Category Archives: Computer Science

Thanks for Coming to My Test Talk™

CS SERIES (3)After learning some life lessons through the pages I’ve skimmed from my copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey; this article’s version for software developers in test caught my eye. What exactly are the seven highly effective habits of SDETs? Here are the seven habits that Angie Jones, a senior developer advocate at Applitools, wrote about: being intentional, enhancing development skills, enhancing testing skills, exploring new tools, automating throughout the product’s tech stack, collaborating, and automating beyond the tests.

If anyone is interested in becoming a SDET, they should follow Jones’ advice as she is very familiar with interviewing SDET candidates. Something thought-provoking about the first one is how automation projects are not always the best option. Before this article, I understood that not everything required automation but it was the end goal for more projects or companies overall. This is due to my experience; for some reason I believed that just because the company I was at wanted automation for something that everyone else would too. After reading this, I am now understanding that automation is only the goal when it is aligned with the overall outcome.

I am noticing a consistent pattern of guides to becoming a good software developer or tester containing similar tips like “enhancing development skills” and “enhancing testing skills” as people in this industry must always keep learning to stay on top of what’s new. Due to the repetition, I have been trying to keep an eye out for the more unique ideas. One of the ideas that stood out to me more is the one of collaborating.

Jones listed careers ranging from business analytics to software development and mentioned how they would be good matches for pairing up with SDETs to help each other better understand certain features and the importance of what they will be working on. From a sociological standpoint, I like this approach to finding all the resources to complete a project outside of the department. As someone who is always looking for ways to connect with people or connect people to other people, this is an effective idea for helping companies and their people feel more at ease with their jobs. The SDETs may feel less pressure knowing they are not entirely on their own and can request help when necessary.

Article: https://techbeacon.com/7-habits-highly-effective-sdets

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

if (two < one) {

CS SERIES (2)According to music artists, two is better than one. When it comes to designing code that has two parts, this may not be the case. In Max Kanat-Alexander’s article, he explains how he has a personal rule of needing to know how generic his code needs to be. He describes it as if he were designing an audio decoder and started out with supporting WAV files and then later needed to add support for MP3 files. His solution was for what he only needed on its own instead of having to copy and paste the common parts for the format; he emphasizes that “it’s not just two implementations that are bad, but also two locations.” Another rule Kanat-Alexander has for helping this stay consistent is to create code well enough to ensure you would ideally never have to go back and change it if another part of the code has to be modified.

I found this information useful because I believe that developers are always striving to be the most efficient coders they can be. In order to do so, using two of Kanat-Alexander’s methods would help them plan to code more effectively. Just imagine the potential headache of realizing you have to go further back to code you thought was finished and then even further back when you notice a change on top of what you originally needed to make. This will probably affect how I will work in the future as it will make me sit back and think beyond the task at hand. It would allow me to save room for potential add-ons without them crisscrossing, which would allow me to skip out on having to do more rework.

At the end of the article, Kanat-Alexander notes that the reader does not have to take this as a “hard and fast law of the universe” and I appreciate how he tries to help the reader but does not try to push them to do it his way. In terms of the subject, I do not think my thoughts have changed too much as I do want to learn how to code better and I would like to continue finding out about people’s coding structure process.

Article: https://www.codesimplicity.com/post/two-is-too-many/

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

Testing, Testing. QAn You Hear Me?

CS SERIES (1)To kick off this series, I wanted to introduce why Software Quality Assurance (SQA) testing is important not only for testers to understand, but for developers as well. From my experience, I’ve become familiar with manual testing and exploring different types of automated testing for web applications. I wanted to know a little more about how being a good developer also includes being a good tester and found an article on SimpleProgrammer which reveals the importance of knowing how to test.

