Development Practices at Inventive Designers
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I talked at the University of Antwerp about the way we organize our development team at Inventive Designers. EESTEC LC Antwerp organizes such presentations from time to time for the students. We try to develop our software efficiently, with an emphasis on quality, but still being able to deliver features in a timely fashion. We try out new techniques regularly and see if we can benefit from them. It was a good opportunity for the audience to get some idea of how things could work in the field. It's not always clear what to expect when starting at your first job, and a lot of processes are applicable when doing school projects also. I got some interesting questions and had the opportunity to elaborate some more after the presentation. I was impressed with their initiatives for organizing their teams. We are also involved in projects at the University of Antwerp, as an industrial partner. We like to stay in touch with the academical world, to stimulate innovation and good education, and to attract new talent.
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Development Practices at Inventive Designers
- 1. Development practices at Inventive Designers Tars Joris – Development Manager 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com
- 2. Who am I? Tars Joris • 1997-2001: Master in Computer Science: University of Antwerp • 2001-2006: Developer at eVision bvba: Software for the furniture industry • 2006-2008: Developer at Inventive Designers • 2008-now : Development Manager at Inventive Designers 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 2
- 3. Agenda General Tools Processes • About Inventive Designers • IDE • Planning • VCS • Meetings • The team • Bug tracking • Code reviews • The software products • Continuous integration • Testing 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 3 • New features
- 4. About Inventive Designers nv • Software Product Company: all in-house development • Services around these products: Integration + Customization • Focus on innovation • Participate in and organize meetings for working groups and communities • W3C: XSL-FO, XForms, Web Crypto • Other: AFP Color Consortium, Belgian Eclipse User Group, Scala, Big data, … 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 4
- 6. The development team 4 team leads • 2 Research & Development Managers • 1 Release / Quality Assurance Manager • 1 Development Manager / SCRUM Master 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 6
- 7. Products Scriptura Engage Working actively on the last 2 products IntelliStamp 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 7
- 8. Some metrics on Scriptura Engage • Working on 8th major release • 6 major platforms • 87133 automated tests running across 24 builds on 18 servers for combinations of 5 java versions, 9 OSes, 3 CPU architectures, 5 browser versions and 5 databases • 3.7 Gb codebase in 289.811 files and 86.007 folders • 2 million lines of code • 1564 libraries • 12 years of development • 200+ releases 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 8
- 9. Without processes / tools When will that feature be available? When it’s ready. Will it work? It might. Can we get a new version? Sure, in 5 minutes. But it broke last week’s fix. Oh yeah, oops. What was the problem again? 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 9
- 11. Tools IDE - Eclipse 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 11
- 12. IDE - Eclipse • Integrated Development Environment • Most of the code is Java • Also XSLT, XForms, Javascript, SQL, XQuery, Xcode, … 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 12
- 13. Tools Version Control System - Git 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 13
- 14. VCS - Git: What? • Version Control System • Distributed • Eclipse plug-in / Powerful command-line 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 14
- 15. VCS - Git: What? Atlassian Stash • On own hardware • Central repository • Single point of truth (not required by Git) • Web interface 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 15
- 16. VCS - Git: Why? • Code sharing and collaboration • History: when was this changed? By who? Why? • Backup: Change/delete code as much as you want • Tagging: what exactly was in a certain release? • Branching: work on different versions of a product at the same time 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 16
- 17. VCS - Git: Nice features • Local commits • Local history • Light-weight branching • work on several issues at the same time (commit what you have and switch to another branch) • No manual management of patches 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 17
- 18. Tools Bug Tracking - Jira 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 18
- 19. Bug Tracking - Jira: What? System for tracking • Bugs • • Filed by customers (external) Filed by services/development (internal) • Tasks • • • Changes to test-infrastructure Small enhancements Actual parts of a new feature implementation • New features • • Requests filed by customers Strategic features 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 19
- 20. Bug Tracking - Jira: What? • Link with support cases • Comments by developers • Code changes automatically linked • Time tracking • To do list (assigned issues) • Bugs/tasks • Review subtasks • Test subtasks • Describe subtasks 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 20
- 22. Bug Tracking - Jira: Why? • Trail/history of a code-change • Link from code-change to • • • • • Jira issue Comments wiki-pages support case customer e-mails • Mark issues related / duplicate • Estimate work / plan sprint / assign work • Workflow: review / test / research / describe 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 22
- 23. Tools Continuous Integration - Hudson 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 23
- 24. Continuous Integration – Hudson: What? • Runs automated builds • • • at scheduled times manual triggered by another build (chain) • Compiles all code when there’s a change (throughout the day) • Runs automated tests with different combinations of OS, JDK, database, … • • • • Unit tests: verify result of a Java-method End-to-end tests: verify files written on disk or interrogate public APIs of the system Browser tests: Automatically launch a browser and interact (type text, click buttons, verify HTML) GUI tests: Launch eclipse, … 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 24
- 26. Continuous Integration – Hudson: Why? • Controlled environment for running tests: consistency • History of test results • Statistics: code coverage, … • Produces nightly builds • Useful for beta testing • Closer to an actual release then a development environment • Use it to test against, to catch build-problems early (obfuscation, …) 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 26
- 29. Planning Sprints of 4 weeks (20 days) • 17 days of development • 3 days of manual testing Code freeze • 5 days later: release x R Sprint x Week 1 Development 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 29 Testing Week 2 Week 3 R Week 4 Testing Sprint x + 1 Week 1 Development
- 30. Planning How do we decide what to do next? • Bugs • Backlog (input from customers, services, development) • New features • Roadmap • Input from stakeholders • Customers • Other departments (services, …) • Strategic (management) 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 30
- 32. Meetings Sign-Off • last day of sprint • developers • knowledge sharing • explain next sprint Sprint review • 1st day of sprint • developers + stakeholders • demo’s last sprint R Sprint x Week 1 Development Technical meeting • 1st day of sprint • team leaders 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com • planning/priorities/… 32 Testing Week 2 Week 3 R Week 4 Testing Sprint x + 1 Week 1 Development Stand-up • every day • developers • yesterday/today/impediments
- 33. Processes Code Reviews 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 33
- 34. Code Reviews: What? Before a code change makes it into the product, reviewed by another developer • All bug-fixes are reviewed • New features are not formally reviewed, but behavior and design is discussed with team leads (another process) 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 34
- 35. Code Reviews: Why? • 4 eyes see more than 2 • Trace down mistakes (typos, oversights, reasoning errors) early on • A fresh look on the problem • Guard coding guidelines and best practices • Helps when coaching junior developers 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 35
- 36. Code Reviews: How? • New branch in Git • Commit until your code is ready • Push to stash • Open a “pull request” (request for pulling my branch in the main branch) • Reviewer gives remarks and ultimately accepts patch • Pull request is merged in main branch 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 36
- 39. Testing: Automated tests • Hudson builds • Add automated tests while developing New Features • Add automated tests when fixing a bug (regression tests) 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 39
- 40. Testing: Manual tests At the end of each sprint, every issue (bug, task, new feature) is tested by another developer • Again, a fresh look on the problem (like review) • Was the customer’s problem actually fixed? R Testing Sprint x R Sprint x + 1 Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Development Testing Week 1 Development Beta testing • Scenarios that are tested manually, just before a major release • User can see other problems that are not captured in tests R Testing Sprint x Week 1 R Testing Sprint x Week 2 Week 3 Development Week 4 Week 1 Testing 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 40 Development R Testing Sprint x Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 1 Testing Development R Sprint x + 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 1 Testing Development
- 41. Processes New features 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 41
- 42. New features 4 phases • Research • Describe • Estimate • Implement (+ write tests and documentation) Resembles “Waterfall”, but no “Big Design Up Front” because we split features and deliver increments. 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 42
- 43. New features “Definition of Done” (SCRUM-principle) We saw a shift: • Works in developer’s workspace • Builds and the automated tests succeed • Documentation is available • Is deployed on a live instance (cloud) 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 43
- 44. With processes / tools When will that feature be available? The first 2 sub-features in 3 weeks. Will it work? The discussed scenarios are tested every night, your output with sample data is still the same. Can we get a new version? Sure, in 3 weeks. But it introduced a bug. We’re sorry. It’s a corner case we didn’t think of. We’ll add an automatic test to make sure it won’t break again. 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com 44
- 46. More info? Contact us: EU phone: +32 3 425 40 00 US phone: 011 32 3 425 40 00 email: info@inventivedesigners.com 3 December 2013 www.inventivedesigners.com Comics were taken from Geek & Poke and are licensed under Create Commons 3.0