Tag: Software Development

Agile Fixed Price Projects

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The Agile fixed price is a contractual model agreed upon by suppliers and customers of IT projects that develop software using Agile methods. The model introduces an initial concept & scoping phase after which budget, due date, and the way of steering the scope within the framework is agreed upon. This differs from traditional fixed-price contracts in that fixed-price contracts usually require a detailed and exact description of the subject matter of the contract in advance.

Fixed price contracts are evil – this is what can often be heard from agilest. On the other hand, those contracts are reality which many agile teams have to face. But what if we try to embrace and manage it instead of fighting against it? How can a company execute this kind of contract using agile practices to achieve better results with lower risk? This article will try to answer those questions.

Fixed Price, Time and Scope

Fixed price contracts freeze three project factors at once – money, time and scope – but this should not be a problem for agile teams. In fact, time boxing is common agile practice. Limiting money simply makes time boxing work better.

A real problem with fixed price contracts is the scope, which is fixed in terms of what should exactly be built instead of how much should we build.

Why are clients so obsessed with fixing the scope? We understand that they want to know how much they will pay (who does not want to know that) and when they will get the product. The only thing they don’t know, even if they will not always admit it, is what exactly they want as the final product.

The reason for fixing the scope has its roots in:

  • Lack of trust between the contractors.
  • Lack of understanding about how the agile software development methodology and processes work.
  • Misunderstanding what the scope means.

Every fixed price contract has a companion document, the “Requirements Specification” or something similar. Most of the time, working in an Agile way, the business requirements are relatively light weight criptic notes captured on stickies or story boards and not in comprehensive Business Requirement Documents (BRDs) pre-approved by business before developemnt commences. Documented requirements tries to reduce the risk of forgetting something important and tries to set a common understanding of what should be done to provide an illusion of predictability of what the business actually wants and needs in the final product.

Key wrong assumptions in fixing the scope are:

  • The more detail we include in the requirements and scope definition up front, the better we understand each other.
  • Well-defined scope will prevent changes.
  • A fixed scope is needed to better estimate price and time.

Converting the Fixed Scope into Fixed Budget

In understanding that the main conflict between application of an agile mindset and a fixed price contract lies in the fixed scope, we can now focus on converting the fixed scope into the fixed budget.

A well defined scope is done by capturing business requirements in as many user stories instead of providing a detailed specification of requirements. These stories are built into a product backlog. The effort required to deliver each story is estimated using one of many story point techniques, like planning poker.

It is key to understand that a higher level of detail in software requirements specifications, means two completely different things for both parties within a contract. Software companies (vendors / supplier), responsible for developing applications, will usually focus on technical details while the company using the software (buying party / customer) is more user focussed and business outcome oriented.

In compiling specifications four key aspects are in play:

  • User stories is a way of expressing requirements, understandable for both suppliers and customers. The understanding builds trust and a sense of common vision. User stories are quick to write and quick to destroy, especially written on an index card. They are also feature oriented, so they can provide a good view on the real scope of a project, and we can compare them with each other in terms of size or effort.
  • Acceptance Ctiteria, captured for each user story, are a formalised list of requirements that ensires a user story is completed with all scenarios taken into account – it specifies the conditions under which a story is fulfilled.
  • Story points as a way of estimating stories, are units of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort required to fully implement a user story or other pieces of work on the product backlog. The team will access the effort to deliver a story against the acceptance criteria and in relation to other stories. Various proven estimation techniques can be adopted by the team for example effort can be expressed as a T-shirt size (i.e. Large, Medium, Small). To quantify the effort, each T-shirt size can be assigned a number of story points i.e. Large = 15 storypoints, Medium 5 storypoints and Small = 2 story points. (See also the section on Estimation below). The intention of using story points, instead of man hours, is to lower the risk of underestimating the scope because, story points in their nature are relative and focused on the whole scope or on a group of stories, while traditional estimation (usually done in man-hours) tries to analyse each product feature in isolation.
  • Definition of done is another way of building trust and common understanding about the process and all the future plans for the project. It’s usually the first time clients see user stories and while they may like the way the stories are written, it may not be so obvious what it means to implement a story. Development teams who confirm with the client their definition of done, in conjunction with the acceptance criteria with, illustrate that they know better what the client’s expectations are.Development on a story will be completed when the defenition of done is achieved. This supports better estimation. In addition on the client side, the definition of done, in conjunction with the accpetance criteria, sets the criteria for user story acceptance.

Using the above four aspects, will provide the building blocks to define the scope budget in story points. This story point budget and not the stories behind it, is the first thing that should be fixed in the contract.

This sets the stage for change.

While we have the scope budget fixed (in terms of story points) we still want to embrace change, the agile way. As we are progressing with the project delivery, and especially during backlog refinement, we have the tools (user stories and points) which we can use to compare one requirement with another. This allows us to refine stories and change requirements along the way within a defined story point budget limit. And if we can stay within that limit, we can also stay within the fixed price and time.

Before Estimation

The hardest part in preparing a fixed price contract is to define the price and schedule that will be fixed based on, in most cases, not so well-defined requirements but preferably a well defined scope.

How can you prepare the project team (customer & supplier) to provide the best possible initial estimation?

Educate: Meet with your client and describe the way you’re going to work. We need to tell what the stories are all about, how we are going to estimate them and what is the definition of done. We might even need to do that earlier, when preparing an offer for the client’s Request For Proposal (RFP). Explain the agile delivery mothodology and you will use it to derive the proposal.

Capture user stories: This can be arranged as a time-boxed sessions, usually not taking no more than 1 or 2 days. This is long enough to find most of the stories forming the product vision without falling into feature creep. At this point it is also very important to discuss the definition of done, acceptance criteria for stories, iterations and releases with the client.

We need to know:

  • The environment in which stories should be tested (like the number of browsers or mobile platforms, or operating systems)
  • What kind of documentation is required
  • Where should finished stories be deployed so that the client can take a look at them
  • What should the client do (i.e. take part in a demo session)
  • How often do we meet and who participates
  • etc.

This and probably many more project specific factors will affect the estimation and will set a common understanding about the expectations and quality on both sides. They will also make the estimation less optimistic as it often happens when only the technical aspects of story implementation are considered by the team.

Estimation

Having discussed with the client a set of stories and a definition of done, we can now start the estimation. This is a quite well-known part of the process. The most important activity here is to engage as many future team members as possible so that the estimation is done collectively. Techniques like planning poker are known to lower the risk of underestimation because of some particular team member’s point of view, especially if this team member is also the most experienced-one, which is usually the case when estimations are done be one person. It is also important that the stories are estimated by the people who will actually implement the system.

Apart from T-shirt sizes to expressed effort estiamtion, as mentioned under Story Points above, the Fibonacci-like scale (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100) comes in handy for estimating stories in points. Relative estimation starts with finding a set of easiest or smallest stories. They will get 1 or 2 points as a base level for further estimation.

In fact during the initial estimation it is often hard to estimate stories using the lowest values like 1 or 2. The point is, the higher the estimation, the less we know about the story. This is also why estimating in points is easier at this early stage, because it is far easier to tell that a story A is 2x as complicated as story B than to tell that story A will take 25 man-hours to get it Done (remember the definition of done?) and the story B will take 54 hours.

This works well even if we choose 3 or 5 point stories as the base level and if we do that, then it will be easier to break them down into smaller stories later during the development phase. Beware however the stories of 20, 40 or 100 points. This kind of estimation suggests that we know nothing about what is to be implemented, so it should be discussed with the client here and now in a little more detail instead of just happily putting it in the contract.

The result of the estimation is a total number of story points describing the initial scope for a product to be built. This is the number that should be fixed in terms of scope for the contract, not the particular stories themselves.

Deriving the Price and Time

Total number of points estimated based on the initial set of stories does not give us the price and time directly. To translate story points into commercial monetory numbers we need to know more about the development team’s makeup described in the number of differently skilled resources within a team, and the team’s ability to delivery work which is expresessed in an agile KPI referred to as the Team Capacity and/or Velocity.

The team’s velocity refers to the pace, expressed in story points per development cycle or sprint, at which a team can deliver work. The team’s capacity is defined by the average number of story points the team can deliver within a development cycle or sprint. An increase in the velocity, as a result of increased efficiency and higher productivity, will over time increase the teams capacity. Understandably, changing the makeup of the team will impact the team’s velocity/capacity. The team’s capacity and velocity is established through experience on previous projects the team delivered. A mature agile team is characterised by a stable and predictable velocity/capacity.

Let’s use a simple example to demonstrate how the team makeup and velocity are used to determine the project cost and time.

Assume we have:

  • Estimated our stories for a total of 300 story points.
  • The team makeup consists of 5 resources – 3 developers, 1 tester and a team leader.
  • Agile Scrum will be team’s delivery methodology.
  • Experience has shown this teams capacity / velocity is 30 story points over development cycle or sprint length of 2 weeks.

Determine the predicted Timeline

Time = <Points> / <Velocity> * <Sprint length>

Thus…

Time = 300 / 30 * 2 = 20 weeks (or 10 sprints)

Many factors during the project may affect the velocity, however if the team we’re working with is not new, and the project we’re doing is not a great unknown for us, then this number might be actually given based on some evidence and observations of the past.

Now we may be facing one of the two constraints that the client could want to impose on us in the contract:

  • The client wants the software as fast as we can do it (and preferably even faster)
  • The client wants as much as we can do by the date X (which is our business deadline)

If the calculated time is not acceptable then the only factor we can change is the team’s velocity. To do that we need to change the teams makeup and extend the team, however this is not working in a linear way i.e. doubling the team size will nor necessarily double its velocity but it should increase the velocity as the team should be able to do more work within a development cycle.

Determine the predicted Price

Calculating the price is based on the makeup of the team and the assocaited resource/skill set rate card (cost per hour).

The teams cost per sprint is calculated by the % of time or number of hours each reasurce will spend on the project within a sprint.

For our eaxmple, let assume:

  • A Sprint duration of 2 weeks has 10 working days and working 8 hours per day = 80h per sprint.
  • Developer 1 will work 100% on the project at a rate of £100 per hour.
  • Developer 2 will work 50% of his time on the project at a rate of £80 per hour.
  • Developer 3 will also work 100% on the project at a rate of £110 per hour.
  • The Team Leader will work 100% on the project at a rate of £150 per hour.
  • The Tester will be 100% on the project at £80 per hour.

