Awareness of Product Development

Software development can be understood simply as a program to receive inputs (i.e customer needs) and then produce outputs (i.e working software). It is worth it to know how many steps are in that program. When something gets stuck in a step, everyone is aware of that.

The first painting of my son

The General Process Big Picture

There are two main factors in this picture including the people with roles and their interactions. All people involved in developing the product know their responsibilities clearly and how to make things done right. Therefore, a good collaboration can be reached.

Product Roadmap Contribution

It would be great for developers to know what the next features to work on are as well as when those features will be delivered. Therefore, the product roadmap is very important.

The items in the roadmap should be contributed by ALL people involved in the product.

Because software engineers directly develop, test, delivery, and monitor the software, they should also contribute ideas to the roadmap.

How to contribute

- For small features, just create a User Story in the Product Backlog and share it with Product Owner (PO)

- For big features (knowns as Epic), create a document to describe it and discuss it with the PO.

Technical Consulting

The sales team, Product Manager, and PO work closely with customers. However, they are almost non-technical people. Therefore, technical consulting from Developers is needed.

Normally, the process of technical consulting consists of the following steps:

- Product Manager/Product Owner creates a document to describe the features' idea

- Developers describe the proposals including architectures and rough estimation. It is important that Developers are the ones who give the estimation directly. The Technical Architect plays the role of facilitating the team to have good proposals. Depending on the feature’s complexity, the research/spy user story should be created first.

For simple issues, technical consulting also can be simply conducted by direct communication without the need of creating a document.

Product Operation

Even though Developers do not operate and maintain the applications in the production environment, they should know how it is operated too. It will impact how the features are implemented as well as avoid some issues when running in production by implementing a good mechanism. Therefore, it requires some transparent information for them.

- A document describes the deployment views, infrastructure, practices, version, etc (i.e Confluence pages)

- Communication channels (i.e weekly catch-up)

Comments

If We Want to Go Fast, We Need to Go Well

Have you ever thought that we won't need to code anymore because programs might be generated from specification? The answer can be yes or no; there is still arguing about it. The programming language is more and more closed to the requirements. The starting is from a very low level as Assembly to a very high level like Python. However, it doesn't make much sense when saying that we will eliminate coding. For me, we currently still need to express our ideas in exact words that tells the machine what we want. Otherwise, I hope in the future the machine is intelligent enough to understand our requirements directly from our words. ;) Take a look at the famous quote of Robert C.Martin about what I mentioned above: "Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we wi...

AngularJS - Build a custom validation directive for using multiple emails in textarea

AngularJS already supports the built-in validation with text input with type email. Something simple likes the following: <input name="input" ng-model="email.text" required="" type="email" /> <span class="error" ng-show="myForm.input.$error.email"> Not valid email!</span> However, I used a text area and I wanted to enter some email addresses that's saparated by a comma (,). I had a short research and it looked like AngualarJS has not supported this functionality so far. Therefore, I needed to build a custom directive that I could add my own validation functions. My validation was done only on client side, so I used the $validators object. Note that, there is the $asyncValidators object which handles asynchronous validation, such as making an $http request to the backend. This is just my implementation on my project. In order to understand that, I supposed you already had experiences with ...

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...

How I did customize "rasa-nlu-trainer" as my own tool

Check out my implementation here Background I wanted to have a tool for human beings to classify intents and extract entities of texts which were obtained from a raw dataset such as Rocket.chat's conversation, Maluuba Frames or here . Then, the output (labeled texts) could be consumed by an NLU tool such as Rasa NLU. rasa-nlu-trainer was a potential one which I didn't need to build an app from scratch. However, I needed to add more of my own features to fulfill my needs. They were: 1. Loading/displaying raw texts stored by a database such as MongoDB 2. Manually labeling intents and entities for the loaded texts 3. Persisting labeled texts into the database I firstly did look up what rasa-nlu-trainer 's technologies were used in order to see how to implement my mentioned features. At first glance rasa-nlu-trainer was bootstrapped with Create React App. Create React App is a tool to create a React app with no build configuration, as it said. This too...

[Snippet] CSS - Child element overlap parent

I searched from somewhere and found that a lot of people says a basic concept for implementing this feature looks like below: HTML code: <div id="parent"> <div id="child"> </div> </div> And, CSS: #parent{ position: relative; overflow:hidden; } #child{ position: absolute; top: -1; right: -1px; } However, I had a lot of grand-parents in my case and the above code didn't work. Therefore, I needed an alternative. I presumed that my app uses Boostrap and AngularJs, maybe some CSS from them affects mine. I didn't know exactly the problem, but I believed when all CSS is loaded into my browser, I could completely handle it. www.tom-collinson.com I tried to create an example to investigated this problem by Fiddle . Accidentally, I just changed: position: parent; to position: static; for one of parents -> the problem is solved. Look at my code: <div class="modal-body dn-placeholder-parent-positi...

vhandit

Search This Blog