Category Archives: Week 6

Apprenticeship Pattern Review 5: Craft over Art

I am not lying when I say I have been avoiding delving into this pattern from Apprenticeship Patterns, for fear that it would hit close to home. Upon reading “Craft over Art”, I’d argue that this pattern is full of more enlightening information than any I have discussed so far. Oh yeah, and it also hit very close to home.

The context for this pattern is very general, as it states that you are being paid to deliver working software to a customer. The pattern argues that delivering working, useful software is paramount to building some magnificent thing in order to display skill or artfulness. We are trying to become craftsman not artists, and while there is a time and place where making the most beautiful code and software is appropriate, a line must be drawn. As explained in the pattern, it is important that a bottom line for quality is determined and met at all times, even under pressure. It is important to note that the authors argue that “utility and beauty are not opposed, but interdependent.” This means that we have to constantly choose a balance of the two that work for any given situation, and this will change constantly.

As I am an extremely creative minded person I find myself often trying to create “art” when I am trying to deliver working software, especially when I am working on self-directed projects. I find myself working on all of the frivolous parts of a project, expending all of my energy on minimal functionality. The end result tends to be me giving up on self-directed projects because I get burnt out working on all of the bells and whistles, while minimal actual functionality is present. A conversation between me and an observer tends to go like this:  “Wow that looks awesome! But what does it do?,” the observer exclaims. “Nothing but it looks cool right??,” I say, sweating slightly. My point is historically I tend to put valuable functionality lower than fancy technology and fluff. After learning about the Agile principles and Scrum frameworks I have been getting much better at reflecting and making sure what I am working on is valuable to the customer.

This pattern is packed with information that I will continue to think about in my career. It is fun to have a romanticized idea of what being a software craftsman is, but at the end of the day the most important thing is that utility is what I’m getting paid for.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Creative Coding by John Pacheco and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Confront Your Ignorance

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

-Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person

Every day of our lives, we find ourselves surrounded by people who know more than us. It is normal to not know everything. This is why we shouldn’t go hard on ourselves when we meet people who expect us to know more than we do. The best we can do is to confront our ignorance, which means to identify gaps in our knowledge and try to fill those gaps continuously. The “Confront Your Ignorance” pattern shows us different ways to approach when we find those gaps in our knowledge. Some of these approaches are: to read the introductory articles and FAQs, to love what you do in order to understand it better, to work with others who have more knowledge than you in a specific topic so you can learn from them, to learn in public and not in secret. As good as this pattern can be, sometimes the apprenticeship can become a problem for the team at work.

This pattern made me realize how important it is to confront and expose my ignorance. Sometimes I get too hard on myself, such that I forget that I am in a learning process and it is okay not to know everything. From now on I will write down everything I find it hard to understand and start working on getting better on those. It could be a skill, a technique or any topic, but that would be a good start towards a great future full of knowledge.

What got my attention is the fact that “Confront your Ignorance” and “Expose Your Ignorance” patterns are very close to each other. By doing a list of the things we don’t know, and the things we should know in the future, we’ll be able to learn where our gaps are, but exposing them to the world help us learn even faster, and get help from the others as well. Facing your ignorance alone leads to stubborn knowledge that never takes action, but reveals your confusion without seeing it as a question that must be answered as soon as possible. As a conclusion, confronting your ignorance is very important in our daily work, especially when our purpose is to be successful in our professions.

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

Integration Testing

Integration testing is the second step in your overall testing process. First off you will perform you Unit test, testing each individual component to see if it will pass. However, your testing process is just getting started and is not ready for a full system test. After the Unit test and before the system test you must run an integration test. This test is the process in which you combine all your units to test for any faults in the interaction between one another. Yes each individual unit might pass on its own but having them work together simultaneously in an integral part of the program. 

These are the many approaches one can take to Integration testing:

  • Big Bang is an approach to Integration Testing where all or most of the units are combined together and tested at one go. This approach is taken when the testing team receives the entire software in a bundle. So what is the difference between Big Bang Integration Testing and System Testing? Well, the former tests only the interactions between the units while the latter tests the entire system.
  • Top Down is an approach to Integration Testing where top-level units are tested first and lower level units are tested step by step after that. This approach is taken when top-down development approach is followed. Test Stubs are needed to simulate lower level units which may not be available during the initial phases.
  • Bottom Up is an approach to Integration Testing where bottom level units are tested first and upper-level units step by step after that. This approach is taken when bottom-up development approach is followed. Test Drivers are needed to simulate higher level units which may not be available during the initial phases.
  • Sandwich/Hybrid is an approach to Integration Testing which is a combination of Top Down and Bottom Up approaches.

I think this part of the testing process is the most interesting. Once you have individually working components it’s like making sure the puzzle pieces fit. 

Integration Testing. (2018, March 3). Retrieved from http://softwaretestingfundamentals.com/integration-testing/.

From the blog cs@worcester – Zac's Blog by zloureiro and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

C4 Models

The c4 model is a tool used by programmers to articulate their software designs in a translatable manner. Using this model a programmer should be able to communicate their design easily to those outside the professions, say a stakeholder for example, and also to their programming team. The model should have levels and using “abstraction first” the levels should show different amounts of complexity that overall allow you and your team to implement the data. A great example of the overview of the c4 model is to think of google maps and their zoom feature. If you are looking at a country and are zoomed out so that you can see it in its entirety, then you may only see the name of the country and what is surrounding it. Then if you zoom in a bit you may see the states that make up the country. Zooming even more, you can see the cities, towns, and you may zoom all the way in to a specific location and see what is there. This allows the viewer to utilize the abstraction to avoid being overloaded with information and instead look at the data in layers of complexity. 

C4 models are implemented to represent the three levels of design. The three levels are known as:

“System design refers to the overall set of architectural patterns, how the overall system functions—such as which technical services you need—and how it relates to larger enterprise contexts. System design is shown in a Context diagram.

Application design refers to the combination of the services that are needed and how to implement them. Application design is shown in a Container diagram.

Service design refers to the patterns and considerations that are involved in implementing specific services. This type of design starts to emerge in a Component diagram”.

Relating these three levels of design to the google maps example starts to make things clear. The system design would be the view of a country in its entirety without too much detail, or in other words the big picture. Application design is a bit zoomed in and could show the states that makeup the country and helps to show the relationship between data inside the big picture. Service design would be the specifically zoomed areas where you can see in much more detail and see the function of data.

This c4 model stands out to me because it helps to bridge the gap between those involved in the field and those who are not. It provides a concise and organized way of communicating project ideas and patterns to your team  and to whom you are working with that may not understand the other diagrams programmers use. For example, UML diagrams are great for programmers but you don’t want to present that to someone who isn’t a programmer. They will have no clue what they are seeing, but with a c4 model you can capture the big picture and have the details on hand as well.

(n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.ibm.com/garage/method/practices/code/c4-model-for-software-architecture/.

From the blog cs@worcester – Zac's Blog by zloureiro and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

REST APIs

The latest in-class activity from CS-343 introduced me to Representational
State Transfer (REST), which is an architecture used by Client-Server APIs. The
activity was helpful in explaining standard HTTP methods which are used by REST,
specifically GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE, but it didn’t really focus on
explaining what REST actually is and how APIs that use it are structured. For
this reason, I decided to further look into the fundamentals of REST and how to
use it. While researching, I came across a blog post by Bivás Biswas titled “How
not to blow your REST interview.” The post can be found here:

View at Medium.com

While this blog does indeed give interview tips, it also helps
explain REST and the design principles it follows. Biswas focuses on five main
principles of REST that RESTful APIs follow, which include the contract first
approach, statelessness, the client-server model, caching, and layered
architecture. I chose to share this blog post because its organization of its
information on REST helped make it easy to follow and understand. For this reason,
I think the blog is an excellent resource for learning about REST, and I could
see myself coming back to it as a reference if I work with REST in the future.

I liked that Biswas opened the blog by acknowledging common
misconceptions about RESTful APIs that he has heard in interviews. One of these
misconceptions was that RESTful APIs simply follow the HTTP protocol, which is
a misconception I may have developed myself due to the aforementioned class
activity being focused on HTTP. The fact that this was immediately stated as
incorrect helped indicate to me that REST was more detailed and complex than I
understood from class.