The team cost per sprint (cps) will thus be…

Resource cost per sprint (cps) = <hours of resource per sprint> * <resource rate per hour>

  • Developer 1 cps = 80h * £100 = £8,000
  • Developer 2 cps = 40h (50% of 80h) * £80 = £3,200
  • Developer 3 cps = 80h * £110 = £8,800
  • Team Leader cps = 80h * £150 = £12,000
  • Tester cps = 80h * £80 = £6,400

Total team cost per sprint = (sum of the above) = £38,400 per sprint

Project predicted Price = <Number of sprints (from Predicted Timeline calculation)> * <Team cost per sprint>

Project predicted Price = 10 sprint * £38,400 per sprint = £384,000

So the Fix Price Contract Values are:

  • Price: £576,000
  • Time: 20 weeks (10 x 2 week sprints)
  • Scope: 300 Story Points

These simplistic calculations are of course just a part of the cost that will eventually get into the contract, but they are also the part that usually is the hardest to define. The way in which these cost are calculated also shows how delivering agile projects can be transferred into the contract negotiations environment.

Negotiating on Price

“So why is it so expensive?”, most customers ask.

This is where negotiations actually start.

The only factor a software company is able to change is its man-hour cost rate. It is the rate card that we are negotiating. Not the length of our iteration, not even the number of iterations. Developers, beyond popular believe, has no superhero powers and will not start working twice as fast just because it is negotiated this way. If we say we can be cheaper it is because we will earn less not because we will work faster.

The other factor that can influence the price is controlled by the customer – the scope.

Tracking Progress and Budget

Now that we have our contract signed, it is time to actually build the software within the agreed constraints of time and budget.

Delivering your fixed price project in an agile way is not a magic wand that will make all your problems disappear but it if measured correctly it will give you early visisbility. That is where the project metrics and more specific the burndown graphs come in to play. Early visibility provides you with the luxury of early corrective action ensuuring small problems do not turn into large expesive one’s.

One such a small mistake might be the team velocity used when the project price was calculated. Burndown charts are a very common way of tracking progress in many agile projects. It shows the predicted/forecasted completion of work rate (velocity) against the actual velocity to determine if the project is on track.

Figure 1 – Planned scope burndown vs. real progress.

They are good to visualize planned progress versus the reality. For example the burndown chart from Figure 1 looks quite good:

We are a little above the planned trend but it does not mean that we made a huge mistake when determining our velocity during the contract negotiations. Probably many teams would like their own chart to look like this. But the problem is that this chart shows only two out of three contract factors – scope ( presented as a percentage of story points) and time (sprints). So what about money?

Figure 2 – Scope burndown vs budget burndown.

The chart on Figure 2 shows two burndowns – scope and budget. Those two trends are expressed here as percentages for the purpose. There is no other way to compare those two quantities calculated (one in story points and the other in man-hours or money spent).

To track the scope and budget this way we need to:

  • Track the story points completed (done) in each iteration.
  • Track the real time spent (in man-hours) in each iteration.
  • Recalculate the total points in your project into 100% of our scope and draw a burndown based on percentage of the total scope.
  • Recalculate the budget fixed in the contract (or its part) into a total available man-hours – this is our 100% of a budget – and draw a budget burndown based on percentage of the total budget usedto date.

The second chart does not look promising. We are spending more money to stay on track than we expected. This is probably because of using some extra resources to actually achieve the expected team’s velocity. So having all three factors on one chart makes problems visible and iteration (sprint) 4 in this example is where we start to talk with the client and agree on mitigating actions, before it is too late.

Embracing Change

Agile embraces change, and what we want to do is to streamline change management within the fixed price contract. This has always been the hard part and it still is, but with a little help through changing the focus from the requirements analysis into some boundary limits early in the process, we want to welcome change at any stage of the project.

Remember earlier in the process changed fixed scope into fixed budget. The 300 story points from the example allows us to exchange the contents of the initial user story list without changing the number of story points. This is one of the most important aspects that we want to achieve with a fixed price contract done the agile way.

The difficulty here is to convince the client that stories can be exchanged because they should be comparable in the terms of effort required to complete them. So if at any point client has a new great idea that we can express as some new set of stories (worth for example 20 points) then it is again up to the client if we are going to remove stories worth 20 points from the end of our initial backlog to make a place for the new ones.

Or maybe the client wants to add another iteration (remember the velocity of 20 points per iteration?). It is quite easy to calculate the price of introducing those new stories, as we have already calculated the cost of a sprint.

What still is the most difficult in this kind of contracts is when we find out during the project that some stories will take longer than expected because they were estimated as epics and now we know more about them than we did at the beginning. But still this might not always be the case, because at the same time some stories will actually take less. So again tracking during the contract execution will provide valuable information. Talking about the problems earlier helps negotiating as we can talk about actions that need to be taken to prevent them instead of talking about the rescue plans after the huge and irreversible disaster.

Earning Mutual Trust

All the techniques discussed, require one thing to be actually used succesfully with a fixed price contract and that is – trust. But as we know, trust is not earned by describing but by actually doing. Use the Agile principles to demonstrate the doing, to show the progress and point out the problems early.

With every iteration we want to build value for the client. But what is more important, we focus on delivering the most valuable features first. So, the best way to build the trust of a client might be to divide the contract.

Start small, with some pilot development of 2 or 3 iterations (which will also be fixed price, but shorter). The software delivered must bring an expected value to the client. In fact it must contain some working parts of the key functionalities. The working software proves that you can build the rest. It also gives you the opportunity to verify the first assumptions about the velocity and eventually renegotiate the next part.

The time spent on the pilot development, should also be relatively small when compared to the scope left to be done. This way if our clients are not satisfied with the results, they can go away before it is too late and they no longer need to continue the contract and eventually fail the project.

Summary

Fixed price contracts are often considered very harmful and many agile adopters say that we should simply avoid them. But most of the time and as long as customers request them, they cannot be avoided, so we need to find ways to make them work for the goal, which is building quality software that can demonstrably increase business value propositions and competitive advantage.

I believe that some aspects of a fixed rpice agile contract are even Good and healthy for agile teams, as it touches on the familiar while instilling commercial awareness. Development teams are used to working with delivery targets and business deadlines. That is exactly what the fixed date and price in the contract are – healthy time boxes and boundaries keeping us commercially aware and relevant.

Keep the focus on scope and you can still deliver your agile project within a fixed time and budget.

The intention of this article was not to suggest that agile is some ultimate remedy for solving the problem of fixed price contracts but to show that there are ways to work in this context the agile way.

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What makes a good Technical Specification Document

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Writing a technical spec increases the chances of having a successful project, service, or feature that all stakeholders involved are satisfied with. It decreases the chances of something going horribly wrong during implementation and even after you’ve launched your product. 

As a software engineer, your primary role is to solve technical problems. Your first impulse may be to immediately jump straight into writing code. But that can be a terrible idea if you haven’t thought through your solution. 

You can think through difficult technical problems by writing a technical spec. Writing one can be frustrating if you feel like you’re not a good writer. You may even think that it’s an unnecessary chore. But writing a technical spec increases the chances of having a successful project, service, or feature that all stakeholders involved are satisfied with. It decreases the chances of something going horribly wrong during implementation and even after you’ve launched your product. 

Developing software solutions using the Agile delivery methodology, your technical specification document is a living document that will be continuously updated as you progressing through the development sprints and the specifics solution designs and associate technical specifications aspects are being confirmed. Initially the tech spec will be describing he the solution at a high level, making sure all requirements are addressed within the solution. As requirements changes through the delivery life-cycle or as the technical solution evolves to working acceptance, the technical specifications are updated accordingly. Every agile story describing a functional piece, will cover requirements, acceptance criteria, solution architecture and technical specification. All the specs are included in the evolving technical specification. At the end of a development project the technical specifications are a good reference point for ongoing improvement development and support.

What is a technical specification document?

A technical specification document outlines how you’re going to address a technical problem by designing and building a solution for it. It’s sometimes also referred to as a technical design document, a software design document, or an engineering design document. It’s often written by the engineer who will build the solution or be the point person during implementation, but for larger projects, it can be written by technical leads, project leads, or senior engineers. These documents show the engineer’s team and other stakeholders what the design, work involved, impact, and timeline of a feature, project, program, or service will be. 

Why is writing a technical spec important?

Technical specs have immense benefits to everyone involved in a project: the engineers who write them, the teams that use them, even the projects that are designed off of them. Here are some reasons why you should write one. 

Benefits to engineers

By writing a technical spec, engineers are forced to examine a problem before going straight into code, where they may overlook some aspect of the solution. When you break down, organize, and time box all the work you’ll have to do during the implementation, you get a better view of the scope of the solution. Technical specs, because they are a thorough view of the proposed solution, they also serve as documentation for the project, both for the implementation phase and after, to communicate your accomplishments on the project. 

With this well-thought out solution, your technical spec saves you from repeatedly explaining your design to multiple teammates and stakeholders. But nobody’s perfect;  your peers and more seasoned engineers may show you new things from them about design, new technologies, engineering practices, alternative solutions, etc. that you may not have come across or thought of before. They may catch exceptional cases of the solution that you may have neglected, reducing your liability. The more eyes you have on your spec, the better. 

Benefits to a team

A technical spec is a straightforward and efficient way to communicate project design ideas between a team and other stakeholders. The whole team can  collaboratively solve a problem and create a solution. As more teammates and stakeholders contribute to a spec, it makes them more invested in the project and encourages them to take ownership and responsibility for it. With everyone on the same page, it limits complications that may arise from overlapping work. Newer teammates unfamiliar with the project can onboard themselves and contribute to the implementation earlier.  

Benefits to a project

Investing in a technical spec ultimately results in a superior product.  Since the team is aligned and in agreement on what needs to be done through the spec, big projects can progress faster. A spec is essential in managing complexity and preventing scope and feature creep by setting project limits. It sets priorities thereby making sure that only the most impactful and urgent parts of a project go out first. 

Post implementation, it helps resolve problems that cropped up within the project, as well as provide insight in retrospectives and postmortems. The best planned specs serve as a great guide for measuring success and return on investment of engineering time. 

What to do before writing a technical spec

Gather the existing information in the problem domain before getting started. Read over any product/feature requirements that the product team has produced, as well as technical requirements/standards associated with the project. With this knowledge of the problem history, try to state the problem in detail and brainstorm all kinds of solutions you may think might resolve it. Pick the most reasonable solution out of all the options you have come up with. 

