I wonder if anybody here uses gantt charts to track / improve own progress when working in a programming project alone or with others and what is the approach you use and which software
Gantt charts can still be useful even when working solo, since they show the critical path and easily update with new completion dates if and when things blow out (or, in those rare occasions, complete early).
Having said that, I don't usually use the charts very often any more. They're a nice picture for upper management levels but, when working alone, I just have the expected times for each task along with the expected dates (in textual format).
I find it hard to justify using an incredibly powerful project management tool when I can get the same information from a simple spreadsheet (with a lot less effort).
When you're managing a team with tasks allocated to a larger number of people then, yes, I still find the charts indispensable. But part of the reason for that is that they have to go up to higher management levels (the kind who can't understand what's going on without a pretty picture).
I use the Gantt diagram on the redmine forge: you insert tickets with deadlines and it generates the Gantt diagram.
You can also show only open tickets, closed tickets, etc.
Preface:
I am a system programmer (who has just started his career as a S/W Engineer), so not very good # web scripting languages, though I have just started learning them.
Problem Synopsis:
I want to write an app that keeps track of what I am doing and records it allowing me to analyse my time spending pattern and could help me analyse whenever I want.
Problem Description:
My plan is to write an app that sits in the background and keeps track of active window on my desktop (every second) and stores this data in a SQLite database. But to be more appealing (As I want to share this app with others), I want to have a feature where the user can analyse data recorded between any period of his interest. For this I want the user to be able to generate charts and graphs using the recorded data.
For this I thought of using browser for UI and Google Visualization APIs for plotting work. So, is it possible to use Google Visualization APIs to plot local data? if so, plz guide me on how to continue... (As told before, I am a system programmer, C programmer to be specific, who has just started learning web scripting in free time)
Reasons for these decisions:
(1) App that records what I am doing will be in C/C++ - B'coz I am system programmer and am very comfortable with them. And can get it done easily and quickly.
(2) SQLite - Very small and can easily be embedded in my app, and is Open Source. And I think many web scripting langs like PHP, python have interfaces to access SQLite DB.
(3) Browser for UI - Hope it will be easy for user to use browser, and I will not have much to do regarding UI. As main UI will be browser and Google Visualization APIs will do plotting. All I might have to do is write few lines of script (Am I right here on the last point???)
Comment on my design decision and any tutorials(or pointers) which teaches me on how to do this will be highly appreciated...
Thank You
MicroKernel :)
PS: Idea inspired by Nathan Baulch's reply to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/161590/how-do-you-track-your-time
#Nathan Baulch, Thank you so much for such a brilliant idea. \m/
I would embed browser to app (you want to write in C#)
and use jquery plotting as chart. You will find more info here: http://www.flotcharts.org/
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I have being toying with the idea of creating software “Robots” to help on different areas of the development process, repetitive task, automatable task, etc.
I have quite a few ideas where to begin.
My problem is that I work mostly alone, as a freelancer, and work tends to pill up, and I don’t like to extend or “blow” deadline dates.
I have investigated and use quite a few productivity tools. I have investigated CodeGeneration and I am projecting a tool to generate portions of code. I use codeReuse techniques. Etc.
Any one as toughs about this ? as there any good articles.
I wouldn't like to use code generation, but I have developed many tools to help me do many of the repetitive tasks.
Some of these could do nice things:
Email Robots
These receive emails and do a lot of stuff with them, they need to have some king of authentication to protect you from the bad stuff :
Automatically logs whatever was entered in a database or excel spreadsheet.
Updates something in a database.
Saves all the attachments in a specific shared folder.
Reboot a server.
Productivity
These will do repetitious tasks:
Print out all the invoices for the month.
Automatically merge data from several sources.
Send reminders of GTD items.
Send reminders of late TODO items.
Automated builds
Automated testing
Administration
These automate some repetitive server administration tasks:
Summarize server logs, remove regular items and send the rest by email
Rebuild indexes in a database
Take automatic backups
Meta-programming is a great thing. If you easily get access to the data about the class structure then you can automate a few things. In the high level language I use, I define a class like 'Property' for example. Add an integer for street number, a string for street name and a reference to the owning debtor. I then auto generate a form that has a text box for street number and street name, a lookup box for the debtor reference and the code to save and load is all auto-generated. It knows that street number is an integer so its text box can only accept integers. If I declare a read only property it will also make sure the text box is read only.
