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

BIRT - Fix the size of an image

I use a dynamic image as a logo my report in pdf. At the beginning, I use table to align the logo in left or right. I meet a problem with some images with a large width or height. My customer requires that the logo should be displayed in original size. These following steps solves my problem: 1. Use Grid instead of Table 2. Set Grid "Height" is 100% and "Width" is blank 3. Set "Fit to container" for images are "true". Download the the template here .

[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...

Generating PDF/A From HTML in Meteor

My live-chat app was a folk of project Rocket.Chat which was built with Meteor. The app had a feature that administrative users were able to export the conversations into PDF files. And, they wanted to archive these files for a long time. I happened to know that PDF/A documents were good for this purpose. It was really frustrated to find a solution with free libraries. Actually, it took me more than two weeks to find a possible approach. TL, DR; Using Puppeteer to generate a normal PDF and using PDFBox to load and converting the generated PDF into PDF/A compliance. What is PDF/A? Here is a definition from Wikipedia: PDF/A is an ISO -standardized version of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specialized for use in the archiving and long-term preservation of electronic documents . PDF/A differs from PDF by prohibiting features unsuitable for long-term archiving, such as font linking (as opposed to font em...

[Snippet] Generate a new unique "name" string from an existing list

Suppose that we have a list of employees. Everytime, we want to add new employee into this list, the name of the employee will be generated with the following rules: - the name of the new one is set to " [originalname] 1 " - in case the name already exist, " [originalname] 2 " is used, and so on. Here is my code snippet by Javascript: var employees =[ {id: 1, name: 'name'}, {id: 2, name: 'name 1'}, {id: 3, name: 'name 2'}, {id: 5, name: 'name 4'} ]; var commonUtils = { isExistName: function(_name, _collection, _prop) { for(var i = 0; i< _collection.length; i++){ if(_collection[i][_prop].localeCompare(_name)==0){ return true; } } return false; }, generateNewName: function(_name, _collection, _prop){ var i = 1; var searching = true; while (searching) { var newName = _name+ " " + i; if (!this.isExistName(newName, _collection, _pro...

Retrospective with Sailboat

Have you ever got bored with the Retrospective meeting? I have, sometime. Most of the times, this meeting just goes traditionally by answering three questions: "What good things have we done? What bad things have we done? And, what actions should we improve?" Ever and ever again! My team found a way to make it a little bit more exciting. The idea is that each member - not only our Scrum Master - will become a host. If a meeting is hosted by a memeber, the next meeting will be hold by another one. Yeah, I used "Sailboat" pattern in my turn. So, I just want to share with you guys how it was. I started the meeting by telling a short story that I hoped everyone in my team could recall the meaning behind of Retrospective meetings: There is a group of people trying pick up trash in a park. At the first look, the park seem not to have a lot of trash because they are spread out all over the place. However, these people continuously found trash when they sta...

vhandit

Search This Blog