Remember that you aren’t alone in this task. Ask an experienced engineer who’s knowledgeable on the problem to be your sounding board. Invite them to a meeting and explain the problem and the solution you picked. Lay out your ideas and thought process and try to persuade them that your solution is the most appropriate. Gather their feedback and ask them to be a reviewer for your technical spec.

Finally, it’s time to actually write the spec. Block off time in your calendar to write the first draft of the technical spec. Usea collaborative document editor that your whole team has access to. Get a technical spec template (see below) and write a rough draft. 

Contents of a technical spec

There are a wide range of problems being solved by a vast number of companies today. Each organization is distinct and creates its own unique engineering culture. As a result, technical specs may not be standard even within companies, divisions, teams, and even among engineers on the same team. Every solution has different needs and you should tailor your technical spec based on the project. You do not need to include all the sections mentioned below. Select the sections that work for your design and forego the rest.

From my experience, there are seven essential parts of a technical spec: front matter, introduction, solutions, further considerations, success evaluation, work, deliberation, and end matter. 

1. Cover Page

  • Title 
  • Author(s)
  • Team
  • Reviewer(s)
  • Created on
  • Last updated
  • Epic, ticket, issue, or task tracker reference link

2. Introduction

2.1 Overview, Problem Description, Summary, or Abstract

  • Summary of the problem (from the perspective of the user), the context, suggested solution, and the stakeholders. 

2.2 Glossary  or Terminology

  • New terms you come across as you research your design or terms you may suspect your readers/stakeholders not to know.  

2.3 Context or Background

  • Reasons why the problem is worth solving
  • Origin of the problem
  • How the problem affects users and company goals
  • Past efforts made to solve the solution and why they were not effective
  • How the product relates to team goals, OKRs
  • How the solution fits into the overall product roadmap and strategy
  • How the solution fits into the technical strategy

2.4 Goals or Product and Technical Requirements

  • Product requirements in the form of user stories 
  • Technical requirements

 2.5 Non-Goals or Out of Scope

  • Product and technical requirements that will be disregarded

2.6 Future Goals

  • Product and technical requirements slated for a future time

2.7 Assumptions

  • Conditions and resources that need to be present and accessible for the solution to work as described. 

3. Solutions

3.1 Current or Existing Solution Design

  • Current solution description
  • Pros and cons of the current solution

3.2 Suggested or Proposed Solution Design 

  • External components that the solution will interact with and that it will alter
  • Dependencies of the current solution
  • Pros and cons of the proposed  solution 
  • Data Model or Schema Changes
    • Schema definitions
    • New data models
    • Modified data models
    • Data validation methods
  • Business Logic
    • API changes
    • Pseudocode
    • Flowcharts
    • Error states
    • Failure scenarios
    • Conditions that lead to errors and failures
    • Limitations
  • Presentation Layer
    • User requirements
    • UX changes
    • UI changes
    • Wireframes with descriptions
    • Links to UI/UX designer’s work
    • Mobile concerns
    • Web concerns
    • UI states
    • Error handling
  • Other questions to answer
    • How will the solution scale?
    • What are the limitations of the solution?
    • How will it recover in the event of a failure?
    • How will it cope with future requirements?

3.3 Test Plan

  • Explanations of how the tests will make sure user requirements are met
  • Unit tests
  • Integrations tests
  • QA

3.4 Monitoring and Alerting Plan 

  • Logging plan and tools
  • Monitoring plan and tools
  • Metrics to be used to measure health
  • How to ensure observability
  • Alerting plan and tools

3.5 Release / Roll-out and Deployment Plan

  • Deployment architecture 
  • Deployment environments
  • Phased roll-out plan e.g. using feature flags
  • Plan outlining how to communicate changes to the users, for example, with release notes

3.6 Rollback Plan

  • Detailed and specific liabilities 
  • Plan to reduce liabilities
  • Plan describing how to prevent other components, services, and systems from being affected

3.7 Alternate Solutions / Designs

  • Short summary statement for each alternative solution
  • Pros and cons for each alternative
  • Reasons why each solution couldn’t work 
  • Ways in which alternatives were inferior to the proposed solution
  • Migration plan to next best alternative in case the proposed solution falls through

4. Further Considerations

4.1 Impact on other teams

  • How will this increase the work of other people?

4.2 Third-party services and platforms considerations

  • Is it really worth it compared to building the service in-house?
  • What are some of the security and privacy concerns associated with the services/platforms?
  • How much will it cost?
  • How will it scale?
  • What possible future issues are anticipated? 

4.3 Cost analysis

  • What is the cost to run the solution per day?
  • What does it cost to roll it out? 

4.4 Security considerations

  • What are the potential threats?
  • How will they be mitigated?
  • How will the solution affect the security of other components, services, and systems?

4.5 Privacy considerations

  • Does the solution follow local laws and legal policies on data privacy?
  • How does the solution protect users’ data privacy?
  • What are some of the tradeoffs between personalization and privacy in the solution? 

4.6 Regional considerations

  • What is the impact of internationalization and localization on the solution?
  • What are the latency issues?
  • What are the legal concerns?
  • What is the state of service availability?
  • How will data transfer across regions be achieved and what are the concerns here? 

4.7 Accessibility considerations

  • How accessible is the solution?
  • What tools will you use to evaluate its accessibility? 

4.8 Operational considerations

  • Does this solution cause adverse aftereffects?
  • How will data be recovered in case of failure?
  • How will the solution recover in case of a failure?
  • How will operational costs be kept low while delivering increased value to the users? 

4.9 Risks

  • What risks are being undertaken with this solution?
  • Are there risks that once taken can’t be walked back?
  • What is the cost-benefit analysis of taking these risks? 

4.10 Support considerations

  • How will the support team get across information to users about common issues they may face while interacting with the changes?
  • How will we ensure that the users are satisfied with the solution and can interact with it with minimal support?
  • Who is responsible for the maintenance of the solution?
  • How will knowledge transfer be accomplished if the project owner is unavailable? 

5. Success Factors

5.1 Impact

  • Security impact
  • Performance impact
  • Cost impact
  • Impact on other components and services

5.2 Metrics

  • How will you measure success?
  • List of metrics to capture
  • Tools to capture and measure metrics

6. Work Execution

6.1 Work estimates and timelines

  • List of specific, measurable, and time-bound tasks
  • Resources needed to finish each task
  • Time estimates for how long each task needs to be completed

6.2 Prioritization

  • Categorization of tasks by urgency and impact

6.3 Milestones

  • Dated checkpoints when significant chunks of work will have been completed
  • Metrics to indicate the passing of the milestone

6.4 Future work

  • List of tasks that will be completed in the future

7. Deliberation

7.1 Points under Discussion or Dispute

  • Elements of the solution that members of the team do not agree on and need to be debated further to reach a consensus.

b. Open Questions and Issues

  • Questions about matters and issues you do not know the answers to or are unsure that you pose to the team and stakeholders for their input. These may include aspects of the problem you don’t know how to resolve yet. 

8. Relating Matters, References & Acknowledgements

8.1 Related Work

  • Any work external to the proposed solution that is similar to it in some way and is worked on by different teams. It’s important to know this to enable knowledge sharing between such teams when faced with related problems. 

8.2 References

  • Links to documents and resources that you used when coming up with your design and wish to credit. 

8.3 Acknowledgments

  • Credit people who have contributed to the design that you wish to recognize.

After you’ve written your technical spec

Now that you have a spec written, it’s time to refine it. Go through your draft as if you were an independent reviewer. Ask yourself what parts of the design are unclear and you are uncertain about. Modify your draft to include these issues. Review the draft a second time as if you were tasked to implement the design just based on the technical spec alone. Make sure the spec is a clear enough implementation guideline that the team can work on if you are unavailable. If you have doubts about the solution and would like to test it out just to make sure it works, create a simple prototype to prove your concept. 

When you’ve thoroughly reviewed it, send the draft out to your team and the stakeholders. Address all comments, questions, and suggestions as soon as possible. Set deadlines to do this for every issue. Schedule meetings to talk through issues that the team is divided on or is having unusually lengthy discussions about on the document. If the team fails to agree on an issue even after having in-person meetings to hash them out, make the final call on it as the buck stops with you. Request engineers on different teams to review your spec so you can get an outsider’s perspective which will enhance how it comes across to stakeholders not part of the team. Update the document with any changes in the design, schedule, work estimates, scope, etc. even during implementation.

Conclusion

Writing test specs can be an impactful way to guarantee that your project will be successful. A little planning and a little forethought can make the actual implementation of a project a whole lot easier.  

Solution Design & Architecture (SD&A) – Consider this…

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When it comes to the design and architecture of enterprise level software solutions, what comes to mind?

What is Solution Design & Architecture:

Solution, Design and Architecture (SD&A) is an in-depth IT scoping and review process that bridges the gap between your current IT environments, technologies, and the customer and business needs in order to deliver maximum return-on-investment. A proper design and architecture document also documents the approach, methodology and required steps to delivery the solution.

SD&A are actually two distinct disciplines. Solution Architect’s, with a balanced mixed of technical and business skills, write up the technical design of an environment and work out how to achieve a solution from a technical perspective. Solution Designers put the solution together and price it up based from assistance from the architect.

A solutions architect needs significant people and process skills. They are often in front of management, trying to explain a complex problem in laymen’s terms. They have to find ways to say the same thing using different words for different types of audiences, and they also need to really understand the business’ processes in order to create a cohesive vision of a usable product.

Solution Architect focuses on: 

  • market opportunity
  • technology and requirements
  • business goals
  • budget
  • project timeline
  • resourcing
  • ROI
  • how technology can be used to solve a given business problem 
  • which framework, platform, or tech-stack can be used to create a solution 
  • how the application will look, what the modules will be, and how they interact with each other 
  • how things will scale for the future and how they will be maintained 
  • figuring out the risk in third-party frameworks/platforms 
  • finding a solution to a business problem

Here are some of the main responsibilities of a solutions architect:

Ultimately, the Solution Architect is responsible for the vision that underlies the solution and the execution of that vision into the solution.

  • Creates and leads the process of integrating IT systems for them to meet an organization’s requirements.
  • Conducts a system architecture evaluation and collaborates with project management and IT development teams to improve the architecture.
  • Evaluates project constraints to find alternatives, alleviate risks, and perform process re-engineering if required.
  • Updates stakeholders on the status of product development processes and budgets.
  • Notifies stakeholders about any issues connected to the architecture.
  • Fixes technical issues as they arise.
  • Analyses the business impact that certain technical choices may have on a client’s business processes.
  • Supervises and guides development teams.
  • Continuously researches emerging technologies and proposes changes to the existing architecture.

