Coming back from spring break not much was done on my end regarding issue 184. However, our team have decided that each member should pick there own issue to solve. After I’ve updated the module from the team’s repository, i came across an issue and couldn’t connect to the server. Because of that, i spent some time trying reconnect to the server. I received help from Haider who was familiar with this problem.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Adestin by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

During this sprint i spent most of my time navigating through the ng2 module to get a strong understanding of it. Our  team spent time solving  issue NGPOC-184 and unfortunately we did not finish on time for the sprint. For me personally, i need to get a better understanding of Angular 2 to actually contribute significantly. Since this is a senior level course, we are given a lot of freedom with the expectation that we would be responsible enough to learn, communicate, and produce meaningful results within our groups. However, that is not the outcome of our team as a whole. We are about halfway through the semester and it’s not to late to pick up some of the slack.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Adestin by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

We have reached the final chapters of the book. The last two chapters talks about teams, projects, mentoring, apprenticeship, and craftsmanship. Even though these two chapters are very brief, there are a lot of important facts and key points that we can take into our careers.

The first chapter talks about working in teams that will sometime consist of programmers, project managers, analyst, and testers. The book explains a concept called “gel” where each members of the team learn each others weakness, strengths, and quirks. It can take a really long time a team to really gel. I can relate to this because i work in teams all the time during school and we don’t always work effectively during the beginning stages. This why a team working on short projects that requires a portion of your time never really learn how to work with each other efficiently. And this is why it is important to form the team before the project; the collaboration will be much more effective depending on the teams experience with each other.

The last chapter of the book starts with the fact that it easy to wiggle through the system and graduate with a degree in Computer Science. Nowadays, Most of the curriculum doesn’t really prepare students for what they will face in the industry. It is important to have a mentor with years of experience working as a software engineer that can teach us what to value and how to behave. This chapter separate programmers into three categories master, journey, and apprentices/interns.  Newly graduates should always start as interns or apprentices. From there they can learn, grow, and gain experience to work on complex projects.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Adestin by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In Chapter 11, Robert Martin talks about pressure and the methods we can follow to handle pressure as software engineers. Being under pressure is something that can either make or break an individual. It is how we handle pressure that defines us as professionals; even in the toughest times a professional must not show signs of distress. Some of the ways that Martin suggests we can manage pressure are avoiding it to began with, not making reckless commitments, and staying clean. Now, I am kind of puzzled that Martin says to avoid pressure because I don’t think anyone purposely tries to put themselves in situations that causes them unmanageable pressure. If we avoided we won’t have to deal with it however, pressure will always find us. These advice are not only applicable to professionals and software engineers, we can also use them in our daily lives to keep manage the distress that derives from being under pressure.

Moreover, Martin talks about collaboration in chapter 12. Collaboration is an essential part of being a software engineer. Most of the programs that engineers works on will always consist of a group of people because there will always be a ton of thing to do. Within that group, there has to be great communication, teamwork, and most important professionalism. Even though at times there will be people that are tough to work with, we have to find a way to strengthen the teamwork. Ultimately, working alone is not always the best choice; when we put our heads together the outcome should be much greater.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Adestin by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In this week’s chapters of The Clean Coder, Robert Martin talks about the importance of meetings and when to determine that a meeting is worth your time. He also talks about  the tools we can use to make accurate, sound, and effective estimations.

According to Martin, not all meetings require your time. If you find out that your time could be spent on something more productive, you can politely refuse the invitation. Even if your presence is demanding by someone of higher authority, you still have to determine whether that authority is more significant than your work schedule. Ultimately, your project is priority over many things and you have to manage your time well in order to complete that project accordingly. Martin also talks about “focus-manna” which programming requires a lot of. Essentially, focus-manna is your ability to concentrate and maintain your focus and unfortunately its limited. It is essential that you use your focus-manna appropriately and recharge by doing activities that doesn’t require much focus.

In chapter 10, we learned about estimations. There is a profound difference of how programmers and businesses understand estimations. Businesses sees them as a commitment and programmers view them as guesses. However in reality, it is difficult for an individual to understand the true nature of an estimation. There is an equation used by the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) to calculate estimations. This was done with trivariate analysis which is consisted of three numbers: Optimistic, Nominal, and pessimistic estimate.

Given these three estimates, we can describe the probability distribution as
follows:
• μ = O+ 4N + P
6

This scheme is designed to help prevent optimistic expectations.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Adestin by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In chapter 7,  Robert talks about the communication between professional developers and Businesses. When it comes to a project, there are a lot of information that is needed from both parties. Developers want to know exactly what they’re suppose to do for a project and businesses want to know exactly what they are going to get. This known as premature precision and most of the time this can never be communicated well. Robert mentions that that the best way to remove all ambiguity from the requirements is by doing acceptance tests. This is where stakeholders and developers collaborative writes a test to define when all requirements are actually done.

