Sunday, October 2, 2011

Using Art To Bring Scientific Concepts To Life

By: Yasmen Refaat

Sometimes the grand ideas behind science's most important and intriguing concepts are so abstract they can be difficult to understand. One of the main goals of the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the journal Science and the National Science Foundation, is to help bring these scientific concepts to life through stunning visualizations.

The photographs, illustrations, video, and interactive graphics submitted by the contest's participants are meant to help us understand both the beauty and the science behind life's many secrets. This gallery shows just a few of the winners, which were announced Friday.


Monday, September 26, 2011

The Stand Up Meeting

By: Aya Raafat

Everyday when I start my working day, I've a call for a stand up meeting .. what ever we do.. this gives the team members a push to commit to some tasks for the day to finish it by the end of it.
 Every morning, gather the development team in the same area. That area could be a hallway, a meeting room or whatever space is available for standing. No chairs allowed.

The meeting should be over in under 10-15 minutes. The agenda is : 
  • What I Accomplished Yesterday
  • What I plan to accomplish today
  • What issues are blocking progress 

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Cloud Computing and Mobile Application Development

By: Mina Samy

Cloud computing has been in use for sometime cause it’s a better solution to traditional software solution as it provides Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS).

For an enterprise, Cloud Computing removes the burden of constructing its IT infrastructure by depending on a third-party service provider that owns and manages the enterprise resources and allowing the enterprise users to access these resources on the Internet.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

ASP.NET Security Vulnerability



By: Ahmed Hussam 
Introduction:
I passed by a very interesting article about ASP.NET vulnerability at ScuttGu blog, it was disclosed by Microsoft Security Advisory and here is the details of the vulnerability and the workarounds to avoid being attacked through it

Monday, August 29, 2011

Job Vacancy: User Experience Designer - Web Designer



Symbyo Technologies is seeking an innovative, self-motivated User Experience designer to innovate and support a variety of user experience design and improvement initiatives across our projects and products. The ideal candidate will work collaboratively with several different business and development teams within the organization, providing elegant User Interfaces to complex workflows. A thought leader within the company this candidate will demonstrate an unfailing passion and capacity to advocate on behalf of our customers. This candidate will also demonstrate bar-raising graphic design ability, designing User Experiences that are aligned with the our products brands, styleguide, and peculiarity. Because the scope of this position supports multiple product launches, business needs, and business domains, the ability to balance high-level, holistic reasoning with detail-oriented feature design is imperative.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

JQuery Auto-Complete TextBox for ASP.NET

By: Ahmed Hussam

Introduction:

 jQuery UI AutoComplete widget provides suggestions while typing into the field. Data-Source would be an xml web-service that returns JSON data, which will be providing flexibility for developers to communicate to any remote databases to get list of suggestions, do processing and format output based on the typed letters

Sunday, August 21, 2011

How To Motivate Your Team?

By: Yasmen Refaat

Motivation, motivation, and motivation!! Personally speaking, it's the biggest and heaviest load on leaders. Motivating people is not an easy job, and when a team works without any kind of motivations it becomes like machines!! Rusty machines !!!


I've been working in a charity organization and many volunteering communities since 2006. That let me live great experiences with too many leaders. Some of them ware amazing, others ware just carrying the title, but having nothing to do with its responsibilities!!! Also, I was on charge of a great team (my graduation's project team), so I became more interesting in leadership in addition to my old admiration to management.

So, I found this great article titled with "10 things you can do to motivate your team", and I liked it a lot. It sums up the most important things leaders should do to motivate their teams.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Job Vacancy At Symbyo Technologies



C++ Developers (Medical Imaging, 3D Visualization, Image Processing):

Symbyo Technologies is seeking Top notch C++ Developers and Solution Architects.
This is an excellent opportunity for potential career advancement and exposure to leading edge technology within the medical imaging industry.
You will be based in our Advanced 3D Visualization and Medical Imagining group, responsible for researching, implementing, testing and documenting medical imaging software systems and will take responsibility for the completion of designated software features; designing suitable solutions to complex problems with assistance from a senior engineers and developing prototypes which you will see through to completion.
To be successful, candidates should have an excellent academic record. You will also have proven practical experience of working with C++, and specifically, strong knowledge of computer graphics and algorithms.Additionally, knowledge of parallel/concurrent programming techniques, x86 assembly language and GPU programming (using a shader language or CUDA, for example) is desirable, but not essential. Previous knowledge of medical imaging would also be advantageous.You will be a strong communicator, able to thrive working within a dynamic, innovative team developing industry-leading 3D medical imaging technology and applications. You will be involved in all aspects of the product development lifecycle from requirements capture through to product release and support.
The work is fast paced and intellectually stimulating. If you enjoy a team-oriented, self-directed, flexible work environment, this position may be for you.

Required Skills/Experience:
• BS or advanced degree in Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering or equivalent subject matter
• Solid programming experience with in C++.
• Strong in trouble-shooting skills, and capable of reviewing source code and developing functional unit tests against it
• knowledge of GPU programming (using a shader language or CUDA, for example), 3D visualization is desirable, but not essential.
• Must be detail oriented, organized and able to multi-task
• Have a passion for software quality and is a champion for the end user
• Very strong communication skills and a collaborative approach

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Keep Design by the Minute

By: Sohair Ali
 Software products go through several stages as they mature from initial concept to finished product. After the purpose and specifications of software are determined, software developers will design to develop a plan for software. It is important to design and document software in an organized way so that it can be easily understood and maintained after the initial release. 


While designing software a lot of concepts and practices are the tools of software designers like abstraction, patterns, modularity, cohesion , separation of responsibilities, modularization and OO design principles

After accomplishing the task of design, this work needs to be maintained, reviewed and modified if needed while implementation and we are facing the question of How to write a code that preserves the initial architecture design, make sure of preserving and recovering the design of software in its implementation phase and avoid losing design in code?

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Introduction to Cross Platform Mobile development



With diversity of mobile platforms iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Phone 7, Meego, WebOS, Bada and many more, developers all around the world face incredible challenge to design and build mobile apps twhat run on all this platforms.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Tutorial: How to use jQuery DatePicker UI inside your ASP.NET Web Application

By: Ahmed Hussam
  jQuery DatePicker Features:
 The jQuery UI Datepicker is a highly configurable plugin that adds datepicker functionality to your pages,
 You can customize the date format and language, restrict the selectable date ranges and add in buttons and other navigation options easily.
By default, the datepicker calendar opens in a small overlay onFocus and closes automatically onBlur or when a date is selected. For an inline calendar, simply attach the datepicker to a div or span.
You can use keyboard shortcuts to drive the datepicker:

Sunday, July 17, 2011

The Android Invasion Continues!!

By: Mina Samy

Android, Google’s mobile operating system that dominates the world market with 36% share seems to continue its invasion of new territories other than handsets and tablets. Android is going to get in Home automation, automotive industry, mobile payment and even military activities.
 Android@Home:

At Google I/O 2011 Google the Android@Home framework which will extend Android to home appliances. Android@Home is a set of protocols for controlling light switches and other home appliances through Android. Google revealed an example : "Project Tungsten," a wireless speaker system that can be synced via Android, as well as wireless light switches and other appliances. 


Another aspect of this is the introduction of the Android open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) an API that allows external USB devices including keyboards, mice, and game controllers- based on the open source Arduino electronics platform - to be connected to Android powered devices.

Google demonstrated an exercise bike connected through USB to an Android phone, the phone launched an application that showed heart rate data from the cycle to the phone.

The ADK API currently supports connectivity through USB, but Bluetooth support is planned for the future.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Understanding Collective Intelligence


By: Yasmen Refaat.

Newer web applications trust their users, invite them to interact, connect them with others, gain early feedback from them, and then use the collected information to constantly improve the application.

Users are expressing themselves. This expression may be in the form of sharing their opinions on a product or a service through reviews or comments; through sharing and tagging content; through participation in an online community; or by contributing new content.
This increased user interaction and participation gives rise to data that can be converted into intelligence in your application. The use of collective intelligence to personalize a site for a user, to aid him in searching and making decisions, and to make the application more sticky are cherished goals that web applications try to fulfill.

More formally, collective intelligence (CI) simply and concisely means To effectively use the information provided by others to improve one’s application.

What is collective intelligence?

When a group of individuals collaborate or compete with each other, intelligence or behavior that otherwise didn’t exist suddenly emerges; this is commonly known as collective intelligence. The actions or influence of a few individuals slowly spread across the community until the actions become the norm for the community.

YouTube Example:
In October 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. In its 20 months of existence, YouTube had grown to be one of the busiest sites on the Internet, dishing out 100 million video (As of September 2006) views a day. It ramped from zero to more than 20 million unique user visits a day, with mainly viral marketing—spread from person to person.

In YouTube’s case, each time a user uploaded a new video, she was easily able to invite others to view this video. As those others viewed this video, other related videos popped up as recommendations, keeping the user further engaged. Ultimately, many of these viewers also became submitters and uploaded their own videos as well. As the number of videos increased, the site became more and more attractive for new users to visit.


Harnessing information from users improves the perceived value of the application to both current and prospective users. This improved value will not only encourage current users to interact more, but will also attract new users to the application. The value of the application further improves as new users interact with it and contribute more content. This forms a self-reinforcing feedback loop, commonly known as a network effect, which enables wider adoption of the service.


CI in Web Applications
Collective intelligence of users in essence is
■ The intelligence that’s extracted out from the collective set of interactions and contributions made by your users.
■ The use of this intelligence to act as a filter for what’s valuable in your application for a user—This filter takes into account a user’s preferences and interactions to provide relevant information to the user.

This filter could be the simple influence that collective user information has on a user—perhaps a rating or a review written about a product, as shown in figure 1—or it may be more involved—building models to recommend personalized content to a user.



As shown in figure 2, there are three things that need to happen to apply collective intelligence in your application. You need to:
1- Allow users to interact with your site and with each other, learning about each user through their interactions and contributions.
2- Aggregate what you learn about your users and their contributions using some useful models.
3- Leverage those models to recommend relevant content to a user.




Benefits of Collective Intelligence
Applying collective intelligence to your application impacts it in the following manner:
■ Higher retention rates —The more users interact with the application, the stickier it gets for them, and the higher the probability that they’ll become repeat visitors.
■ Greater opportunities to market to the user—The greater the number of interactions, the greater the number of pages visited by the user, which increases the opportunities to market to or communicate with the user.
■ Higher probability of a user completing a transaction and finding information of interest —The more contextually relevant information that a user finds, the better the chances that he’ll have the information he needs to complete the transaction or find content of interest. This leads to higher click-through and conversion rates for your advertisements.
■ Boosting search engine rankings —The more users participate and contribute content, the more content is available in your application and indexed by search engines. This could boost your search engine ranking and make it easier for others to find your application.


References:
1. Satnam Alag, “Collective Intelligence In Action”. Manning Publications Co., 1st Ed., 2009.


About Yasmen Refaat:

 Associate Software Engeneer, at Symbyo Technologies. Yasmen's experience includes analysing, designing, & developing larg scale comunity based websites.Contact with Yasmen at:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/yasmenrs
.