Solution Architecture Document:

The Solution Architecture provides an architectural description of a software solution and application. It describes the systems and it’s features based on the technical aspects, business goals, and integration points. It is intended to address a solution to the business needs and provides the foundation/map of the solution requirements driving the software build scope.

High level Benefits of Solution Architecture:

  • Builds a comprehensive delivery approach
  • Stakeholder alignment
  • Ensures a longer solution lifespan with the market
  • Ensures business ROI
  • Optimises the delivery scope and associated effectiveness
  • Easier and more organised implementation
  • Provides a good understanding of the overall development environment
  • Problems and associated solutions can be foreseen

Some aspects to consider:

When doing an enterprise level solution architecture, build and deployment, a few key aspects come to mind that should be build into the solution by design and not as an after thought…

  • Solution Architecture should a continuous part of the overall innovation delivery methodology – Solution Architecture is not a once-off exercise but is imbedded in the revolving SDLC. Cyclically evolve and deliver the solution with agility that can quickly adapt to business change with solution architecture forming the foundation (map and sanity check) before the next evolution cycle. Combine the best of several delivery methodologies to ensure optimum results in bringing the best innovation to revenue channels in the shortest possible timeframe. Read more on this subject here.
  • People – Ensure the right people with the appropriate knowledge, skills and abilities within the delivery team. Do not forget that people (users and customers) will use the system – not technologists.
  • Risk – as the solution architecture evolves, it will introduce technology and business risks that must be added to the project risk register and addressed to mitigation in accordance with the business risk appetite.
  • Choose the right software development tech stack that is well established and easily supported while scalable and powerful enough to deliver a feature rich solution that can be integrated into complex operational estates. Most tech-stacks has Solution Frameworks that outline key design options and decision when doing solution architecture. Choosing the right tech-stack is one of the most fundamental ways to future-proof the technology solution. You can read more on choosing the right tech stack here.
  • Modular approach – using a service oriented architecture (SOA) model to ensure the solution can be functionally scaled, up and down to align with feature required, by using independently functioning modules of macro and micro-services. Each service must be clearly defined with input, process, output parameters that aligns with the integration standard established for the platform. This SOA also assist in overall information security enhancements and fault finding in case something goes wrong. It also makes the developed platform more agile to adapt to continuous business environment and market changes with less overall impact and system changes.
  • Customer data at the heart of a solution – Be clear on Master vs Slave customer and data records and ensure the needed integration between master and slave data within inter-connecting systems and platforms, with the needed security applied to ensure privacy and data integrity. Establish a Single Customer and Data Views (single version of the truth) from the design off-set. Ensure personal identifiable data is handled within the solution according to the regulations as outlined in the Data Protection Act and recently introduced GDPR and data anonymisation and retention policy guidelines.
  • Platform Hosting & Infrastructure – What is the intended hosting framework, will it by private or public cloud, running in AWS or Azure – all important decisions that can drastically impact the solution architecture.
  • Scalability – who is the intended audience for the different modules and associated macro services within the solution – how many consecutive users, transactions, customer sessions, reports, dashboards, data imports & processing, data transfers, etc…? As required, ensure the solution architecture accommodate the capability for the system to monitor usage and automatically scale horizontally (more processing/data (hardware) nodes running in parallel without dropping user sessions) and vertically (adding more power to a hardware node).
  • Information and Cyber Security – A tiered architecture ensure physical differentiation between user and customer facing interfaces, system logic and processing algorithms and the storage components of a solution. Various security precautions, guidelines and best practices should be imbedded within the software development by design. This should be articulated within the solution architecture, infrastructure and service software code. Penetration Testing and the associated platform hardening requirements should feed back into the solution architecture enhancement as required.
  • Identity Management – Single Sign On (SSO) user management and application roles to assign access to different modules, features and functionality to user groups and individuals.
  • Integration – data exchange, multi-channel user interface, compute and storage components of the platform, how the different components inter-connects through secure connection with each other, other applications and systems (API and gateway) within the business operations estate and to external systems.
  • Customer Centric & Business Readiness – from a customer and end-user perspective what’s needed to ensure easy adoption (familiarity) and business ramp-up to establish a competent level of efficiency before the solution is deployed and go-live. UX, UI, UAT, Automated Regression Testing, Training Material, FAQs, Communication, etc…
  • Enterprise deployment – Involvement of all IT and business disciplines i.e. Business readiness (covered above), Network, Compute, Cyber Security, DevOps. Make sure non-functional Dev-Ops related requirements are covered in the same manner as
  • Application Support – Involve the support team during product build to ensure they have input and understanding of the solution to provide SLA driven support at to business and IT operations when the solution goes live. 
  • Business Continuity – what is required from an IT infrastructure and platform/solution capability perspective to ensure the system is always available (online) to enable continuous business operations?

Speak to Renier about your solution architecture requirements. With more than 20 years of enterprise technology product development experience, we can support your team toward delivery excellence.

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Different Software Testing – Explained

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Testing of software and application is an integral part of the software development and deployment lifecycle. But with so many different types of tests to choose from when compiling your test approach, which are best suited for your requirements?

In this post 45 different tests are explained.

Software Application Testing are conducted within two domains: Functional and Non-Functional Testing.

Functional testing is a software testing process used within softwaredevelopment in which software is tested to ensure that it conforms with all requirements. Functional testing is a way of checking software to ensure that it has all the required functionality that’s specified within its functional requirements.

Functional testing types include:

  • Unit testing
  • Integration testing
  • System testing
  • Sanity testing
  • Smoke testing
  • Interface testing
  • Regression testing
  • Beta/Acceptance testing

Non-functional testing is defined as a type of Software testing to check non-functional aspects (performance, usability, reliability, etc) of a software application. It is designed to test the readiness of a system as per nonfunctional parameters which are never addressed by functional testing.

Non-functional testing types include:

  • Performance Testing
  • Load testing
  • Stress testing
  • Volume testing
  • Security testing
  • Compatibility testing
  • Install testing
  • Recovery testing
  • Reliability testing
  • Usability testing
  • Compliance testing
  • Localization testing

45 Different types of testing – explained

  1. Alpha Testing

It is the most common type of testing used in the Software industry. The objective of this testing is to identify all possible issues or defects before releasing it into the market or to the user. Alpha testing is carried out at the end of the software development phase but before the Beta Testing. Still, minor design changes may be made as a result of such testing. Alpha testing is conducted at the developer’s site. In-house virtual user environment can be created for this type of testing.

  1. Acceptance Testing

An acceptance test is performed by the client and verifies whether the end to end the flow of the system is as per the business requirements or not and if it is as per the needs of the end user. Client accepts the software only when all the features and functionalities work as expected. It is the last phase of the testing, after which the software goes into production. This is also called as User Acceptance Testing (UAT).

  1. Ad-hoc Testing

The name itself suggests that this testing is performed on an ad-hoc basis i.e. with no reference to test case and also without any plan or documentation in place for such type of testing. The objective of this testing is to find the defects and break the application by executing any flow of the application or any random functionality.

Ad-hoc testing is an informal way of finding defects and can be performed by anyone in the project. It is difficult to identify defects without a test case but sometimes it is possible that defects found during ad-hoc testing might not have been identified using existing test cases.

  1. Accessibility Testing

The aim of accessibility testing is to determine whether the software or application is accessible for disabled people or not. Here disability means deaf, color blind, mentally disabled, blind, old age and other disabled groups. Various checks are performed such as font size for visually disabled, color and contrast for color blindness etc.

  1. Beta Testing

Beta Testing is a formal type of software testing which is carried out by the customer. It is performed in Real Environment before releasing the product to the market for the actual end users. Beta testing is carried out to ensure that there are no major failures in the software or product and it satisfies the business requirements from an end-user perspective. Beta testing is successful when the customer accepts the software.

Usually, this testing is typically done by end-users or others. It is the final testing done before releasing an application for commercial purpose. Usually, the Beta version of the software or product released is limited to a certain number of users in a specific area. So end user actually uses the software and shares the feedback to the company. Company then takes necessary action before releasing the software to the worldwide.

  1. Back-end Testing

Whenever an input or data is entered on front-end application, it stores in the database and the testing of such database is known as Database Testing or Backend testing. There are different databases like SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle etc. Database testing involves testing of table structure, schema, stored procedure, data structure and so on.

In back-end testing GUI is not involved, testers are directly connected to the database with proper access and testers can easily verify data by running a few queries on the database. There can be issues identified like data loss, deadlock, data corruption etc during this back-end testing and these issues are critical to fixing before the system goes live into the production environment

  1. Browser Compatibility Testing

It is a subtype of Compatibility Testing (which is explained below) and is performed by the testing team.

Browser Compatibility Testing is performed for web applications and it ensures that the software can run with the combination of different browser and operating system. This type of testing also validates whether web application runs on all versions of all browsers or not.

  1. Backward Compatibility Testing

It is a type of testing which validates whether the newly developed software or updated software works well with older version of the environment or not.

Backward Compatibility Testing checks whether the new version of the software works properly with file format created by older version of the software; it also works well with data tables, data files, data structure created by older version of that software. If any of the software is updated then it should work well on top of the previous version of that software.

  1. Black Box Testing

Internal system design is not considered in this type of testing. Tests are based on the requirements and functionality.

Detailed information about the advantages, disadvantages, and types of Black box testing can be seen here.

  1. Boundary Value Testing

This type of testing checks the behavior of the application at the boundary level.

Boundary value Testing is performed for checking if defects exist at boundary values. Boundary value testing is used for testing a different range of numbers. There is an upper and lower boundary for each range and testing is performed on these boundary values.

If testing requires a test range of numbers from 1 to 500 then Boundary Value Testing is performed on values at 0, 1, 2, 499, 500 and 501.

  1. Branch Testing

It is a type of white box testing and is carried out during unit testing. Branch Testing, the name itself suggests that the code is tested thoroughly by traversing at every branch.

  1. Comparison Testing

Comparison of a product’s strength and weaknesses with its previous versions or other similar products is termed as Comparison Testing.

  1. Compatibility Testing

It is a testing type in which it validates how software behaves and runs in a different environment, web servers, hardware, and network environment. Compatibility testing ensures that software can run on a different configuration, different database, different browsers and their versions. Compatibility testing is performed by the testing team.

  1. Component Testing

It is mostly performed by developers after the completion of unit testing. Component Testing involves testing of multiple functionalities as a single code and its objective is to identify if any defect exists after connecting those multiple functionalities with each other.

  1. End-to-End Testing

Similar to system testing, End-to-end testing involves testing of a complete application environment in a situation that mimics real-world use, such as interacting with a database, using network communications, or interacting with other hardware, applications, or systems if appropriate.

  1. Equivalence Partitioning

It is a testing technique and a type of Black Box Testing. During this equivalence partitioning, a set of group is selected and a few values or numbers are picked up for testing. It is understood that all values from that group generate the same output. The aim of this testing is to remove redundant test cases within a specific group which generates the same output but not any defect.

Suppose, application accepts values between -10 to +10 so using equivalence partitioning the values picked up for testing are zero, one positive value, one negative value. So the Equivalence Partitioning for this testing is: -10 to -1, 0, and 1 to 10.

  1. Example Testing

It means real-time testing. Example testing includes the real-time scenario, it also involves the scenarios based on the experience of the testers.

  1. Exploratory Testing

Exploratory Testing is an informal testing performed by the testing team. The objective of this testing is to explore the application and looking for defects that exist in the application. Sometimes it may happen that during this testing major defect discovered can even cause system failure.

During exploratory testing, it is advisable to keep a track of what flow you have tested and what activity you did before the start of the specific flow.

An exploratory testing technique is performed without documentation and test cases.

  1. Functional Testing

This type of testing ignores the internal parts and focuses only on the output to check if it is as per the requirement or not. It is a Black-box type testing geared to the functional requirements of an application. For detailed information about Functional Testing click here.

  1. Graphical User Interface (GUI) Testing

The objective of this GUI testing is to validate the GUI as per the business requirement. The expected GUI of the application is mentioned in the Detailed Design Document and GUI mockup screens.

The GUI testing includes the size of the buttons and input field present on the screen, alignment of all text, tables and content in the tables.

It also validates the menu of the application, after selecting different menu and menu items, it validates that the page does not fluctuate and the alignment remains same after hovering the mouse on the menu or sub-menu.

  1. Gorilla Testing

Gorilla Testing is a testing type performed by a tester and sometimes by developer the as well. In Gorilla Testing, one module or the functionality in the module is tested thoroughly and heavily. The objective of this testing is to check the robustness of the application.

  1. Happy Path Testing

The objective of Happy Path Testing is to test an application successfully on a positive flow. It does not look for negative or error conditions. The focus is only on the valid and positive inputs through which application generates the expected output.

  1. Incremental Integration Testing

Incremental Integration Testing is a Bottom-up approach for testing i.e continuous testing of an application when a new functionality is added. Application functionality and modules should be independent enough to test separately. This is done by programmers or by testers.

  1. Install/Uninstall Testing

Installation and uninstallation testing is done on full, partial, or upgrade install/uninstall processes on different operating systems under different hardware or software environment.

  1. Integration Testing

Testing of all integrated modules to verify the combined functionality after integration is termed as Integration Testing. Modules are typically code modules, individual applications, client and server applications on a network, etc. This type of testing is especially relevant to client/server and distributed systems.

  1. Load Testing

It is a type of non-functional testing and the objective of Load testing is to check how much of load or maximum workload a system can handle without any performance degradation.

Load testing helps to find the maximum capacity of the system under specific load and any issues that cause the software performance degradation. Load testing is performed using tools like JMeter, LoadRunner, WebLoad, Silk performer etc.

  1. Monkey Testing

Monkey testing is carried out by a tester assuming that if the monkey uses the application then how random input, values will be entered by the Monkey without any knowledge or understanding of the application. The objective of Monkey Testing is to check if an application or system gets crashed by providing random input values/data. Monkey Testing is performed randomly and no test cases are scripted and it is not necessary to

Monkey Testing is performed randomly and no test cases are scripted and it is not necessary to be aware of the full functionality of the system.

  1. Mutation Testing

Mutation Testing is a type of white box testing in which the source code of one of the program is changed and verifies whether the existing test cases can identify these defects in the system. The change in the program source code is very minimal so that it does not impact the entire application, only the specific area having the impact and the related test cases should able to identify those errors in the system.

  1. Negative Testing

Testers having the mindset of “attitude to break” and using negative testing they validate that if system or application breaks. A negative testing technique is performed using incorrect data, invalid data or input. It validates that if the system throws an error of invalid input and behaves as expected.

  1. Non-Functional Testing

It is a type of testing for which every organization having a separate team which usually called as Non-Functional Test (NFT) team or Performance team.

Non-functional testing involves testing of non-functional requirements such as Load Testing, Stress Testing, Security, Volume, Recovery Testing etc. The objective of NFT testing is to ensure whether the response time of software or application is quick enough as per the business requirement.

It should not take much time to load any page or system and should sustain during peak load.

  1. Performance Testing

This term is often used interchangeably with ‘stress’ and ‘load’ testing. Performance Testing is done to check whether the system meets the performance requirements. Different performance and load tools are used to do this testing.

  1. Recovery Testing

It is a type of testing which validates that how well the application or system recovers from crashes or disasters.

Recovery testing determines if the system is able to continue the operation after a disaster. Assume that application is receiving data through the network cable and suddenly that network cable has been unplugged. Sometime later, plug the network cable; then the system should start receiving data from where it lost the connection due to network cable unplugged.

  1. Regression Testing

Testing an application as a whole for the modification in any module or functionality is termed as Regression Testing. It is difficult to cover all the system in Regression Testing, so typically automation testing tools are used for these types of testing.

  1. Risk-Based Testing (RBT)

In Risk Based Testing, the functionalities or requirements are tested based on their priority. Risk-based testing includes testing of highly critical functionality, which has the highest impact on business and in which the probability of failure is very high. The priority decision is based on the business need, so once priority is set for all functionalities then high priority functionality or test cases are executed first followed by medium and then low priority functionalities.

The low priority functionality may be tested or not tested based on the available time. The Risk-based testing is carried out if there is insufficient time available to test entire software and software needs to be implemented on time without any delay. This approach is followed only by the discussion and approval of the client and senior management of the organization.

  1. Sanity Testing

Sanity Testing is done to determine if a new software version is performing well enough to accept it for a major testing effort or not. If an application is crashing for the initial use then the system is not stable enough for further testing. Hence a build or an application is assigned to fix it.

  1. Security Testing

It is a type of testing performed by a special team of testers. A system can be penetrated by any hacking way.

Security Testing is done to check how the software or application or website is secure from internal and external threats. This testing includes how much software is secure from the malicious program, viruses and how secure and strong the authorization and authentication processes are.

It also checks how software behaves for any hackers attack and malicious programs and how software is maintained for data security after such a hacker attack.

  1. Smoke Testing

Whenever a new build is provided by the development team then the software testing team validates the build and ensures that no major issue exists. The testing team ensures that build is stable and a detailed level of testing is carried out further. Smoke Testing checks that no show stopper defect exists in the build which will prevent the testing team to test the application in detail.

If testers find that the major critical functionality is broken down at the initial stage itself then testing team can reject the build and inform accordingly to the development team. Smoke Testing is carried out to a detailed level of any functional or regression testing.

  1. Static Testing

Static Testing is a type of testing which is executed without any code. The execution is performed on the documentation during the testing phase. It involves reviews, walkthrough, and inspection of the deliverables of the project. Static testing does not execute the code instead of the code syntax, naming conventions are checked.

The static testing is also applicable for test cases, test plan, design document. It is necessary to perform static testing by the testing team as the defects identified during this type of testing are cost-effective from the project perspective.

  1. Stress Testing

This testing is done when a system is stressed beyond its specifications in order to check how and when it fails. This is performed under heavy load like putting large number beyond storage capacity, complex database queries, continuous input to the system or database load.

  1. System Testing

Under System Testing technique, the entire system is tested as per the requirements. It is a Black-box type testing that is based on overall requirement specifications and covers all the combined parts of a system.

  1. Unit Testing

Testing an individual software component or module is termed as Unit Testing. It is typically done by the programmer and not by testers, as it requires a detailed knowledge of the internal program design and code. It may also require developing test driver modules or test harnesses.

  1. Usability Testing

Under Usability Testing, User-friendliness check is done. Application flow is tested to know if a new user can understand the application easily or not, Proper help documented if a user gets stuck at any point. Basically, system navigation is checked in this testing.

  1. Vulnerability Testing

The testing which involves identifying of weakness in the software, hardware and the network is known as Vulnerability Testing. Malicious programs, the hacker can take control of the system, if it is vulnerable to such kind of attacks, viruses, and worms.

So it is necessary to check if those systems undergo Vulnerability Testing before production. It may identify critical defects, flaws in the security.

  1. Volume Testing

Volume testing is a type of non-functional testing performed by the performance testing team.

The software or application undergoes a huge amount of data and Volume Testing checks the system behavior and response time of the application when the system came across such a high volume of data. This high volume of data may impact the system’s performance and speed of the processing time.

  1. White Box Testing

White Box testing is based on the knowledge about the internal logic of an application’s code.

It is also known as Glass box Testing. Internal software and code working should be known for performing this type of testing. Under this tests are based on the coverage of code statements, branches, paths, conditions etc.

Release Management as a Competitive Advantage

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“Delivery focussed”, “Getting the job done”, “Results driven”, “The proof is in the pudding” – we are all familiar with these phrases and in Information Technology it means getting the solutions into operations through effective Release Management, quickly.

In the increasingly competitive market, where digital is enabling rapid change, time to market is king. Translated into IT terms – you must get your solution into production before the competition does, through an effective ability to do frequent releases. Doing frequent releases benefit teams as features can be validated earlier and bugs detected and resolved rapidly. The smaller iteration cycles provide flexibility, making adjustments to unforeseen scope changes easier and reducing the overall risk of change while rapidly enhancing stability and reliability in the production environment.

IT teams with well governed agile and robust release management practices have a significant competitive advantage. This advantage materialises through self-managed teams consisting of highly skilled technologist who collaborative work according to a team defined release management process enabled by continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD), that continuously improves through constructive feedback loops and corrective actions.

The process of implementing such agile practices, can be challenging as building software becomes increasingly more complex due to factors such as technical debt, increasing legacy code, resource movements, globally distributed development teams, and the increasing number of platforms to be supported.