John Sonmez, the founder of SimpleProgrammer, says that he “owe[s] a large amount of the success [he] ha[s] had in [his] career as a software developer to [his] background in testing.” I can see why he feels that way, as using just a little more time to double-check what you have created could save you even more time in the long-run. For instance, if something you have spent hours working on seems complete and you do not double-check it and pass it on to a QA team, you have to wait for someone in QA or a testing platform to check it. That could take anywhere between minutes to a few days or more. Once it is QA tested, maybe a bug is found and your task falls back into your hands again.

Could the scenario above been preventable? Yes and no. It is a true that “you can never find all the bugs or defects in a piece of [theoretical] software and you can never test every possible input into the [theoretical] software” but you can try your best. This doesn’t necessarily mean having to do your own end-to-end regression testing through the entire software each time you add a minuscule feature but you should thoroughly check what you have changed and the features directly connected to it.

The article continues to describe common testing forms and what they each mean for developers. Sonmez supports the Agile cycle of software development and describes it in the article as well.

Article: https://simpleprogrammer.com/software-developers-know-testing-qa/

 

From the blog CS-Series by samanthatran and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The CS Series || Intro V2

Processed with VSCO with hb2 presetHey guys! This site is going to take a slight change in direction for the next few months; it’s my last year of college so your girl is going to feature some CS content for classes.

Stay tuned for more!

Samantha Tran

P.S. Please excuse my double-intro.

 

From the blog CS-Series by samanthatran and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The CS Series || Intro V1

Processed with VSCO with hb2 presetHey guys! This site is going to take a slight change in direction for the next few months; it’s my last year of college so your girl is going to feature some CS content for classes.

Stay tuned for more!

Samantha Tran

P.S. Please excuse my double-intro.

 

From the blog CS-Series by samanthatran and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Preparing to Present

Over the past semester, I’ve been working with Dr. Vallejos to build a website for Massachusetts HOSA. At the conclusion of my independent study project, I will be presenting my project to the Computer Science faculty and other CS students. In preparing for this presentation, I came to a couple of realizations about what I’ve learned from this experience.

While I certainly think that I have improved upon my technical skills in CSS and PHP, I think that what is perhaps more valuable is the immense amount of real-world project management experience that I have gained. This experience has already allowed me to build a better understanding of project requirements at work and for the software development capstone project with AMPATH Informatics. Being able to understand the requirements of stakeholders is essential to delivering a product that meets their expectations. Asking the right questions the first time will prevent having to reach out again and again for clarification of the requirements. People are generally very busy and they will not be available to answer your questions or provide you with information. Whether it is a customer, manager, or product owner, it is best not to waste other people’s time with comeback questions because of your own failure to fully consider the project’s requirements.

I also believe that I greatly improved my personal software development process throughout this project. Although it took a couple of mistakes for me to learn, I am thankful that I made these mistakes in a safe environment and lost nothing but a few hours of my time. I was initially pretty careless, making customization changes to the theme files directly on the web server itself, not backing up, and not tracking any of my changes. After losing all of my theme customizations by updating the theme, I decided to make some changes to this process. I implemented Git version control, allowing me to make and test changes locally before pushing to the actual website as well as tracking changes incrementally and allowing me to rollback to any revision, as desired. I also implemented automatic offsite backup in Google Drive, which runs weekly to ensure that even if I do mess something up, there’s always a working copy safely stored elsewhere.

I have always been an avid believer in learning through experience, and the MassHOSA website project has been a fantastic opportunity to learn through my experiences. Not only have I had the chance to both sharpen my technical skills and widen my skill set, I have gained invaluable experience managing a project and working with stakeholders on bringing an idea from the conceptual phase through to a working product.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Looking Back on the Final Working Sprint

Just like that, I am writing the final sprint retrospective for our capstone project working with AMPATH Informatics! I have learned so much about the development process, contributing to open source software, and especially working in a Scrum development team. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with the AMPATH developers, my team, who were extremely helpful and made this experience valuable. I am thankful that the software development capstone has allowed me to contribute to a real-world application, and hopefully make some small difference.

