Tag: Programming

Agile@School 2017 – When the projects come true

Last time we had a great time. I’d have expected some trouble, some problem to manage. Well, everything has been well done. Anything goes. This is the reason why I’m attaching the pictures of the results hereafter, because it’s the best way to describe how the students were making their ideas. Keep in mind that we’re speaking about 18 years old guys, not startups!

Pictures paint a thousand words.

Introducing the teams:

The Messinesi team (Amanda and Alex) is developing a real time collaborative chat. Similar to the famous Slack, its purpose is to make the team’s member more aware of technologies used nowadays, like SignalR and the latest releases of the .Net framework. The name of the project is Notify. The guys are also following an interesting course with Visual Studio, in order to be prepared to become real developers in the future. As you see below, the development is still in progress, it’s just a matter of design. Due to the nature of the project itself, we need to wait for the next releases.

The Random team (Thomas and Luca) is presenting us a natural language bot, without any deep learning in this first release, which replies to a set of questions about Italian famous writers. It replies showing links, information and texts about the author requested by a real user. The name of the project is Italian Authors and it’s been made by integrating the Wit.ai APIs. It will eventually run on Facebook Messenger via Heroku platform. Lots of technologies!

The Scrubs team (Enea and Sebastiano) is working on a similar project, based on a natural language bot, without any deep learning in this first release, which replies to a set of questions about two topics which we should take care of, sports and photography. Also in this scenario, the real user interacts with the chatbot. The name of the project is CPP and it’s been made by integrating the Wit.ai APIs. It will eventually run on Facebook Messenger via Heroku.

 

The Domotic team (Nicodemo and Mattia), as the name of the team describes, is realising an IoT real time application which interacts with a prototype of a “smart house”. You can open and close doors and windows, turn on and off the lights. In this first release, you cannot clean the floor, but I guess we need more time for that feature… Actually the guys could integrate a robot 🙂 . The name of the project is Future House and it’s developed for Arduino using also php.

 

The Human Recognizers team (Marco and Francesco) is developing a face recognition Android app, which associate pictures of people in order to get information about age, mood and so on, also printing a string related to the mood itself. The name of the project is iFinder in consumes Android sdk and Face API by Microsoft. The result is impressive.

The Bar Santa team (Simone And Mirko) is hacking a remote-controlled car. As a result, they’ve got a super car with a camera onboard, stepped motors for wheels, and sensors. Everything mixed in a dedicated chassis, printed by the school’s 3D printer. The name of the project is SuperCar (do you remember Kit?) and it’s been made for Raspberry Pi3.

 

I don’t want to bother you with the teams’ retrospectives and ceremonies, but this time they worked perfectly. Each team started to discuss with us about the pros and cons of their choices, the things to do and the ones to avoid in the future. They depicted everything using starfish diagrams (in italian):

 

What can I say? AWESOME! This is how I’m feeling right now. Lots of ideas, technologies, integrations, and definitely FUN! I hope that everyone else agrees with me.

I guess that the exam will be a great show for those guys, also. The next post will be about the pitch videos they’ll create for each project. I’m excited but I have to bite my tongue, because I’ve already seen something and I don’t want to spoil anything, so…

Stay Tuned!

Agile@School 2017 – obstacles on the path

Hello everyone,

As mentioned in the previous post, the project has been started and we’ve reached the “fourth episode”. This time, Alessandro and I were able to talk with students in order to get which kind of project they are going to complete and show during the final exam.

Like every other project, problems are behind the corner. Indeed, the students didn’t create any task under the related Product Backlog Items. This is what they should have done. The issues were principally:

  • some teams still not had figured any idea to implement
  • some other weren’t able to use Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) in the right way (or few of them simply didn’t wanted to 🙂 )

That’s it, so our last meeting was focused on explaining the advantages of agile methodologies instead of the classic waterfall approach, showing them how to use VSTS correctly in order to clarify any doubt about its use. We started to speak about methodologies because they used to waterfall their project, and this means that they were gathering ideas, instead of thinking in an iterative way.

Although this fact, we could see the first results from the majority of the students which let us being confident about the future of their projects.

As result of this talk, the students seemed to have got why choose a methodology instead of another, being able to manage their work with the right tools. At the end of this day, we’ve assigned them just a simple homework: create the tasks which reflects their development steps, moving PBIs through different status during their work.

That was all for this episode. Stay tuned for any news about the course of the project.

See you to the next post!

Agile@School 2017 – let’s start over

As a recurring project, Agile@School is started again on February, with a new set of projects and ideas. Gabriele will help me again, but it will be a very difficult task. During the past year we followed a Scrum approach, in order to comply the team structure. As you can read here, there were one team with a small bunch of members. Now, we’re getting “bigger”. As a result, we’ll have micro-teams of two/three member each. Great chance for Kanban. Let’s give it a try.