Sunday, July 3, 2011

Facing Quality Challenges in Agile Teams

By: Aya El-Gebeely

One of the Agile practitioners tweeted  this quote : "Many Agile-related questions I get are of the type "How do we drive a car safely when it has only 3 wheels, no breaks, and a blind driver?". This is pretty true, because many people consider that software product quality will find itself a path through and just be there, without giving it even small portion of thought.  As  mentioned in various literature about Agile teams, that the product Quality is the responsibility of the whole team. All team members work closely(Product owner - Developers - Testers - Architects - Technical Lead..etc.)to get the software product to the light. And the capacity to create high-quality solutions lies in the (Will) of the team and their dedication in considering quality through project's  different phases.
On tight schedules teams tend to squeeze out the time dedicated for QA and testing activities, with a whole focus on getting the set of features done. Actually this may work for small projects and teams, but getting sloppy with process not always succeed; as we ignore the fact that higher penalty  and technical dept will accumulate  on the team, and then you find that more time and cost are depleted in the maintenance and rework. This was discussed before  the Technical dept posted recently.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

How to Branch Strategically ?


Branching is a fundamental part of version control systems. If you're working on any good sized project this is a feature you'll eventually come to depend on to enable simultaneous development of different features.

If you branch strategically, you can maintain the order and consistency of multiple versions of your software. In this article your will learn the best practices for adopting branching in your project regardless of the source control system you rely on.

When you work with a version control system, you must consider how to set up a branch structure. You can create a branch by mirroring the source code file. Then you can change the branch without affecting the source. For example, as the branch structure in the following illustration shows, the MAIN branch contains completed functionality that has passed integration tests, and the DEVELOPMENT branch contains the code that is under construction. When a new functionality in the DEVELOPMENT branch is completed and can pass integration tests, you can promote the code from the DEVELOPMENT branch to the MAIN branch. This process is referred to as reverse integration. Conversely, if you merge the code from the MAIN branch to the DEVELOPMENT branch, the process is referred to as forward integration.
Main Branch


Branching and merging entail the following principles:
  1. Each branch must have a defined policy about how to integrate code into this branch. For example, in the branch structure of the previous illustration, you can assign a team member to own and manage the MAIN branch. This member is responsible for performing the initial branch operation, reverse integrating changes from the DEVELOPMENT branch to the MAIN branch, and forward integrating changes from the MAIN branch to the DEVELOPMENT branch. Forward integration is important when the MAIN branch also integrates changes from other branches.
  2. The MAIN branch must contain code that has passed integration tests so that it is always ready for a release.
  3. The DEVELOPMENT (or work) branch constantly evolves because team members check in changes periodically.
  4. Labels are snapshots of the files in a branch at a specific time.
How often should your team reverse integrate and forward integrate?


As shown in the following illustration, reverse integration and forward integration should occur at least when you complete a user story. Although each team might define completeness differently, completion of a user story generally means that you complete both the functionality and the corresponding unit tests. You can reverse integrate to the MAIN branch only after unit tests have verified the stability of the DEVELOPMENT branch.
Branch across two sprints
If you have more than one work (DEVELOPMENT) branch, forward integration to all work branches should occur as soon as any branch integrates into the MAIN branch. Because the MAIN branch is kept stable, forward integration is safe. Conflicts or failures at the work branches might occur because you cannot guarantee that the work branches are stable.
It is important that you resolve all conflicts as soon as possible. By using a gated check-in for the MAIN branch, you help make the reverse integration much easier because quality gates help avoid conflicts or errors in the MAIN branch.

As the following illustration shows, you can check in changes to a work branch periodically to complete a user story. You can implement multiple user stories in the same branch at the same time. However, you can reverse integrate to the MAIN branch only when you complete all the in-progress work. It is recommended that you group user stories by similar size because you do not want a large user story to block the integration of many small ones. You can split the two sets of user stories into two branches.
Check-in Completes User story

You should create branches in the following situations:
  • When you must release code on a different schedule/cycle than the existing branches.
  • When your code requires a different branch policy. If you create a new branch that has the new policy, you can add strategic value to your project.
  • When functionality is released to a customer and your team plans to make changes that do not affect the planned release cycle.
You should not create a branching for each user story because it creates a high integration cost. The overhead of managing branches can become significant if you have many branches.

Your team should be able to release code at the end of any sprint. By using Team Foundation Server, you can label a branch to take a snapshot of the code at a specific point in time. As the following illustration shows, you can label the MAIN branch for a release. This lets you return the branch to its state at this point.
Label a branch to take a snapshot of the code
Because you must implement updates on releases, creating a branch for a release helps your team continue to work independently on the next sprint without creating conflicts with future releases. The following illustration shows a branch that contains code for an update and that is reverse integrated into the MAIN branch after a release at the end of the second sprint.
Reverse integrate a branch that contains update
When you create a branch for a release, you should create that branch from the MAIN branch, which is the most stable. If you branch for release from a work branch, it can cause integration challenges because the stability of work branches is not guaranteed.

Source: link

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Product Managers Job Role @ Symbyo



In this blog article we will highlight the role Product Managers play in Symbyo Technologies.

Product Managers at Symbyo acts as a managed conduit between the business world and a project team. In the beginning of a project life cycle, they drive gathering requirements, expectations, and constraints and distill them into a solution definition. As a project progresses, Product Managers works with the team to clarify what has been gathered and works with stakeholders to refine expectations. As a solution starts to take form, they reverse the conduit flow to start to prepare stakeholders for the coming solution.

Quality Goals
The quality goals for Product Managers are the following:
  • Satisfy stakeholders
  • Define solution within project constraints

Focus

Product Managers ensures that all stakeholder expectations are understood, managed, and met throughout a project. In addition, Product Managers ensures that a project sponsor is satisfied with the progress and outcome of a project. To be effective, Product Managers needs to understand, communicate, and ensure success from a stakeholder perspective. To do this, they need to gain knowledge about customers' business, success factors, and key performance measures. They own and drive the definition of requirements and feature sets as well as help the team understand user profiles and how users will use a solution. As you can tell, it is a very communications-oriented group.

As discussed previously about partnering with a customer, Product Managers leads this effort. They collaborate with customers to drive a solution vision and adjust both the vision and expectations as a project continues. It cannot be stressed enough how critical it is to manage customer expectations. Stuff happens, no plan is able to cover all project impacts, and as such, sharing that information in a no-fault environment is very important and healthy.

The importance of effectively managing expectations can be illustrated with an example involving the anticipated delivery of five solution features from a team to a customer by a certain date. If a team delivers only three features when a customer expects delivery of all five, a project will be deemed a failure both by the customer and by the team.

If, however, Product Management maintains constant two-way communication with the customer during a feature development and production period, changes are made with regard to customer expectations that ensure success. Product Management might include customers in the trade-off decision-making process and inform them of changing risks and other challenges. Unlike the previous scenario, customers can assess the situation and agree with the team that delivery of all five features within the specified period is unrealistic and that delivery of only three is acceptable. In this scenario, the delivery of three features now matches the customer's adjusted expectations, and both parties will consider the project a success.

Functional Areas

The Product Managers are responsible for several functional areas, including Marketing/Corporate Communications, Business Analyst, and Product Planning.

Marketing/Corporate Communications

This functional area is the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product, solution, or service. Nearly every solution needs to be introduced and promoted, even if it is a solution being rolled out internally to employees. When solution promotion is internal-facing, it is refered to as Corporate Communications.
Whether it is called a marketing plan or a corporate communications plan, this plan needs to outline how to excite the target audience. After all, not everyone will welcome change; even if it is a new and improved solution. Typical promotional efforts on a project involve launch promotions, sustained promotions, and public relations. Promotional efforts run the gamut from sending out fliers and e-mail to full advertising campaigns.
Key Responsibilities
This functional area and the others to follow have key responsibilities. Key responsibilities for this functional area include the following:
  • Marketing and public relations messages to excite and positively affect the target customer and users
  • Understanding the competitive landscape
  • Distribution channels so target customers easily acquire a solution
  • For packaged solutions, enabling customers to have a positive experience buying and using a solution
Key Activities
Each functional area has a set of key activities to help uphold its responsibilities. Some activities are done throughout a project; some are done each iteration. Key activities for this functional area include the following:

  • Develop a plan to promote a solution
  • Be able to highly differentiate a solution so it stands out from the competition
  • Set up and prepare distribution channels

Business Analyst

A Business Analyst functional area works in conjunction with a sponsor(s) to gather, manage, and refine throughout the life cycle all the market information, all functional and operational requirements, all stakeholder expectations, and anything else that could affect the definition and delivery of a solution.

