; } virtual public void showName() { Console.WriteLine("base class"); } } To add additional methods to a class you have to subclass it or add

Dotnet New initialization feature

2010-02-13T07:58:00.000-08:00

There are different ways an object properties can be initialized Using constructor Calling some methods Or directly updating the values by object But there is a new feature implemented in Dotnet Consider the following class class Person { public string FirstName { get; set; } private string LastName { get; private set; } protected string Email { get; set; }

Differences between an Interface and an Abstract Base Class

2010-02-13T07:55:00.001-08:00

An abstract class can contain both concrete methods (implemented) and abstract methods (method with only signature – no implementation);an abstract class needs at least one abstract method); an interface does not contain any method implementations. An abstract class can contain constructors and destructors; an interface does not. A class can implement multiple interfaces, but it can inherit from

.Net & Automatic properties

2010-02-13T07:52:00.000-08:00

We used to declare properties with get & set blocks public string FirstName {get{return _FirstName;}set{_FirstName = value;}} if we have to make them read only we used to remove the set block & if the property has to be made write only the get block was removed. In most cases there was not other filtering or validations done so Microsoft introduced the Automatic properties with .Net 2008

Anonymous types - sorting & working with Linq

2010-02-07T08:48:00.000-08:00

Consider the following code var numbers = new int[] { 1, 4, 6, 2, 9, 10, 0, 99, 33 }; var sortedNums = from n in numbers orderby n descending select n; foreach (var v in sortedNums) Console.WriteLine(v); var sports = new string[] { "soccer", "baseball" }; var

Anonymous types - Examples

2010-02-06T08:15:00.000-08:00

Simple var simple = "Simple Ann Type"; string str= "Simple Ann Type"; Both the code are identical for MSILArray Initializer var name = new string[] { "a","b","c" };Console.WriteLine(name[0]);Composite Anonymous Types We can think of this use of anonymous types as defining an inline class without all of the typing. var Person = new {FirstName="Bill", LastName="Clinton"};

Basic rules for using anonymous types

2010-02-06T06:36:00.000-08:00

Anonymous types must always have an initial assignment and it can’t be null because the type is inferred and fixed to the initializer. can be used with simple or complex types can be used as initializers in for loops can be used and has to be used for array initializers can be used with arrays can be returned from methods but must be cast to object cannot be used for a class field