01

How will we approach in the beginning?

  • defining a set of micro-team, that we call “task forces”
  • designing a Kanban board
  • describing personas
  • speaking of some ceremonies we’d like to get rid of
  • speaking of some ceremonies we’ll keep
  • describing the customer journey and the story map practices

The task forces

The term not fits very well, actually; indeed, a task force is something that could be considered as a “defcon 1” team. However, we would give the teams a label which is “strong”. To be honest, we have a little amount of time, so in the end we can say that we’re in hurry already 🙂

The Kanbard board

As we said above, we will have more task forces, most likely six. Therefore, the board will use columns (as usual) for the status management and rows (aka Swimlanes) for separating teams and projects.

02

The board will be created in Visual Studio Team Services, in order to use also the Source Control Manager which relies on it.

Personas

Each team member will populate a simple card, the Persona card, which is depicted in the picture below:

03

As you can see (in Italian), the first column is for Persona details, the second for interests and the third is the “role” which the member would like to have. I know that the last column is not included in any best practice, but I feel that some student could start to think about its job and its future. Could be interesting.

The customer journey

During the next meeting, we’ll ask the students to show us their customer journey. Each team will have to describe the journey of a typical user, with mood for each action it takes and the value which it gets by the action itself.

Conclusions

Kanban, task forces, boards, customer journey, personas, etc. This year is full of new things to get knowledge from. Also the source control manager will change. We will use git on VSTS so we will get different projects in the same place in a quicker way.

And now, let’s start over! 🙂

Automatically link databases to Red Gate SQL Source Control

For the ones that have many databases to keep under source control, it can be really useful to speed up the link-to-source-control process. The only way we have now is to use the GUI provided by Red Gate SQL Source Control. Actually, there’s a github project called SOCAutoLinkDatabases by Matthew Flat, a Red Gate engineer, but, unfortunately it works only on a shared database model (centralised) in TFS. Let’s see how to manage the link using Working Folder (which is also good for many SCM) and dedicated database model (distributed).

Continue reading “Automatically link databases to Red Gate SQL Source Control” →

Accessing SQL Server data with Simple.Data

Recently Michael suggested me a lightweight framework for accessing and manipulating data with SQL Server. I’ve tried it and I’ve found some misunderstanding on the official documentation. The framework I’m speaking for is Simple.Data, a very user-friendly, simple-to-install, quick-to-apply, open and lightweight framework.

After some tests I’ve started to write down an article, that should be taken like a reference due to missing information on official documentation.

You can find it here (in italian).

Hope this helps!

Stay Tuned! 🙂

SQL Saturday Parma – English Slide decks available to download

My SQL Saturday Parma slide decks are available to download on SlideShare.

The main topic of those presentations is database lifecycle management (DLM) on SQL Server.
Concepts: ALM/DLM, team work, differences between code and databases.
We’ve demonstrated the usage of the following tools: Visual Studio with SQL Server Data Tools, Red-Gate ed ApexSQL.
Second session: “Unit testing su database“.
Concepts: unit testing, database testing vs code testing.
We’ve demonstrated testing tools like Red-Gate SQL Test and Visual Studio Unit test projects, and the TSQLUnit framework.
Additionally, I’ve created a set of sample scripts with T-SQL and TSQLUnit on MSDN Code Samples.
Stay Tuned! 🙂

Create C# enum template with SSMS Boost

I’ve spoken about SSMS Boost in this post and now I’m going to apply one of its feature in order to improve the productivity of my team. Speaking about the database side, a table that contains static data can be used as a foreign key referenced table. In my experience those kind of tables are often mapped to enums in our application layer. Creating that enum can be a tedious operation and sometimes it can be very uncomfortable. With SSMS Boost we can enhance our development experience. Continue reading “Create C# enum template with SSMS Boost” →

Avoid nested INSERT EXEC (where possible)

Some days ago, I received a tedious error while executing a pipeline of nested stored procedures, which contains INSERT-EXEC statements. The issue is based on a SQL Server limitation, by design since SQL Server 2005. Actually, the INSERT-EXEC was supported in SQL Server 2000, but I’ve never tried that behavior on the older version. Let’s see the behavior. Continue reading “Avoid nested INSERT EXEC (where possible)” →

How to mark SQL Server objects as deprecated with extended properties

I want to share a “trick” on how to mark SQL Server user objects as deprecated. But first, why we need to mark an object as deprecated?

  • code refactors
  • object schema refactors
  • mandatory backward compatibility in a multi customer scenario
We can use extended properties. They are a set of name/value properties in which you can specify custom value, with your own naming convention. Every SQL Server object can be, let’s say, extended using those properties. There are also three stored procedures which you can use in order to manage extended properties: