Software Engineer

This is a summary of some presentations given yesterday, congratulations to the people that worked on TechCamp

Scrum

Speaker: @agilenature

The scrum presentation reinforces our knowledge about the set of assets (such as the backlog, burn down charts,etc) and actions required to manage a project.

The definitions or scrum roles (product owner, scrum master, developer, tester), the required actions (stand up meetings, effort estimation) can help us to better face a project as a cohesive team and better manage those projects where complexity is high due to not fully understood requirements and/or unknown technology needed to satisfy product objectives.

The main objectives are:

* Give the project visibility (stakeholders have from the beginning a clear state of the project progress)
* Get rid of uncertainty (the product owner is highly involved in the project)
* Manage change.

Since scrum is a extensive topic, the presenter gave us several topics that we can research for further knowledge about the methodology, such as:

Further reading:

• Scrum in 10 minutes .
• Stakeholder management.
• “Poker” effort estimation.

Appcelerator

Speaker: @yeco

It talked about the Appcelerator Titanium Mobile which is a framework for building professional-grade applications for the iPhone and Android.

Titanium Mobile offers a way to create native mobile applications using HTML and Javascript. There is access to all native features, like geo-location, local filesystem and database access, and multi-touch and accelerometer controls, but without having to write native code. And because it’s cross-platform, a single codebase will work for both the iPhone and Android Phones.

Further reading:

• http://www.appcelerator.com/
• http://www.codestrong.com/timobile/

Firefox Add-on development

The presentation wasn’t about how to develop an add-on for firefox, but it gave a general perspective about the development process and the Mozilla Foundation effort to offer high quality addons by checking and reviewing every development posted here: https://addons.mozilla.org/

The speaker talked about the business opportunity because there are not many companies developing Firefox add-ons and this software has a lot of potential to enhance user experience and productivity when surfing the web.

As for the career path for a Add-on Developer, the speaker talked about his and how it went from being a contributor in 2001 to a Mozilla employee.

Further reading:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developers

Speaker: Jorge@mozilla.org

HTML5 & CSS3

The html is going to make web pages more semantic and browsers will provide more functionality making pages more lightweight even when there is video/audio streaming so HTML5 aims to reduce the use of proprietary plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash.

HTML5 provides new elements that reflect typical usage on current web pages. Some of them are semantic replacements for common uses of
element, such as (website navigation block), and . There is new functionality through a standardized interface, such as the and elements.

There are dropped elements including purely presentational elements such as and
, whose effects are achieved using CSS.

Further reading:

• http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html

Taken from agilesoftwaredevelopment.com there i s good definition about Backlog. It’s Scrum artifact. it’s a list of things needed to be done; however, it’s more than a to-do list.

First of all, it’s a high-level document, because it’s made and managed mainly by the product owner which is the voice of the customer so the list of items to be developed are prioritized by business value.

Taken from agilesoftwaredevelopment.com:

• Product backlog always lists items adding value for the customer. It includes functional requirements and non-functional requirements. It can also include items required by the team, but only the ones that will eventually bring value to the customer, e.g. taking into use a continuous integration server in order to guarantee the continuous end product quality.
• Product backlog cannot include concrete low level tasks and requests for building the intermediate artifacts. For example, it cannot include request for producing the design document unless customer has to ship it further for some purpose.
• Product backlog utilizes the simplest and the most effective way for prioritizing requests – a simple list. Such a method does not allow for having 100 absolute max priority features and forces the product owner to actually make decisions about the feature priorities.
• The higher the items are located on the product backlog, the more detailed they are. Items for the closest couple of months are usually quite detailed, while items that will be worked on in some 6-12 month can be defined very broadly and imprecisely.
• When there are several interdependent teams in the company or department, typically they all have a single product backlog and pull their work from it.
• Product backlog does not typically include the detailed requirement information. Usually the final requirement details are figured out with the help of the customer, when the requirement is being implemented.

I’ve found this article very interesting (taken from sei)

Agile development methods and CMMI (Capability Maturity Model^® Integration) best practices are often perceived to be at odds with each other. This report clarifies why the discord need not exist and proposes that CMMI and Agile champions work toward deriving benefit from using both and exploit synergies that have the potential to dramatically improve business performance.

Here the pdf download.