In terms of concrete tasks for this sprint, I took on fewer development stories than in previous sprints, and chose to focus more on documenting and producing tests for what I have already contributed. Other team members were assigned develop tasks, however, and our implementation of an offline login is close to being a shippable product. The main item blocking a pull request to AMPATH is the lack of encryption for the stored credentials. They are currently only encoding in base64, which is about as good as plain text. We are unsure whether a working encryption implementation will be available before time runs out.

One of the development tasks that I took on for this sprint was to update the refresh time of the online tracker indicator on the bottom of the screen. When Dominique added a checkbox element to the user interface, she used a subscription that updated every three seconds. As a result, the checkbox would appear even when the online tracker indicated that the user was still offline. To fix this, I updated the refresh time of the online tracker component to match the subscription of the checkbox.

Another task that was assigned to Dominique and Luigi for this sprint was to implement the backend logic for the checkbox. While there are still some bugs, we should be able to work through them as a team if they are not resolved by the time we meet for review and retrospective. This logic should store credentials in localStorage only when the checkbox is checked.

A task that was assigned to Matt was to document the current status of our offline login implementation. During our in-class meetings, I discussed with Matt how my implementation works and where I made changes to the code in order to allow the user to login offline. I think that we will continue this task into the final presentation preparation sprint, where we all will be documenting our contributions.

Kwame was assigned the task of looking at writing tests for the offline login implementation. While he had some trouble writing tests, I think that this is something that we can all work on in the final sprint as part of documenting what we have done. I think that it might be easier to write tests for the code that we have contributed as individuals, rather than assigning all of the test writing to one person.

As mentioned earlier, we are waiting on an encryption service for the storage of user credentials from another team. While we were able to accomplish most of the requirements for the offline login implementation, the lack of encryption has kept us from submitting much of anything to AMPATH. Storing the user’s credentials in plain text is far too risky from a security standpoint, and I am doubtful that the developers would accept our implementation without encryption.

I am very happy with the progress that we’ve made as a team. I have certainly improved from the beginning of the semester, and it has been great to see other members of the team improve as well. I’m looking forward to the last sprint where we will compile all of what we have learned and implemented into a presentation.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Thinking Like an End User

I am getting ready to deliver a website product that I have been working on for Massachusetts HOSA. Because I’ve been working on the development of the website for the past couple of months, I am familiar with where to find everything. Once the product is delivered, however, it will be updated and maintained by Massachusetts HOSA. While I would be perfectly happy to continue helping out with the website as needed, I would like to minimize the need for my involvement by making the website as self-sustaining as possible.

In previous blog posts, I already outlined the setup of automatic backups. This makes me feel much better about enabling automatic updates for the WordPress installation. With automatic upgrades enabled, the site will be kept secure and up to date as WordPress and plugin or theme developers release new versions. I would be weary of allowing automatic updates if I was unsure of whether or not there were current backups because of the possibility of an update breaking the site. Occasionally there are incompatibilities between different plugin/WordPress version combinations, or simply bugs in a release that could make the site unstable. In case of such a scenario, having a recent backup that can quickly be rolled back to is essential.

The second part of making the site self-sustaining is to write documentation for the use of this specific WordPress installation. While WordPress is already extremely well documented, this vast documentation can sometimes be difficult to navigate efficiently. I would like to pick and choose the essentials to include in a slimmed-down version of documentation to provide to MassHOSA as a guide for the maintenance and updating of the website. This documentation will include guides for use of the WordPress platform, use of the various plugins that are installed, and also references to the locations of various resources such as backups and styling files.

I am extremely thankful for the opportunities that working on this project has granted me. While I may have had some prior experience building WordPress websites, this was quite different. I got a much better idea of the various stages of a design project and experience working directly with stakeholders to turn specifications into a working, real-world implementation.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Looking Back on Sprint 5

Before heading into the last working sprint, I would like to reflect on how happy I am with the progress made by all members of the team during the fifth sprint. It would seem that my hope that getting a rudimentary implementation of the offline login pushed up to the team repository did generate some buzz and get other team members pushing code as well. I’m looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish in the final push.