There are software robots, but often you really don't see them. For example consider a robot that is used to package stuff. There is a person who monitors the robot in case of a failure. When the robot fails, the person shuts the robot down and fixes things. That person is like a programmer who operates IDE to compile, refactor etc. When errors occur, the programmer fixes the code and runs the compiler again.
Well compiling is not very robot like, but then there are software that compile your project automatically. Now that is more like a kind of a robot. That software robot also checks things in the code like is there enough comments and so on.
Then we have software that generates code according to our input. For example we can create forms in MS Access easily with Wizards. The wizards are not automatically producing new forms form after form after form, because we need every form to be different. But the form generator is a kind of robot-like tool that is operated.
Of course you could input the details of every form first and then run generate, but people like to see soon every form. Also the input mechanism is the form pretty much already, so you get what you create on the fly. Though with data transformation tools you can create descriptions of forms from a list of field names, generate the forms, and call that as using robots.
There are even whole books about automated software production, but the biggest problem is, that the automation of the process lasts longer then the process itself.
Mostly programmers give up on this, since they try to achive everything on one step, from manual programming, to automation.
Common automation in software production is done through IDEs, CodeGenerators and such, until now nearly no logic is automated.
I would appreciate any advance in this topic. Try to automate little tasks from the process, and connect those tasks afterwards. Going step by step.
I'm guessing that, just like just about every software developer on planet Earth, you want to write software that writes software by itself. Unfortunately, it's an idea that only works on paper. I mean, we have things like code generators, DSLs, transformation pipelines, Visual Studio add-ins that statically analyse code and generate derivative code, and so on. But it's nowhere near anything one would call a 'robot'.
Personally, I think more needs to be done in this area. For example, the IDE should be able to infer things and make suggestions based on what I'm actually doing. For example, if I'm adding a property, the IDE infers what attributes other properties in the file has, and how the property itself is structured, and adjusts the property accordingly.
Any sort of AI is hard work and, regrettably, does not have such a great ROI. But it sure if fun.
Scripting away the repetitive tasks - that's what you refer? I guess you're a Windows developer where scripting is not as nearly common as in *nix world. Hence your question.
You might want to have a look at the *nix side of software development arena where the workflow is more or less similar to what you describe (at least more than Windows). Plowing your way via bash, perl, python, etc.. will get you what you want.
ps. Also look at nsr81's post in comments for similar scripting tools on Windows.
Code generation is certainly a viable tool for some tasks. If done poorly it can create maintenance problems, but it doesn't have to be done poorly. See Code Generation Network for a fairly active community, with conference, papers, etc.
Code Generation in Action is one book that comes to mind.
You can try Robot framework
http://robotframework.org/
Robot Framework is a generic automation framework,It has easy-to-use tabular test data syntax and it utilizes the keyword-driven approach.
Even you can used this tools as software bot (RPA).
Robotic Process Automation
First, a little back-story... In 2011, I was the Operations Manager for Contracting Center of Excellence at Bristol-Myers Squibb. We were in the early stages of rolling out a brand new Global Contracting System. This new system was replacing a great deal of manual effort across the globe with the intention of one system to create, store and retrieve Contracting information for all of the organization. No small task to be sure, and one we certainly underestimated the scope and eventual impact of. Like most organizations getting a handle on this contract management process, we found it to be from 4 to 10 times larger than originally expected.
We did a lot of things very right, including the building of a support organization from the ground up, who specialized on this specific application and becoming true subject matter experts to the organization in (7) languages and most time zones.
The application, on the other hand, brought it's own challenges which included missing features, less than stellar performance and a lot of back-end work needing done by the Operations team. This is where the Robotics Process Automation comes into the picture.
Many of the 'features' of this software were simply too complicated for end users to use, but were required to create contracts. The first example was adding a "Contact" to whom the Contract would be made with. The "Third Party", if you will. This is a seemingly simple thing, which took (7) screens of data entry, a cryptic point of access, twenty two minutes and a masters degree to figure out, on your own for each one. We quickly made the business decision to have the Operations team create these 'Contacts' on behalf of our end users. We anticipated the need to be a few thousand a year. We very quickly passed 800 requests per week. With three FTE's working on it, we had a backlog ever growing and a turn-around time of more than two weeks per request. Obviously, this would NOT due in any business environment.
The manual process was so complicated, even my staff had a large number of errors in creating them, even as subject matter experts. The resulting re-work further complicated the issue and added costs. I had some previous Automation experience and products that I worked with, but this need was even more intense and complicated than I had encountered before. I needed something great, fast, easy to implement and that would NOT require IT assistance (as that had it's own pitfalls.) I investigated a number of products, all professing to do similar things. One of course, stood out to me. It seemed to be the most capable, affordable and had good support options. The product I selected was Automation Anywhere at the bargain price of about $4000.00 USD.
I am not here to pitch for Automation Anywhere, or any specific product, for that matter. But, my experiences with this tool, forever changed my expectations and understanding of what Robotic Process Automation really means.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am not here to pitch for Automation Anywhere, or any specific product, for that matter. But, my experiences with this tool, forever changed my expectations and understanding of what Robotic Process Automation really means. (see below, if you are unsure)
After my first week, buying the tool and learning some of the features, I was able to implement a replacement of the manual process of creating a "Contact" in the contracting system from a two week turn around, to a (1) hour turn-around. It took the FTE effort of 22 minutes for each entry, to zero. I was able to run this Automated process from a desktop PC and handle every request, fully automated, including the validation and confirmation steps into other external systems to ensure better data quality than was ever possible, previously. In the first week, my costs for the software were recovered by over 200% in saved labor, allowing those resources to focus on other higher value tasks. I don't care where you are from, that is an amazing ROI!
That was just the beginning, now that we had this tool, and in fact it could do much more than this initial task I needed, it became one of the most valued resources for developing functional Proof of Concept/prototypes of more complex processes we needed to bridge the gaps in the contracting system. I was able to add on to the original purchase with an Enterprise License and secure a more robust infrastructure partnering with our IT department at a an insanely low cost for total implementation. I now had (5) dedicated Corporate servers operating 24/7 and (2) development licenses for building and supporting automation tasks and we were able to continue to support the Contracting initiative, even with the volume so much greater than anticipated with the same number of FTEs as we started with. It became the platform for reporting, end user notification, system alerts, updating data, work-flow, job scheduling, monitoring, ETL and even data entry and migration from other systems. The cost avoidance because of implementing this Robotic Process Automation tool can not be over stated. The soft-dollar savings from delivering timely solutions to the business community and the continued professional integrity we were able to demonstrate and promote is evident in the successful implementation to more than 48 countries in under (1) year and the entry of over 120,000 Contracts entered each year since.
It became the platform for reporting, end user notification, system alerts, updating data, work-flow, job scheduling, monitoring, ETL and even data entry and migration from other systems.
While the term, Robotic Process Automation is currently all the buzz, the concepts have been around for some time. Please, please however, don't make the assumption that this means it is a build and forget situation. As it grows, and it will grow, you need a strong plan to manage tasks, resources and infrastructure to keep things running. These tools basically mimic anything a human can do, and much more than a human as well. However, a human can rather quickly change their steps in a process if one of the 'source' systems she/he is using has a change in the user interface. Your Automation Tasks will need 'tweaked' to make that change in most cases. Some business processes can be easier than others to Automate and might be two complex for a casual "Automation task creator" to build and or maintain. Be very sure you have solid resources to build and maintain the tasks. If you plan to do more than one thing with your RPA tool, make sure to have solid oversight, governance, resources and a corporate 'champion' or I assure you, your efforts will not be successful.
Robotic Process Automation Defined:
(IRPA) Institute for Robotic Process Automation: “Robotic process automation (RPA) is the application of technology that allows employees in a company to configure computer software or a “robot” to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems.”
Wikipedia: “Examples of robotic automation include the use of industrial robots in manufacturing and the use of software robots in automating clerical processes in services industries. In the latter case, the use of the term robot is metaphorical, conveying the similarity of those software products – which are produced to provide a generic automation capability and then configured within the end user environment to execute manual and repetitive tasks – to their industrial robot counterparts. The metaphor is apt in the sense that the software “robot” is now mimicking or replacing a function classically associated with a person.”