This week’s topic has to do with behavior-driven development, which a strategy of software development that focuses on the communicating narrative between developers so as to ensure that all members understand the specifications and other requirements of a program. I found an insightful article at the following website: https://airbrake.io/blog/software-design/behavior-driven-development. This blog post is one of a few in a series explaining different development techniques that work together as part of the software development life cycle.

As explained in the article, behavior-driven development, or BDD, works hand-in-hand with other strategies, such as test-driven development, which entails the execution of a failing test and then subsequently writing a minimum amount of code in order to pass the test. The BDD of tests becomes different from this technique when it relies more on the desired behavior of the program, rather than simply writing initially failing tests for all parts of the program, as utilized with test-driven development. BDD defines behavior specifications with user stories that outline various scenarios for the program to be executed or tested. These stories take on a narrative tone that states who and what are involved in each scenario, as well as the conditions that must be met in order for the scenarios to be successfully implemented. By using a common language understood and easily communicated by everyone on a development team, members can easily collaborate to define these specifications and perform tests based on the definitions given with the user stories.

This topic stuck out to me because it somewhat combined what I have been learning in both my Software Design and Software Testing courses this semester. This post discusses different methods of designing programs and their tests, and I thought that BDD clearly incorporated both, with the description of designing the behavior specifications to be met, as well as the concept of testing these specifications. We’ve somewhat been starting to take on both of these roles in the classroom by determining the purpose and desired functions of our programs, and then performing tests to ensure that the functions are working successfully. While we haven’t written out user stories to more specifically outline the behaviors, I think that this process is more implicit for us at this point.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Hi, I'm Kat. by Kat Law and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

https://abstracta.us/blog/software-testing/test-automation-patterns-and-good-practices/

This blog post discusses good practices to use with test automation. Automating tests can save time and decrease the amount of work that has to be done. Following these practices will help ensure that you get the most value out of automation.

Test Code Review

• All levels of testing should be reviewed to examine their quality. This will help the tester discover bad practices or mismatches in the tests.

Apply Assertions

• Assertions should be used to identify problems.
• An assertion that’s too generic can create false negatives and false positives, so pay special attention in the definition of assertions.

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)

• A common language should be created for the business and engineers to be used as a starting point for development and testing.
• User stories are defined and used as input for test cases.
• BDD gives developers clear specifications and brings testability to a system.

Page Object Pattern for UI Testing

• The use of design patterns increases scalability and maintainability
• The page object pattern allows you to reuse knowledge of the structure of an application while having a minimal impact on tests.
• This pattern strengthens tests by decoupling the structure of the user interface from the test code

Data-Driven Testing

• With data-driven testing, automated tests are parameterized so that the same steps can be carried out with diverse amounts of test data
• Adding data to the file creates new test cases

Parallel Execution of Tests

• Using parallel execution options like Selenium will reduce testing time by running several tests at the same time.

I thought this blog was very interesting. While I have learned a little about test automation I haven’t used it enough to learn the best practices for it. It is important to learn these practices because the whole point of automation is to save time, and if you don’t do it correctly you will end up spending more time trying to fix your errors.

I thought the most interesting part of this post was the section on the page object pattern. This is a design pattern that I’ve never heard of. It seems to be very useful because it helps prevent you from breaking your tests when you change your code. This is a topic that I would like to learn more about and will keep in mind when I work with automated testing. Overall I thought this was a useful and well-written blog post.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science Blog by rydercsblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

http://news.mit.edu/machine-learning-image-object-recognition-0918

Speech recognition systems usually require hundreds of thousands of transcripts in order to work properly. This new model of machine learning learns through audio visual associations similar to how a child would learn, where they correlate speech with related images. The researchers then modified the model to associate specific words with specific pixels. It works by dividing the image into a grid of cells consisting of patches of pixels while dividing the audio portion into segments of the spectrogram. It then compares each image cell to each audio segment and produces a similarity score for each individual one. The researches call this comparison method a “matchmap”. One good use of this is learning translations between all of the languages on the planet. There are an estimated total of 7,000 languages spoken wordwide and only about 100 have trascription data for speech recognition. With this model, two different language speakers can describe the same image and the machine can learn the speech signals of the two languages and match the words, making them translations of one another. This is interesting because that means the model does not require actual text to learn to translate. In languages where things are not commonly written down, the machine can translate meanings where other methods that are common today cannot.

This method is important to note because machine learning is a growing topic in the world of computer science and this could open up all kinds of possibilities. It is a new and innovative way to try to solve a problem and might become something needed for future jobs or projects in life. With this matchmap system, speech recognition no longer needs to be manually taught hundreds of thousands of transcriptions and examples of those transcriptions in order to function properly. This is increasingly important since new words enter our dictionary and become common for people over time. Currently, the machine can only recognize a few hundred words but in the future it could help advance the machine learning field while also improving the speech recognition software that exists such as siri.

From the blog CS-443 – Timothy Montague Blog by Timothy Montague and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

“The Deep End” resonated with me, not because I’ve applied the pattern before, but rather because I’ve been thrown into the deep end. When I took Data Structures at a different college over the summer, I found out the course was being taught using C, which I hadn’t yet learned. My dad accurately described the task ahead of me as, “Here’s a new [human] language. Write a novel.”

Worse, the professor was often unhelpful. The pattern, which encourages taking challenges and high-profile roles, warns that you could end up in over your head and drown in trying to apply it. I actually compared my emotional state those first couple of weeks to drowning in the middle of the ocean, because I was so out of my depth, no one could help me, and the consequences of failure were drastic. And I was failing for a while. Assignments were graded using an automated system that tended to give out 100s or 0s with no in-between, and 10 points got taken off for every day late. I fell behind and was submitting assignments late, which in turn gave me less time to work on the next one.

The Deep End identifies Find Mentors and Kindred Spirits as patterns that can be used to mitigate its risks. What eventually made me feel less like I was drowning was identifying the one tutor available for the class who seemed to know what he was doing and reaching out to him for help. He was accommodating and even offered to look at my code outside of his tutoring hours. It was, in fact, finding a mentor/kindred spirit that enabled me to salvage the situation.

Good things came of surviving the deep end. I was able to take Robotics the next semester because my knowledge of C made me feel more prepared than I would have otherwise. My Unix Systems Programming course this semester is also turning out to be much easier than it could’ve been.

The idea for action given at the end is also interesting. The writers suggest rating every project you’ve ever worked on using your own ways of measuring complexity or difficulty, and then plotting new projects that come along in a chart with the others. This seems like a good idea for making sure your career trajectory is going up and consistently challenging you instead of stagnating.

As a final note, the idea of applying this pattern by taking high-profile roles also reminded me of a principle one of my role models has: that if you’re given something you feel you don’t deserve, the answer isn’t to refuse, it’s to take it and work hard to deserve it.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Fun in Function by funinfunction and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog CS@Worcester – BenLag's Blog by benlagblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In this section of the Apprenticeship Patterns, the term “concrete skills” was introduced. It gives us an overview of why having certain concrete skills are necessary to have, especially when you, as an apprentice, will start developing your craft in the software development team. For example, a concrete skill can be your “First Language”, where you have prior knowledge and skills on understanding the programming language and knowing how to implement it in an IDE.

“Having knowledge is not the same as having the skill and practical ability to apply that knowledge to create software applications.”

I found this idea very useful and I completely agree with it because a developer who has adequate or substantial knowledge in software development has no value in their team if they do not know how to implement their knowledge in their craft. Therefore, the develop has no value in their team, and is nothing more than a dud in the team.

“The point is that you will often require hiring managers to take a leap of faith in choosing you. Concrete skills (which are ideally discrete enough that you can bring toy implementations to an interview) allow you to meet them halfway. The concrete skills you possess are your answer to the question: “If we hire you today, what can you do on Monday morning that will benefit us?” A deep understanding of ‘Your First Language’ will help establish your credibility and should prove to be extremely useful to your team.”

This idea supports that programming languages can be an effective concrete skill to have. Programming Languages, however, are not the only concrete skills that developers may need to have. Team management, communication, and organization skills are also necessary to have in order to have an efficient and cohesive team.

Reading this Apprenticeship Pattern made me think about the development capstone class because it made me evaluate myself and my team members on where we stand in acquiring our concrete skills. Within the past couple weeks, I’ve been trying to get use to Angular by doing more of the Angular tutorials so I can be well equipped on that knowledge on how use Angular. I think that would be a great task for me to do so in case if my teammates need help on Angular, I can show them, which is how I can be become a valuable asset to the team and our success.

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

Most apprentices like me always face problems such as frustration and discouragement from peers and even their craftsmen sometimes. It is my dream as an apprentice to excel in my learning.  Some craftsmen will always intimidate their apprentices and it takes a brave and focus apprentice to stay on track. Sometimes, it is not just the craftsmen that will give you hard time. Being in a team that dictates your contribution can cause you a lot of damage in your learning. As a first comer, those who have been in the apprenticeship for years might have the mind set of you not knowing anything yet and will not value your contributions. Also, moment you have that feeling of fear and not able to speak out your ideas, you are on your way to failure.

However, this pattern has good information that can help me as an apprentice to figure out how to deal with most situations whiles learning.  One thing I have come to notice is that you cannot meet your desired expectation if you have no passion for what you are learning. Being happy or excited of what you learning or working on will actually enable you to put much effort into achieving your goals.

I am actually surprised of what makes a better team. Even though I am aware that a team of experience members can have problem due to everybody trying to be the leader, I usually think they will still have a better result. A team with varying levels of experience is the least I can think of being successful in its activities. I also think, believing in yourself that your contribution to a team will make a difference will enable you to openly speak out. Sometimes, I try to get as much as I could from my team members by listening to all they have to offer but very careful of what information I am taking from them because more often they are either misleading or conflicting with what I knew.

Again, I am not surprise craftsmen learn from their apprentices because a good apprentice will always search for knowledge outside his confined area and when his findings are openly embrace, craftsmen will benefit from it. Reading this pattern has impacted me with ideas that will help me focus on my apprenticeship journey. I will openly unleash my enthusiasm and would never allow others or circumstances around me to dictates what I can offer to my team.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science Exploration by ioplay and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I thought this section of Apprenticeship Patterns presented a fascinating take on how newcomers might fit in with their more experienced counter parts when entering the professional world of computer science. The authors describe the role an “apprentice” might want to take when working in a team of seasoned computer scientists. They explain that it is common place for newcomers to “fly under the radar” and not speak their ideas due to lack confidence in their ability to be a contributing team member. They point out that while every team may differ, teams typically benefit from having team members of varying skill levels, even “apprentices.” The authors also cite a study involving aircraft carrier crews that showed that it is healthier for teams to consist of people with different degrees of skill and experience and found that newcomers played an integral role in the team dynamic. Finally, the authors propose that newcomers should in fact “unleash their enthusiasm” in hopes that their excitement will rub off on other team members as well as keep other team members on their toes through asking many questions on why things are the way they are as well as presenting fresh ideas.

I honestly found this particular pattern to be extremely relatable as I am currently a newcomer in a security team that is made of individuals who have varying degrees of skill level, experience, and expertise.  When I first started, I admit that I was a little intimidated by all the tools that were being used not to mention all the acronyms being thrown around in meetings that I had never heard of before. However, I feel like that feeling of being overwhelmed pushed me to want to learn more about security and obtain the same kind of knowledge possessed by my coworkers while at the same time applying the knowledge I have acquired throughout the course of my college career. I also feel like I really lucked out because of the willingness of each of my team members to answer my questions and give me advise. After reading this pattern I think I will ask questions and speak up more confidently at work because now I know that it is important to bring a fresh perspective to a team.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Caleb's Computer Science Blog by calebscomputerscienceblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.