One of the story items that I was assigned for this sprint was the “Take offline status checking outside of error checking” task. This was not too difficult to accomplish, but did require some investigation into how to make use of a service in TypeScript. While it seems like a relatively basic concept, it was the first time I had ever attempted to use a service. Following the examples set by the AuthenticationService and SessionService, I managed to piece together how services are imported, included as part of the constructor, and then used within the class.

While working on changing my rudimentary implementation of the offline login to use the OnlineTrackerService rather than the error checking logic of the LoginComponent, I discovered a bug. Because I needed the OnlineTrackerService working for my offline login implementation, I chose to investigate and attempt to fix this bug. The bug was not difficult to identify, and I fixed it relatively quickly. After attempting to build the project, however, one of the tests failed. I looked into the failing test, and found that the test was expecting the incorrect value for isUpdating when offline, causing the test to fail when the program was behaving properly. I corrected this test and submitted a pull request to AMPATH. The pull request can be seen here: https://github.com/AMPATH/ng2-amrs/pull/671. Just a few hours before writing this post, the pull request was approved and merged into AMPATH’s master. While this task was not originally assigned at the beginning of the sprint and was done out of necessity, I feel that it was important contribution. For this reason, I added it to the Trello board as a story item, and marked it as complete once the pull request was accepted.

Although I was a bit distracted during the middle of the sprint by the OnlineTracker bug, I got back down to business with our offline login implementation once the bugfix code was submitted to AMPATH. I noticed that the build had failed for the code that I pushed that took the offline status checking outside of error checking, and set out to investigate why. The description given by the testing framework was vague, but I eventually determined that the test was failing because of a missing import in the login.component.spec.ts class. Because I was implementing the OnlineTrackerService in login.component.ts, I also had to import the service in the test class. Once I added this import, the build passed.

The final task that I took on for the sprint was fixing our severely broken team git tree. Because we did not branch for development of the offline-login, our master branch became cluttered with many small, meaningless commits and merge commits. This became apparent when I attempted to submit a pull request to AMPATH for my bugfix. I worked with Matt in class to get all of the commits related to the offline-login in a new offline-login branch. He then developed guidelines for a git workflow for the team repository.

I’m very excited about what we’ve accomplished this sprint. It is rather unfortunate that just as we are getting up to speed and comfortable working with the ng2-amrs application, we are entering our final working sprint. I’m still hopeful that we will be able to make significant progress towards a working implementation in the last sprint.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Transitioning

After meeting to discuss the current status of the website, there are only a few tasks that remain. Although I am still waiting on some of the design content such as images and social media links to be provided, I think that the website design will soon be wrapped up. Once this happens, the next step will be education and training on the use and maintenance of the site. This should not be too intense because of how intuitive WordPress is to use.

Part of this training will likely involve the transfer of the hosting off of my personal virtual server to a permanent host. While I do not mind hosting the site for the time being, I do not want to be responsible in the case that my server goes down. When using a well known hosting provider, you are paying for someone to take on this responsibility. I have prepared the site to be migrated, and I do not anticipate any issues with migration. WordPress is rather portable, not requiring much more than a few directories and a small database.

One item that still needed to be addressed was the size of the font used on the website. Although it appeared appropriate on my screen, it was difficult to read from a distance on higher resolution monitors. While I had tested the website in a few different browsers and even on my mobile phone, none of these allowed me to view the site as if I were using a higher resolution monitor. During the meeting, when viewing the site at a higher resolution, the text appeared to be “zoomed out” and was difficult to read in some of the lower contrast areas of the page.

The next thing that I will be looking at for the MassHOSA project is QuickBase. I am familiar with the platform because of an internship where I am currently auditing and validating user access to QuickBase. Despite this familiarity, there may be a few obstacles to making the desired changes. After a quick inspection of the application, many of the features required to make the desired changes to the application are blocked due to the QuickBase tier in use. I will be looking for workarounds and discussing the potential solutions during my next meeting.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.