As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
What would you say is the minimum / appropriate team size and project duration for using Scrum?
We're thinking about using Scrum for our next software project (about 1600 - 1800 Man-hours) with a team size of 7 members. Since the team size is pretty big (in relation to the project duration, but cant avoid that), would you prefer Scrum?
7 members in a team is perfect from SCRUM. The only reasons why you would consider some other process instead of SCRUM:
Your requirements change radically on a daily basis.
Your project is shorter than 1 week.
Members of your team are not willing to adapt to the SCRUM way of doing things.
All your members are senior software developers and know exactly what must be done. Then trust me, SCRUM is a waste of time.
Finally, in SCRUM you first experiment little bit in order to find the perfect balance. (That comes from SCRUM being empirical process)
For my experience, 5 members and 1 week sprint is an absolute minimum.
Scrum Master, Product Owner, 2 Developers and 1 Tester. If you have less people - you just don't need SCRUM.
7 members is not very big, we had even more.
According to Winston Royce (publisher of the original Waterfall paper in 1970), the waterfall methodology should be used only for - and I quote - the most simple and straightforward projects (this is a true and sad anecdote: Waterfall was meant as an example of how not to do things).
I would therefore say that for short, simple and straightforward projects, the kind that the team can complete in one sprint (usually 1-4 weeks), you may use another methodology, as you will not be gaining any advantage from the feedback cycles, and will generally have no opportunity to inspect and adapt you process.
As for the size of the team, I think that any size that can be managed is good. The project scope will dictate how many people are required in order to complete it in one sprint.
Related
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 11 years ago.
I'm a java developer, currently starting developing a hospital management system that will server patients, doctors, accountant, .... etc the system is really huge that may have 900,000 records/day, data is really growing so fast, for that i'm confusing in which database to use since i have the following options: (Percona Server(Mysql), Oracle, SQLServer), since the application will run on network with average of 45 online users.
I hope to find a good answers here.
Thanks in advance
If you have been working with MySQL for 6 years then stick with it!
You don't want to add the burden of learning another database as well as having to develop your application.
If you are unsure if MySQL is up to the job then run some tests. Write an app that runs multiple threads inserting 1M rows and see if your servers can handle it.
I'm guessing the brand of the database you choose will be less important than the performance of the platform (machines) it is running on.
There is no good or bad answer to this question. Basically it is as good as the DBA knowns to manage it.
If asking this question it would be wise to group a team of people well known with various systems to find out the best practice. To answer such a case, even more with very sensitive data, it is not just a simple solution which will do the trick. A thorough process of decision making is very important. Not only from a technical but also from a security and business side.
As per as think your database is large you can go with oracle.but the decision also depends on the expertise of people working with you and availability of resources.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 11 years ago.
I'm always hearing that RoR is good for Agile implementation. Could someone plaese summarize this statement and explain me why with some examples.P.S I can't read "Agile Web Development with Rails" yet.
Tools are never agile in the matter of software engineering. Tools support in being agile. Ruby on rails is a framework to rapidly build basic functionalities with ease and Agile in most minds is a way to build your system without having the knowledge of every requirement needed by your system.
So tools which support the developers to rapidly bootstrap a software or change functionalities rapidly help you in being agile. Because most of the times the understanding of "How things work" differs between the customer and the developer perspective.
Aligning those perspectives is a success factor on every project and most of the times it is better to show something for a common understanding than painting some flow charts, uml charts or whatever which imply domain knowledge.
Another thing is if you may bootstrap a project rapidly you may react on reordering of priorities more flexible.
For the nitpickers.: Agile is a buzzword. There are lots of definitions and different understandings whats agile is and it may always be that my view on being agile or developing agile differs from some other definitions.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
There are good online store building solutions like Shopify, Volution, etc.
I'm looking to build my own small-scale service like that.
Are there any customizable online store building scripts I can install on my own server or companies that offer reselling opportunities?
VirtueMart is another very simple e-commerce app that my clients have used very successfully. It's based on Joomla, but still is an effective and easy tool to deploy.
I'll warn you, there's not a ton of money to be made building e-commerce "services" to resell. There's a million and one people doing it and it takes a LOT of work to get right. Not to mention the heartburn that goes along with payment processors and dealing with fouled transactions, which happens to the best of systems. People don't have a ton of patience when it comes to credit card transactions and I found myself doing tech support at the worst possible times. These are HIGH MAINTENANCE apps if you're not just doing it for yourself...
Magento has a pretty sweet multi-store setup. My company runs a fulfillment house using a single magento install and a store front for each individual client. All our orders are visible under the central dashboard and it's easy enough to create new stores once you get the hang of things.
Check it out here:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/multi-store-retailing-magento-demo/
Note: Magento has a very steep learning curve, not recommended for beginners.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 11 years ago.
I want to take up software testing job in software company in future so i want information about how its done.
Well, there's always this book.
If it's Java, usually it's done with Junit. If it's .NET, then there are more alternatives. Visual Studio has one built-in testing framework, and there are several others like Nunit. For .NET, there are also some good third party commercial libraries such as Telerik's.
I don't know about tools for other languages.
Are you going to work with black-box or white-box testing ?
I will write you what kind of experiences I already have under belt and maybe this will shed some light. At the beginning of my career I was working as a software tester (black-box one) in banking industry and we were using internal application for bug tracking - what is an essential tool in this particular position. My duties included regression testing, retesting, exploration testing, bugs finding and test cases preparation by means of Excel :)
Later on (also as a Software Tester - black box) I was working with MES product. And there we were using Test Track Pro to track bugs in waterfall, Version 1 to track the tasks and bugs in Scrum methodology, Quality Assurance Director for test cases creation, execution etc. Test Partner for coding automated scripts.
Apart from the last duties I was responsible for test cases creation, execution and writing automated tests.
Testing Computer Software is a good place to start if you really don't have any background in testing. Alan's link to How We Test Software at Microsoft is a good second book, I would say. I would strongly recommend picking up some programming skills, as testing is moving strongly towards more automation. There are manual testing jobs, but they are becoming less common and there are many manual testers already out there with more experience than you. C# or Java (and object-oriented programming), plus SQL, is a very good start.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
I'm not talking about bug tracking software (like Bugzilla or Jira). I'm looking for something that:
Stores test specifications in text format
Combines test specs into test coverage scenarios
Keeps track of the progress through testing scenarios
Links test specs with bug reports stored in Bugzilla
Generates progress reports
Is centrally managed on its own (i.e. is not a hack/extension on top of something else)
TestLink is a pretty nice open source test tracking tool with the features you need, and is still under active development. Take a look at http://testlink.org/
I haven't used this (yet), but Testopia seems to meet all your requirements, especially the one about Bugzilla.
I'm biased since I'm the primary author, but I think Cuanto is pretty good. It allows you to track historical results for multiple test projects and you can store your analysis with the test results.
RTH is another open source test management tool
I have personally used Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) which combines a simple issue tracker with Wiki functionality. Solved the need I had on my project.
A while back I briefly looked at the free version of QaTraq. Although I left the team I was considering it for before we every got very far with the project, it was the frontrunner of the options I looked at at the time.
It's got quite a nice interface, and what seemed to me to be a very sensible test planning structure. I think one of the big downsides was the the open source version didn't have table support in the WYSIWYG test case editor - Not a showstopper, and could be fixed with a little development effort or by spending some money on the professional version.