To start, a Business Analyst team forms an initial vision and conceptual understanding of a solution, given insight of business needs and opportunities as well as the competitive landscape. As a solution vision, solution road map, and constraints are worked into high-level requirements, business analysts work with product planners (discussed next) to segment a solution into projects to deliver capability incrementally.
Key Responsibilities
  • Solution landscape
  • Stakeholder expectations
  • Quantifying a solution's return on investment (ROI)
  • Sponsor relationship
Key Activities
  • Perform objective cost/benefit analyses to help communicate to the team a defined stack ranking of requirements and feature priority
  • Assist sponsor's development of a business case
  • Define and maintain business justification for a projectDefine and measure business value realization and metrics
  • Manage customer expectations and communications
  • Determine business metrics and success criteriaProvide requirements and feature trade-off decisions

Product Planning

As opposed to a Business Analyst functional area that is more externally focused, a Product Planning functional area works with the team on a tactical level, as depicted in the following figure. Product planners take a vision and conceptual solution and drive a delivery strategy.


As discussed, Symbyo software development methodology recommends that solutions be incrementally delivered through versioned releases. A release is a bundling of solution features and capabilities so that it can be shared either internally among the team or externally with stakeholders. A Product Planning functional area coordinates and manages versioned solution releases. A release can encompass one or more teams' efforts. For instance, a release might be made up of new features from some teams and updates from others with previously released features. This functional area coordinates with Product Management from each of the subteams to present an integrated solution version for release.
Product planning entails understanding the requirements of a solution completely, including what the needs of the business are, how customers will use it, what support issues will be, and what alternatives are available. It also entails working with the team to agree upon prioritization of requirements, capabilities, and feature sets; issues; risks; and so forth.
Key Responsibilities
  • Shared project and solution vision
  • Working with the respective teams to deliver a solution version consistent with a solution road map
  • Being the authority on requirements and expectations associated with each release
  • Solution definition and solution definition process
Key Activities
  • Stack-rank requirements and features for a solution and for each release
  • Balance and trade off requirements with project(s) constraints
  • Perform market research, market demand, competitive intelligence/analysis
  • Gather, analyze, and prioritize customer and business requirements
  • Perform release-level requirements and feature trade-off decisions
  • Identify a multiversion release plan


Symbyo Is continuously looking for talented product managers to join our team, if you feel you have the qualification, experience and passion to excel in a product manager role in Symbyo Technologies, Then apply online through our careers section. www.symbyo.com/careers/

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Applying Agile Techniques to Software Architecture

Introduction
The agile methodologies are getting widely accepted all over the world. However, there is still a lot of discussion and debate on how to apply those methodologies to the architectural space. Most conflicting issues arise between the ‘big design upfront – an approach that is strongly discouraged by the agile approach practitioners and the traditional approach to architectural design. In this post you will read on how you can achieve technical excellence, streamlined development practices, and a constant and ever-increasing flow of business by integrating the agile approach in to your software architecture. This can be achieved with a set of team dynamics, conceptual practices, and specific technologies that are proposed herein.