To realise this advantage, an organisation must first optimise its release management process and identify the most appropriate platform and release management tools.

Here are three well known trends that every technology team can use to optimise delivery:

1. Agile delivery practises – with automation at the core 

So, you have adopted an agile delivery methodology and you’re having daily scrum meetings – but you know that is not enough. Sprint planning as well as review and retrospection are all essential elements for a successful release, but in order to gain substantial and meaningful deliverables within the time constraints of agile iterations, you need to invest in automation.

An automation ability brings measurable benefits to the delivery team as it reduces the pressure on people in minimising human error and increasing overall productivity and delivery quality into your production environment that shows in key metrics like team velocity. Another benefit automation introduces is consistent and repeatable process, enabling easily scalable teams while reducing errors and release times. Agile delivery practices (see “Executive Summary of 4 commonly used Agile Methodologies“) all embrace and promote the use of automation across the delivery lifecycle, especially in build, test and deployment automation. Proper automation support delivery teams in reducing overhead of time-consuming repetitive tasks in configuration and testing so them can focus on the core of customer centric product/service development with quality build in. Also read “How to Innovate to stay Relevant“; “Agile Software Development – What Business Executives need to know” for further insight in Agile methodologies…

Example:

Code Repository (version Control) –> Automated Integration –> Automated Deployment of changes to Test Environments –> Platform & Environment Changes automated build into Testbed –> Automated Build Acceptance Tests –> Automated Release

When a software developer commits changes to the version control, these changes automatically get integrated with the rest of the modules. Integrated assembles are then automatically deployed to a test environment – changes to the platform or the environment, gets automatically built and deployed on the test bed. Next, build acceptance tests are automatically kicked off, which would include capacity tests, performance, and reliability tests. Developers and/or leads are notified only when something fails. Therefore, the focus remains on core development and not just on other overhead activities. Of course, there will be some manual check points that the release management team will have to pass in order to trigger next the phase, but each activity within this deployment pipeline can be more or less automated. As your software passes all quality checkpoints, product version releases are automatically pushed to the release repository from which new versions can be pulled automatically by systems or downloaded by customers.

Example Technologies:

  • Build Automation:  Ant, Maven, Make
  • Continuous Integration: Jenkins, Cruise Control, Bamboo
  • Test Automation: Silk Test, EggPlant, Test Complete, Coded UI, Selenium, Postman
  • Continuous Deployment: Jenkins, Bamboo, Prism, Microsoft DevOps

2. Cloud platforms and Virtualisation as development and test environments

Today, most software products are built to support multiple platforms, be it operating systems, application servers, databases, or Internet browsers. Software development teams need to test their products in all of these environments in-house prior to releasing them to the market.

This presents the challenge of creating all of these environments as well as maintaining them. These challenges increase in complexity as development and test teams become more geographically distributed. In these circumstances, the use of cloud platforms and virtualisation helps, especially as these platforms have recently been widely adopted in all industries.

Automation on cloud and virtualised platforms enables delivery teams to rapidly spin up/down environments optimising infrastructure utilisation aligned with demand while, similar to maintaining code and configuration version history for our products, also maintain the version history of all supported platforms. Automated cloud platforms and virtualisation introduces flexibility that optimises infrastructure utilisation and the delivery footprint as demand changes – bringing savings across the overall delivery life-cycle.

Example:

When a build and release engineer changes configurations for the target platform – the operating system, database, or application server settings – the whole platform can be built and a snapshot of it created and deployed to the relevant target platforms.

Virtualisation: The virtual machine (VM) is automatically provisioned from the snapshot of base operating system VM, appropriate configurations are deployed and the rest of the platform and application components are automatically deployed.

Cloud: Using a solution provider like Azure or AWS to deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), new configurations can be introduced in a new environment instance, instantiated, and configured as an environment for development, testing, staging or production hosting. This is crucial for flexibility and productivity, as it takes minutes instead of weeks to adapt to configuration changes. With automation, the process becomes repeatable, quick, and streamlines communication across different teams within the Tech-hub.

3. Distributed version control systems

Distributed version control systems (DVCS), for example GIT, Perforce or Mercurial, introduces flexibility for teams to collaborate at the code level. The fundamental design principle behind DVCS is that each user keeps a self-contained repository with complete version history on one’s local computer. There is no need for a privileged master repository, although most teams designate one as a best practice. DVCS allow developers to work offline and commit changes locally.

As developers complete their changes for an assigned story or feature set, they push their changes to the central repository as a release candidate. DVCS offers a fundamentally new way to collaborate, as  developers can commit their changes frequently without disrupting the main codebase or trunk. This becomes useful when teams are exploring new ideas or experimenting as well as enabling rapid team scalability with reduced disruption.

DVCS is a powerful enabler for the team that utilise an agile-feature-based branching strategy. This encourages development teams to continue to work on their features (branches) as they get ready, having fully tested their changes locally, to load them into next release cycle. In this scenario, developers are able to work on and merge their feature branches to a local copy of the repository.After standard reviews and quality checks will the changes then be merged into the main repository.

To conclude

Adopting these three major trends in the delivery life-cycle enables a organisation to imbed proper release management as a strategic competitive advantage. Implementing these best practices will obviously require strategic planning and an investment of time in the early phases of your project or team maturity journey – this will reduce the organisational and change management efforts to get to market quicker.

Executive Summary of 4 commonly used Agile Methodologies

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AGILE – What business executives need to know #2: Overview of 4 most commonly used Agile Methodologies

In the first article in this series we focussed on an overview of what Agile software development is and referred to the Agile SCRUM methodology to describe the agile principles.

Let’s recap – Wikipedia describes Agile Software Development as an approach to software development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing cross functional teams and their customers / end users.  It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change. For an overview see the first blog post…

Several agile delivery methodologies are in use for example: Adaptive Software Development (ASD); Agile Nodelling; Agile Unified Process (AUP); Disciplined Agile Delivery; Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM); Extreme Programming (XP); Feature-Driven Development (FDD); Lean Software Development (LEAN); Kanban; Rapid Application Development (RAD); Scrum; Scrumban.

This article covers a brief overview of the four most frequently used Agile Methodologies:

  • Scrum
  • Extreme Programming (XP)
  • Lean
  • Kanban

 

SCRUM

Using Scrum framework the project work is broken down into user stories (basic building blocks of agile projects – these are functional requirements explained in an in business context) which are collated in the backlog (work to be done). Stories, from the backlog, are grouped into sprints (development iteration) based on story functionality dependencies, priorities and resource capacity. The resource capacity is determined by the speed (velocity) at which the team can complete stories, which are categorised into levels of complexity and effort required to complete. Iterations are completed with fully functional deliverables for each story until all the needed stories are completed for functional solutions.

SCRUM

Scrum is based on three pillars:

  • Transparency – providing full visibility on the project progress and a clear understanding of project objectives to the project team but more importantly to the stakeholders responsible for the outcome of the project.
  • Inspection – Frequent and repetitive checks on project progress and milestones as work progresses towards the project goal. The focus of these inspections is to identify problems and differences from the project objectives as well as to identify if the objectives have changed.
  • Adaptation – Responding to the outcome of the inspections to adapt the project to realign in addressing problems and change in objectives.

Through the SCRUM methodology, four opportunities for Inspection and Adaptation are provided:

  • Sprint Retrospective
  • Daily Scrum meeting
  • Sprint review meeting
  • Sprint planning meeting

A Scrum team is made of a Product Owner, a Scrum Master and the Development Team.

Scrum activity can be summarised within the following events:

  • Sprint – a fixed time development iteration
  • Sprint Planning meetings
  • Daily Scrum meetings (Stand-Up meetings)
  • Sprint Review meetings
  • Sprint Retrospectives

 

XP – EXTREME PROGRAMMING

XP

Extreme Programming (XP) provides a set of technically rigorous, team-oriented practices such as Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, and Pairing that empower teams to deliver high quality software, iteratively.

 

LEAN

LEAN

Lean grew from out of the Toyota manufacturing Production System (TPS). Some key elements of this methodology are:

  • Optimise the whole
  • Eliminate waste
  • Build quality in
  • Learn constantly
  • Deliver fast
  • Engage everybody
  • Keep improving

Lean five principles:

  1. Specify value from the customer’s point of view. Start by recognizing that only a small percentage of overall time, effort and resources in a organization actually adds value to the customer.
  2. Identify and map the value chain. This is the te entire set of activities across all part of the organization involved in delivering a product or service to the customer. Where possible eliminate the steps that do not create value
  3. Create flow – your product and service should flow to the customer without any interruptions, detours or waiting – delivering customer value.
  4. Respond to customer demand (also referred to as pull). Understand the demand and optimize the process to deliver to this demand – ensuring you deliver only what the customer wants and when they want it – just in time production.
  5. Pursue perfection – all the steps link together waste is identified – in layers as one waste rectification can expose another – and eliminated by changing / optimizing the process to ensure all assets add value to the customer.

 

KANBAN

Kanban is focussed the visual presentation and management of work on a kanban board to better balance the understanding of the volume of work with the available resources and the delivery workflow.

KANBAN

Six general work practices are exercised in kanban:

  • Visualisation
  • Limiting work in Progress (WIP)
  • Flow management
  • Making policies explicit
  • Using feedback loops to ensure customer and quality alignment
  • Collaborative & experimental evolution of process and solutions

By limiting WIP you are minimising waste through the elimination of multi tasking and context switching.

There is no prescription of the number of steps to follow but it should align with the natural evolution of the changes being made in resolving a problem or completing a specific peace of work.

It focuses on delivering to customer expectations and needs by promoting team collaboration including the customer.

 

A Pragmatic approach

These techniques together provide a powerful, compelling and effective software development approach that brings the needed flexibility / agility into the software development lifecycle.

Combining and borrowing components from different methodologies to find the optimum delivery method that will deliver to the needs of the organisation is key. Depending on the specific business needs/situation, these components are combined to optimise the design, development and deployment of the software.

Helpful references:

A good overview of different agile methodologies can be found on this slideshare at .

Further Reading:

-> What Is Agile? A Philosophy That Develops Through Practice from Umar Ali

Let’s Talk – Are you looking to achieve your goals faster? Create better business value? Build strategies to improve growth? We can help – make contact!

The 7 Deadly Sins Of Product Development

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Guest Blog: Travis Jacobs via LinkedIn

1.   The Pregnant Woman Theory

If one woman can make a baby in 9 months, then 9 women can make a baby in 30 days.  Now you may laugh, but this is the most common problem in developing a new product. Throwing more resources at the problem and praying it goes away does not solve anything.

2.   Stepping Over A Stack Of $100 Bills To Pick Up A Penny

We can’t spend $10 on an off the shelf tool but we can spend $1,000 to develop our own, which doesn’t work and causes more problems than it solves.

Spending countless hours in useless meetings and then having a meeting to discuss why everything is overbudget and behind schedule.

3.   Champagne On A Beer Budget

Expecting everything for free and having It done yesterday. This is a very common occurrence especially when subcontractors are hired.

I want to hire an Engineer with 3 PhD’s, and 30 years of experience for minimum wage

4.   The Scalpel Is Only As Good As The Surgeon Who Uses It, Not All Tools Are Created Equally.

A Scalpel is a commodity, the surgeon who uses it to save your life is not.

Not all tools are created equally, choose the right tool for the right job, not just because that tool Is the cheapest and the “sales guy” said it would “work”.

5.   You Never Run Out Of Things That Go Wrong

There will always be an endless supply of challenges and things that go wrong. Pretending there aren’t any problems doesn’t make them go away.

6.   A Plan Is Just A List Of Stuff That Didn’t Happen & Everything Takes Longer, And Costs More Than You Planned

The battle plan is the first casualty of war, as soon as the first shot is fired the plan goes out the window. Likewise, when the first problem is encountered when developing a new product, the plan and the Gantt Chart go out the window.

7.   Good, Fast, Cheap… Pick Any Two

We never have time to do it right, but we always have time to do it over….. and over….. and over…..

I hear time and time again. Just get it done right now, we’ll fix it later. The problem is that later never comes, and the product is only “fixed” after a very expensive product recall. By then it is too late and significant market share has been lost as well as the reputation of the brand. Trying to save a few bucks in product development can cost millions in product recalls.

AGILE Software Development – What business executives need to know

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AGILE Software Development – What business executives need to know

As a business executive how much do you really know about the Agile approach to software development? As the leaders within the company responsible for using technology innovation as an enabler to accelerate the business operations and improve the companies results, do you really understand your role and involvement in the technology development methodology used in your organisation? How can you direct the team if you do not understand the principals of the software development game?

All executives in businesses using an agile approach for software development must understand the basic principals, rules, practices and concepts of “Agile”. With an understanding of the methodology the software development team is following, a better understanding and appreciation of the team and their efforts are reached improving your ability to lead and direct the people involved across the business.

This series of Blog Posts provides an executive summary of the “Agile Software Development Approach” to get your tow in the water.

Agility is expected in modern software development and the customers assume that through appropriate planning, solutions are build with the ability to anticipate changes and to realign over time, as requirements and needs are changing.

Agile comes from the Latin word ‘agere’ which means “to do” – it means the ability to progress and change direction quickly and effectively while remaining in full control.

Software development delivering products and solutions, usually come about through the same phases within the business:

  • A need – The business has a particular demand and/or requirement and need a new software product or changes and enhancements to existing software solutions to address this demand and deliver value to the client and/or customers.
  • Funds – Budgets are drawn up and the business secures the availability of funds required to deliver the new project
  • Project Acceptance – The business stakeholders approves the software development project and it is chartered.
  • A Plan – Project Planning and Management is the fist but also a continuous key exercise in any project.
  • Execution – Build it!
  • Acceptance and Go-Live – The business accepts the software as fit for purpose, addressing the need and it is released into production.
  • Support – The provision of operational and technical support to keep the new software working after deployment into production.

In addressing this business need, software technology development teams follow a typical cycle – The Software Development Cycle:

Requirements –> Design & Architecture –> Functional Specifications & Use Cases –> Acceptance Criteria –> Technical Specifications –> Code Engineering –> Testing –> Deploy –> User Acceptance –> Production –> Support –> Requirements for a new cycle

SWDev_Trad_Agile

In traditional software development, individual specialised groups of Business Analyst, Testers, Architects, Designers, Developers and Network Engineers completing each step by working through the full scope of the project before it is handed over to the next step. A lot of effort is spent in each of the steps and more time is spent in handing over documentation and knowledge from one step to the other until the project is done.

In agile software development, the entire project team, consisting of members from specialised groups, is responsible to complete small increments of working software that deliver value to the business. Collaboration, across the whole company and the end user, client or customer during the development of each increment, ensures the need is met. The full Software Development Lifecycle is followed in the development of each increment, which is concluded with a release of working software into production. Change is the only constant in today’s world, so the project planning is done one increment and release at a time starting with high-level functionality. More incremental releases are completed adding more detail to the functionality until the full project scope has been completed or until the business is satisfied that the need has been addressed.

Agile project management is not meant to replace formal project management methodologies, but to compliment it.

Agile Software Development’s Prime Goal: High value, high quality software, delivered quickly and frequently!

Agile Manifesto

Agile is all about – expecting change through rapid feedback and interaction though-out the project; the ability to adapt and anticipate change events, delivering scalable components that address the stakeholder’s needs; parallel cycles of work delivery with good communication and progress feedback; keeping it simple assuming the lowest cost and simplest solution is the best; demonstrating the progress after each cycle and evaluate improvements to feedback into the next cycle.

Agile Framework

Being agile is all about being flexible and adaptable to continuous change. Agile project management can help to manage change consistently and effectively. It is all about thinking lean and making optimum use of resources as well as looking after the team though continuous interaction, coaching and mentoring to increase the performance.

Inception – Setting the project up for success

During inception all members of the team collaborate and define the outcomes of the project and what success looks like. The team grasps an understanding of the business requirements, meet the stakeholders, and compile a prioritised list of the features and functionality required broken down as “user stories”. The high level solution design and underlining technical architecture are compiled followed by an estimating exercise defining the high-level effort required to deliver the project scope.

Iteration 0 – Preparation that enables the team to be productive from Iteration 1

In this iteration preparations of the team’s workspace, tools and infrastructure are completed.

Execution – The execution consists of a series releases that each consists of a series of time-boxed iterations – also called sprints – where the software increments are planned, built (coded and tested), deployed and demonstrated to the stakeholders.

image003

Closing – Was the business need met by this project delivery? Ensure everyone understands how the new changes introduced by the project will work in operations with appropriate handovers from the project team to the operational teams. The team does a retrospective to discuss the ‘Lessons Learned’ – What has worked well? What caused difficulties? What value and benefits were added? How accurate was the estimates? What should be done differently next time? These answers are an important feedback loop to continuous improvement.

Cycling through the iterations, the focus is on continuous improvement of the functionality, productivity and efficiency to optimize the use of funds and reduce waste. Through this constant cycle of adapting and learning, excellence becomes an reality.

Agile Methodologies: The next post give an executive overview of four of the most commonly used Agile Methodologies.

Let’s Talk – Are you looking to achieve your goals faster? Create better business value? Build strategies to improve growth? We can help – make contact!

How to choose a Tech Stack

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WHITE PAPER – How to choose a Technology Stack

What is a Technology Stack?

A technology stack (Tech Stack) is a set of software code that is made up of modules used in software products and programming languages to build (develop/code) a software application.

The lower in a Tech Stack you go the closer you get to the hardware, for example a Operating System is the part of the tech stack that provide an interface between the computer user and the computer hardware, it communicates directly with the computer hardware. The higher you go in a Tech Stack the more specific and specialized the functionality becomes for example a DBMS (Database Management System) that provides the interface and platform to manipulate, store, manage and administrate data into databases.

Choosing a Primary Tech Stack usually involves the choice of the Operating System, programming languages, standard development libraries, frameworks, DBMS and a support community. The Primary Tech Stack will be used by most of the developers and software engineers in building the software product/application but several Secondary Tech Stacks may be used in support of the Primary Tech Stack to fulfill specific specialized requirements.

There are lots of different, competing technologies made up of different tech stacks, to build a website or software application with. A software application usually consist of the following main components: the Front End of the site/application (what the end users see on the screen and will be interacting with), the Admin Portal (that the application/program administrators or back office personal will use as an interface to administer and manage the application or site), the Middleware, Logical Layer or Application Layer (that performs all the ‘automatic’ actions and is the heart of the application doing all the calculations, processing and data manipulation), and the Database where all data used within the application or site is stored. Each of these components making up an application or website can be developed with a different software product or programming language but preferably within the same Tech Stack to reduce the complexity of supporting the application/site.

How do you choose a technology stack, what factors and key technical aspect should be considered to avoid the wrong choices?

When choosing your tech stack it is important to choose components that designed to easily integrate – the frontend technology must integrate with the admin, logic and database. The integration of the different application components is illustrated in the hand drawn diagram.

TechStack_Integration

The challenge today is choosing a Tech Stack, which supports current trends, and also future proofs your technology solution for the future. You can only focus your choice towards the Tech Stack that will be appropriate and the best fit for your business today and with that realize that the Tech Stack might change in the future as technology evolves – in other words there is no such thing as a fully future proof tech stack.

Considerations and Factors to keep in mind when choosing your Tech Stack

    • Development Lapse Time / Time to Market: How long will it take to develop an application in one tech stack vs the other. If the tech stack give you access to frameworks and platforms it will reduce the development lapse time and hence your time to market (in other word the application can be developed quicker).
    • Compatibility: Will the new technology work with exiting tools and software used within the business? Can you reuse previous developed software code in the new tech stack? Integrating the new tech stack into your existing environment, will it cause disruption or large quantities of rework of existing systems and infrastructure?
    • Cutting Edge: The more cutting edge the technology the more bumps their will be on the road ahead as the cutting edge still has some way to go to maturity and stability.
    • Productivity: If you already have a development team in-house, are they qualified to work with the tech stack? DO the developers have any issues with the new tech stack? What issues and pain did you and your development team have with the previous tech stack – are those addressed in the new?
    • Engineering Talent Availability: Is the right people available to support the tech stack you intend to use? The right people will be across the board including, architects, tech leads, senior developers, developers, database developers / administrators, etc. Will it be easy to find these people? This is linked to the popularity of the tech stack – the more popular the more talent will be available. Where (in which location) will you need the talent – what is the availability of the talent in your preferred location, the location where you want to build you in-house and offshore teams?
    • Recruitment and Retention: How ill you recruit the talent for the tech stack? Will what you have to offer (salary, working environment, training, personal growth, business prospects and growth, etc.) be attractive to the market of professional knowledge workers (technologist)? Make sure that can recruit and retain your technology staff to support your tech stack, otherwise it might be an expensive choice.
    • Expertise: What level of expertise on the new tech stack do you have within your (in-house or outsourced, on-shore, near-shore or off-shore). Make sure that you have staff that are well experienced with the tech stack and ensure that they understand your business drivers and your requirements. Ensure that within your team you enough experts (at the right levels i.e. Tech Leads & Snr Developers) that thoroughly understand the tech stack intrinsically.
    • Maintenance & Support: Different programming languages promote different style for example Object Oriented (OO), Strongly Type (Functional) and Dynamic styles. As the complexity and the magnitude of the technology solution increase and/or the team that develop the solution is large then OO style programming languages bring a lot of value. Strongly typed languages and their frameworks like C++, C#, Java and Scala support better tools while Dynamic one like PHP, Pyhton, Ruby, Javascript take less development time. The trends based on the above is that strongly type OO languages are mainly used in enterprise solutions where code base size, team size and maintenance matters. Another factor to consider is the standards and methodology followed by developers in writing the code. Some software development methodologies introduce very robust quality assurance and code validation that delivers a very superior, bug free solutions that are easier to support. A well-written technology solution is also adequately documented to ensure maintainability and supportability. Other factors like team knowledge, expertise and the availability of resources/talent (as mentioned in other points in this section) to form a solution support team must also be kept in the equation.
    • Scalable: Scalability refers to the ability of a solution to easily adapt to service more users, process more data within a specific timeframe without increasing the overall software and development cost. Hardware is mostly directly related to the scalability for example the more the solution scale the more hardware might be needed to support the technology solution. Scaling can take place horizontally – that is adding more hardware (servers) to the overall solution or vertically which increases the ability to process more data and/or request/users on a particular server. Will the tech stack scale to meet your requirements in performance? How easy is it to scale the solution horizontally? How does the tech stack compare with others in vertical scaling? If you know your solution will be receiving high traffic (lots of users) or will be processing loads of data the choice of your tech stack becomes very important. The difference in the scalability of two tech stack can be seen in timing and compairing the systems’ response in processing the same about of user requests or data for example:
      • Ruby is 30 x slower than C
      • PHP is only 8 x slower than C
      • Java is a mere 2 x slower than C
    • Community: How strong is the community for your selected tech stack? A strong community is a key factor is selecting a tech stack as an active and devoted community ensures the following:
      • Availability of Documentation
      • Fast response to bugs, issues and problems. Response and support to resolution of issues that might appear to be specific to your solution
      • Availability of issue and problem solutions and the source code to copy/paste speeds up the resolution
      • Continuous updating of the basic framework, increasing the availability modules and libraries, producing new releases that results in a more stable tech stack
      • Availability of resources/talent understanding the tech stack
    • Quality of Tools: Ensure the tech stack provide adequate tools to the development and support teams to use for example IDEs (Integrated Development Environment), Debuggers, Build Tools, etc. Adequate tools will ensure you have an empowered and engaged development team that can get the job done.
    • Licensing: Tech stacks are licensed differently – either Open Source or Commercial licensing applies. Open Source tech stack has grown tremendously over the past view years. Statistics show that on the internet, more open source tech stack driven solutions (solutions based on the LAMP stack consisting of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) are present than commercial tech stack based solutions like Microsoft consisting of Windows server, IIS, SQL Server and .NET. When deciding on a tech stack it is important to understand the different licensing types and the associated cost to the license to use the software not just for development but commercially in the mainstream production environments of your business. Open Source licenses are usually cheaper than commercial licenses. Make sure that you understand the type of license the tech stack components are under and that you have the associated budget.
    • Hardware Resource Hungry: What level (quantity and specification) of hardware will the tech stack require to run your application effectively according to expectations and requirements? Some tech stacks require several different servers to run a single application dependent on the complexity. This should be taken into consideration especially in conjunction with the budget constraints. Tech stack and Hardware requirements are dependent on the performance and uptime requirements of the operational technology solution. A solution that needs to be up and running every second of the every day and/or are procession large volumes of data in the shortest possible time, will have a higher dependency on the hardware with infrastructure design incorporating the resilience against hardware and connectivity failures. Hardware is not directly dependent on the tech stack for redundancy but some tech stacks are better suited for high availability with build in capabilities, than others.
    • Popularity: See point on Talent Availability and Documentation
    • Future Proof: This is a relative concept because none of us have a crystal ball to gage exactly what the future will hold in order to choose our tech stack accordingly. How long into the future are you looking to proof your application, recognizing that technology is rapidly changing and no single tech stack has ever been and will ever be available and around for ever. Even tech stacks like Microsoft that has been around for twenty plus years has changed within and the older tech stacks from Microsoft are absolute while newer options are introduced every two to three years – sometimes without appropriate backwards compatibility. Your tech stack must be agile (adapt to change), backwards compatible, scalable (to accommodate your business and market growth), from a reputable supplier (a supplier that is credit worthy and likely to be around for the future) and popular. Popularity is very important and the community following, embracing and developing a tech stack will ensure the availability of talent and support resources to ensure your application build in a particular tech stack can be supported long into the future.
    • Documentation: Are the appropriate documentation available for the tech stack to completely enable your team to utilize the power of the tech stack? Documentation includes printed manuals, internet information resources, sample code, module and libraries, community forums where issues and problems are discussed and resolved with solution code that can easily be copied/pasted.
    • Maturity/Stability: What is the latest released version of the tech stack. A mature tech stack with release versions will be much more stable than a version 1 release, for example.
  • Company Constraints: Is your tech stack choice affected by certain constraint within your business i.e. if you are looking to develop a native mobile application for iPhone or iPad who have no other choice but Objective C for your programming language. Do you have access to a DevOps team (operations team ensuring the software development and operational infrastructure seamlessly integrate)? If not you might want to consider a PaaS option and use the stack it supports. Other constraints can be: legal requirements like PCI DSS (Credit Card and Personal Information security legislation and requirements), budget and operational costs.

 

What are the popular choices in Tech Stacks?

Operating Systems
·       Microsoft Windows

·       Apple OS X

·       Linux

·       Mobile

·       iOS

·       Android

 

Programming Language Associated Web Framework
Java ·       Spring/Hibernate

·       Struts

·       Tapestry

·       Play! (Scala)
Javascript ·       JQuery

·       Sencha

·       YUI

·       Dojo
PHP ·       CodeIgniter

·       Zend

·       Cake

·       Symfony
Python ·       Django

·       web2py

·       TurboGears

·       Zope
Ruby ·       Rails

·       Sinatra
C# ·       ASP.NET

 

Web/Application Servers
·       Apache

·       Tomcat

·       Netty

·       Ngnix

·       Unicorn

·       Passenger

·       IIS

·       Microsoft Windows

 

Databases
·       Microsoft SQL Server

·       MySQL

·       Postgres

·       Oracle

 

Cloud PaaS (Platform as a Service)
·       Heroku

·       CloudFoundry

·       Microsoft Azure

·       Redhat Openshift

·       EngineYard

 

Let’s Talk – Are you looking to achieve your goals faster? Create better business value? Build strategies to improve growth? We can help – make contact!

 

Source & Reference List:

The Art of IT Effort Estimation

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Why Estimate at all?

Estimation is an essential part of any project methodology. Estimation is used for a number of purposes:

  • To justify the project enabling the costs to be compared with the anticipated benefits and to enable informed comparisons to be made between different technical or functional options.
  • To enforce the discipline needed to make the project succeed.
  • To secure the resources required to successfully deliver the project.
  • To ensure that the support impact of the project is fully understood.
  • To inform and improve the software development process.

What is estimation and why is it so important

Projects are planned and managed within scope, time, and cost constraints. These constraints are referred to as the Project Management Triangle.  Each side represents a constraint.  One side of the triangle cannot be changed without impacting the others. The time constraint refers to the amount of time available to complete a project. The cost constraint refers to the budgeted amount available for the project. The scope constraint refers to what must be done to produce the project’s end result.

These three constraints are often competing constraints: increased scope typically means increased time and increased cost, a tight time constraint could mean increased costs and reduced scope, and a tight budget could mean increased time and reduced scope.

PM 3 Constraints

What are the challenges

  • Lack of communication between…a…b…c
  • Lack of training in basic knowledge and techniques of estimation
  • Inability to do estimations based on – cost – time – scope
  • Project failure through time over runs and faulty estimation

Where are we going wrong?

  • Every day, project managers and business leaders make decisions based on estimates of the dynamics of the project management triangle.
  • Since each decision can determine whether a project succeeds or fails, accurate estimates are critical.
  • Projects launched without a rigorous initial estimate are five times more probable of experiencing delays and cancellations.
  • Even projects with sound initial estimates are doomed if they are not guided by informed decisions within the constraints of the triangle.
  • If you are working under a fixed budget (cost constraint), then an inaccurate estimate of the number of product features you can produce (scope) within a fixed period of time (schedule) will doom your project.
  • Inaccurate estimates across your projects de-optimize your portfolio.
  • Estimates are always questioned when estimates are given with knowledge – no estimation template is being used

How can we improve?

  1.  Outsource the project estimation function to an outside qualified consultant for each project to be able to gain viable and realistic project estimations that can be achieved.
  2.  Education of in-house project managers and technical leads so that we are able to collectively able to provide clear methodologies on how to estimate accurately.

This can be done through an onsite workshop/course  – onsite is cost effective as company will pay one block fee for the attendees instead of delegates going offsite and attending a workshop where individual fees are applicable.

My personal recommendation is option B – as this option will allow us to retain skills in house to be able to produce accurate estimates

What are the long term benefits

Well crafted estimate creates many benefits:

  • alignment between business objectives and technical estimates
  • more informed business decision making
  • reliable project delivery dates
  • improved communication between management and the project team
  • controlled project costs, and
  • satisfied customers

Conclusion

The UK is facing ever tightening economic restraints. This means the quality of work is now, more than ever, of the utmost importance. To stay competitive in a shrinking marketplace, this company cannot afford to get a reputation in the industry for non-performance and bringing in projects over budget and outside estimated time frames. Credibility is the basis on which we build our reputation. In the eyes of clients credibility = successful projects. For us the success of all projects rest on the correct and precise estimation from the start of a project based on best practices, realistic expectations and transparency.