In opinion, i believe that acceptance testing is an effective solution to eliminate ambiguity between stakeholders and developers. If both parties can come to a consensus of what “done” actually means, then the communication should be great.

Chapter 8 talks about testing strategies. A developer’s should write their program well enough so that QA doesn’t find any bugs in them. Even though QA’s job is to help developers improve their code, developers should always strive to write clean code. It is a great mindset to maintain. This chapter also covers the benefit of the Test Automation Pyramid which list all the test that a professional organization need to write quality code. It includes Unit, component, integration, system, and manual exploratory tests. These tests covers all aspects of a program to ensure their cleanliness.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Adestin by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week we finished our sprint with only one task that has to be carried over to the next sprint and that is the angular tour of heroes. We also took the time to review each other based on communication, participation, reliability, and attendance. Ultimately our group was rated well with some room for improvement. For the rest of the week we just had to continue working on angular and openMRS. I did not learn anything new this week however, my team and I are ready for the next sprint.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Adestin by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In this week’s chapters of The Clean Coder, Robert C. Martin talks about the importance of test driven development and ways that programmers can practice their art. Robert talks about the first time he became acquainted with TDD. Although he was skeptical at first, he soon realize that TDD had a lot more to offer than just shortening cycle time. There are three crucial laws one must follow when practicing TDD. One, You are not allowed to write any production code until you have first written a failing unit test. Two, You are not allowed to write more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail—and not compiling is failing. Lastly, You are not allowed to write more production code that is sufficient to pass the currently failing unit test. even though these laws does not guarantee perfection in any program,  It is a discipline that enhances certainty, courage, defect reduction, documentation, and design. As professional coder, it would be foolish not to follow these laws because of those benefits.

Moreover Robert explain the importance of practicing. Practicing allows us to keep our mind and skills sharpened and stay up to date. As coders, we should be excited about coding therefore, practicing should be done for the enjoyment. After all, as the author, mentions “Professional programmers practice on their own time. It is not your employer’s job to help you keep your skills sharp for you. It is not your employer’s job to help you keep your resume tuned”. We are responsible for mastering our craft and the best way to do that is practicing.  Additionally, Robert correlates Coding and martial arts with a series of activities he calls the coding dojo. In a dojo there are several activities such as Kata, Wasa, and Randori. The purpose of these activities are to synchronize the mind and the body to practice the movements and decision involve in solving a problem.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Adestin by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In our last chapter we focused on the importance of saying No as well as when and how to say no. Well, this chapter shows that knowing how to say yes in certain situation can also solidify our title as professionals. Saying “yes” is a verbal commitment and Roy Osherove splits it into three parts:  saying you’ll do it, meaning  it, and actually do it. The first part is easy for an individual to say. Saying you will do a certain task doesn’t not always signify that you mean it and it doesn’t always lead to completion. So how do we know who is actually committed? Well, we can confirm whether an individual is actually committed by  identifying their choice of words. Using phrase like “We need to get this done”, “I hope to get this done”, or “I Wish i had time for that” are all phrases that shows signs of non-commitment.  A person who is actually committed and takes responsibility for things would avoid using words like need, should, and wish. Instead, they will start their sentences with “I will” to express their commitment. Thus, putting them in a situation where they are obligated to getting the task done.

When saying “yes” we must consider all the possibilities such as deadlines, estimations, and our well-being. As a professional we can’t just simply say “yes” when we have to sacrifice discipline. Breaking discipline will only make things harder. The book gave an example of an employee named peter who was in a situation where he was considering sacrificing discipline to meet a deadline. It states that:

 as a professional he has a responsibility to maintain certain standards. His code needs to be tested, and needs to have tests. His code needs to be clean. And he has to be sure he hasn’t broken anything else in the system.

We have responsibilities as developers to make sure under any circumstance, that our code is near perfection before release.

This leads to chapter 4 of the book which talks about coding and rules that can be followed. I can agree that working working when you are tired will not lead to a clean and applicable code. The best time to code is when your head is clear, when you’re well-rested, and in a decent mood. I listen to music all the time while coding. It was a surprise to see that the book mentions that it is actually not productive to listen to music while coding. I find it funny that the author accident wrote the lyrics of a song in the comments of his code. Even though that hasn’t happen to me, I’m sure it can happen in the future.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Adestin by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.