Architectural dynamic utilized in Agile teams
One of the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto states that “the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” This is something that is considered as a foundation here, especially with regard to the shared specialization.
The architecture is an activity that is historically performed with emphasis on the early stages of a project. The agile development on the other hand, lays its focus on emergent design and iterative production. Thereby, it creates a series of interesting challenges down the road.
The basic characteristic of the agile approach is that it believes in shared responsibility. Unlike the traditional approach wherein a software architect was considered wholly responsible for creating the software architecture and higher-level design, in case of the agile approach this responsibility of the software architect is diluted. In this approach, the software architecture is developed by the whole team. Hence, it helps in preserving its multi disciplinary nature. Now, that doesn’t mean the role of software architect is no longer considered important. It goes without saying that the software architect will still remain the person who will conceptualize the idea of the software architecture however, he will explain the design to the team members and they all will contribute in its development. The benefit here is that the entire team participates in understanding the implications of the design and continuously evaluates them.
It is a fact that key considerations such as the modularity strategy, how communication is handled within and outside the application, and how data and services are accessed and abstracted are better analyzed when a team sits and discusses about them rather than an individual handling them all simultaneously. In this way, the team members contribute their suggestions, their fears and concerns. Hence, the probability of failure is reduced to a great extent.
These challenges are usually tackled by holding regular meeting of the team members for architectural discussion and revision. These review and design meetings comprise a lot of white boarding and open talk. Also, it helps to have the most important guidelines permanently exposed in the meeting area. These could include diagrams, checklists or reference charts around the walls, and semi-permanent flip charts that can be used as posters.

Patterns and practices followed in Agile architecture
The big design approach leaves us with several inconveniences. To avoid this one of the most common approach suggested it “sashimi” approach. Here separate design for each part is not developed instead, small codes are developed with the intent to connect all the pieces and then the main functionality is constructed. This will give you the same end to end set up that you wanted. The objective is to do away with complexities of big building architectural components. Since there are repetitions of some of the processes become unnecessarily big and unmanageable.
However one challenge that is faced with to replace this support system with architectural pieces is to define a decoupled API. At the outset developing the API becomes the most critical thing to do. For similar reasons it is advised to star with absolutely no implementation. Even if you use a third party component it is advised that you follow a similar practice.
Architectural Pattern
Concentric approach has also emerged as a most common approach for agile development of software for architecture. The first step is to analyze and develop technical vision of the desired solution. This technical vision enables you not only to compare your own progress but also to guide you as to what your subsequent action should be. Thus it is important to establish a logical continuity in your entire planning. The second step would be to decompose the entire step into as many small manageable steps as possible. This not only makes the job easier in terms of division of responsibility but also to check progress and to check whether the person to whom the responsibility was given has lived up to it or not. This also helps in adding up new functionality if needed. This helps us do away with the requirement of having to redo the entire program all over again.
The next step is to describe each such decomposition in terms of architectural styles. This helps us make this decomposition more understandable to people who are not directly linked with the project. The trickiest part is to define the layers. The layers have to be so defined that they represent the decomposed components of the project. If they are clearly defined then it becomes easier for the person to whom the responsibility is entrusted to understand and execute the work better. This also makes it easier to distribute the work among teams so that development of each part can be closely monitored and handled. This also helps understand which a particular component is lagging.
The next level is the packaging of the software to turn them into independent saleable software packages. This helps to turn them into independently recognizable software packages.
The next step is to finally develop the program languages and introduce the same to the stake holders.
However one should keep in their mind that all these different steps in the architecture can be undertaken in an independent basis as well. The latter would be in congruence with the needs and goals of the project!
Quality Attributes required in architecture
It is a common aspect in the world of architecture of what are the aspects which one should consider in a system design. There are several qualities and attributes which are essential. In perspective of agility one should keep in mind the attributes which must be managed in view of the backlog of the product. The implementation should be done on an incremental basis. In specific terms it means the management of a mix of needs, both the quality attribute requirements as well as features. Interestingly, the several qualities attribute lead to a trade off decisions and analysis where the usual prioritization might not prove to be enough!
The authors suggest that in order to manage quality attribute in an effective manner, one need to consider the latter as a goal whereas the requirements as a support system and user stories to the goal. It is important for the stories to have some normal acceptance criterion which re defined clearly. This is vital such that the tests that are implements can be neatly written out. For instance, some of the requirements are performance which need the resource usage and response time.
Validation of the architecture
The validation and testing of the architecture are the last stage of this section. From the authors point of view there are automated quality-attribute requirements testing, test-driven development, environment-configuration management, automated integration testing, and application-configuration management and automated deployment.
The authors are of the belief that interfaces should be defined as in the first section. Unit tests which can be executed should be used in the definitions. These specifications will have a dual role. Firstly they will safeguard for multi component and local refactoring and secondly they will be the point of entry for identifying defects in the reporting of the incident. The basic idea is that the implementation needs to be correct or changed in sync with the defect! However one should bear in mind that there are several changes in the architecture that will not be noticeable in unit tests!
In order to have a good management of the changes which should exceed the contracts of unit tests, one needs automated tests. The latter is a must for quality attributes and integration. While automated tests are difficult to create, their results are superior. These tests need to be such that they have a lower frequency which is a result of their resource usage.
Some of the examples include the following:
· Scalability: There is an acceptable amount of response time in the event of increase in system load. There is a planned capacity along with tool support which is a must for these tests. In this case both the server and client site needs to be kept in mind. The deployment also needs to be automated in the testing environment.
· Flexibility: The layers pattern needs to be instantiated. The tests need to be configured such that the acceptance needs to layer by layer, starting from the top layer only!
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For the above to come true, one need to manage the configuration in two levels, one which is dependent on the environment and one is not. The automated deployment will be enabled in case of environment dependent configuration and focuses on the local and physical resource configuration! For the remaining configuration, there will be an issue that is the variability of the available functionality!
Technologies and techniques
It is vital to use the appropriate techniques and technologies in order to achieve the needed discipline through automation.
The agile world is one which has given more importance to human and their interactions rather than to tools and processes. in lieu of the above a helpful set of tools have been devised which make tedious and manual jobs away from individuals and make the execution frequent and fast. The latter is simple use to the constant feedback which is provided making it easier for human beings to act.
In order to attain the first level of technology, it usually includes frameworks and regular testing tools. Some of the unit testing tools includes xUnit to Cucumber apart from others. There are others like Selenium which is functional testing tools apart from several others which have a host of technologies needed for stress and performance testing. All of these run successfully on a built server as well individually at varying frequencies.
In a nutshell, while the basic development proactive is undertaken, it is supplemented with a specific unit test, stress level and acceptance to validate the architecture. There are style analysis, afferent and efferent coupling, cyclomatic complexity, code coverage statistics, lined of code per module and other such checks which were introduced in the second level. These tools are used in NDepend, StyleCop, FXCop, CheckStyle, JDepend, and Lattix among others. In the area of dynamic languages like Python, JavaScript and Ruby, there in an inherent problem in the implementation. However this should be filled up soon!
The third step is about metrics involving maintainability and flexibility regarding the project life cycle. In this arena, Visual Studio Team System has made immense progress.
It has been seen that a model needs to be in place for validation of a model of architecture. The important factor is for the automation of the process for the extraction of the required Meta data which is needed to validate the references, module composition and code. In addition, the distinguishing aspect of the module or code view of the system, starting from the runtime view in the evaluation period is vital! Lastly, learning about the performance of levels of reverse engineering is also done. The final step in the process involves the configuration and deployment in the varying staging
It is essential to have the project relevant and appropriate techniques in each fold and step of the main plan. The latter ensures that the controls are planted in the proper places with commencement of the project.
Conclusion
Symbyo Technologies strongly belief that the consideration of the architecture is the most fundamental aspect which creates value to the software projects. Additionally, the agile teams have immense techniques, tools and mechanics which are on offering for the software architecture society. Interestingly, these contributions have been considered one of the best in its area. It provides immense benefits to the users and enhances one’s results and project value!


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