I also thought that Biswas’ approach to explaining the five
principles of REST was particularly effective. He makes use of analogies and
examples to demonstrate each concept instead of relying on technical terms that
newcomers to the topic, such as myself, would likely not understand. For
example, he explains the contract first approach with a mailbox analogy by
suggesting that applications can get the same data without changing URIs in the
same way that people can get their mail without changing mailboxes. Similarly, layered
architecture is explained by comparing an API’s Gateway layer to a bed’s
mattress. Much like a bed frame can be changed without affecting how the
mattress feels, changing the fundamental layers of a RESTful API does not
change how applications interact with the API’s Gateway. Analogies and examples
always help make complex concepts easier to understand for me, and their use in
this blog greatly helped increase my understanding of REST and its 5 core
principles. I am by no means an expert on REST just because of this blog, but
it has certainly helped prepare me to learn more about it in the upcoming class
activities.

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

Refactoring

Once again I was looking through the course topics for my CS-343 Class on Software Construction, Design, and Architecture where I came across refactoring. refactoring is the process of “editing and cleaning up previously written software code without changing the function of the code at all” by Sydney Stone in an article called “Code Refactoring Best Practices: When (and When Not) to Do It“. The technique of Red-Green-Refactor seems to be the most used type of refactoring process and focuses on the three steps of Red or consider what needs to be changed, Green or write enough code to pass the test written, and Refactor/clean up the code. Refactoring is clearly an important part of the software development process, but it is not something that I have used in my own coding experience so far. The continuous cleaning, optimizing of code, and adding of new functionality helps to ensure that the user receives the best experience using that code or program or tool. At the same time refactoring may not be the best solution due to time constraints and if the design or code is not worth refactoring because in some cases it’s much easier to just start from scratch.I have found myself in the hole of attempts to change and fix thing and I’m sure almost all people that code have fallen into this hole because its much more enticing to try to use or change something you already coded instead of starting over. I personally really like the style of Refactoring code and it seems to be more commonly used in things like games, applications, and other user based software.
I can certainly see myself using this technique in the future when working on code or being instructed to do a part of the refactoring process because it looks to be common practice in the field of Computer Science and especially software engineering. I knew that there was a process to updating and refining/adding new functionality to software but was unsure of the name or the actual process that takes place in order to yield the best results. I also had no idea that eclipse had a built-in automated refactoring support which makes me want to learn more about how to achieve this so I can apply it to my own software in the future. Testing also is an important part of refactoring so I can apply this method as I learn more about Software Testing and Quality Assurance which encourages me to learn more about good practices in both fields of Software engineering.

Link to Article referenced: https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/engineering/code-refactoring-best-practices-when-and-when-not-to-do-it/

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tyler Quist’s CS Blog by Tyler Quist and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

REST and RESTful

The article, “REST vs. RESTful: The Difference and Why the Difference Doesn’t Matter,” examines the Representational State Transfer pattern, or REST, and its implementations, RESTful services. The author, Eric Goebelbecker, mentions REST pattern’s creator Roy Fielding, and provides a link to Fielding’s dissertation.

 The article then
defines REST’s architectural constraints. Client-server architectural style,
separating responsibilities between client-side and server-side. Client-side
will handle user interaction while server-side will handle data and state. This
allows for the two sides to evolve independently of each other. Stateless, the
server is not responsible for a client’s session state and instead, the client
keeps the session state. Cacheable, the server must classify their responses as
cacheable or not. This improves performance by allowing the client to store
cacheable responses for later, equal requests. Uniform Interface, possibly the
most important constraint, requires the use of a uniform interface for
components. This simplifies the architecture by taking advantage of the
software principle of generality. The final constraint mentioned in the article
is a layered system. A layered system is a hierarchical system that
encapsulates components to layers that can be independent of each other. This
can be used for security and performance such as load-balancing. These five architecture
constraints are what defines the REST pattern.

The article then gives an example between remote procedures
calls (RPC) and REST. The difference being that RPC manipulate data by remote
calling the server functions and REST, instead, shares the data between
client-server. Put simply, in REST the URIs work with data and not remote
methods.

The article then mentions the Richardson Maturity Model.
Richardson’s model classifies RESTful services into four levels of compliance. Level
0, the use of RPCs. Level 1, sharing resources between server and client. Level
2, the proper use of HTTP verbs. And level 3, exporting hypertext with objects
to aid with API discoverability. The author of the article brings up that Fielding
would only consider level 3 to be true REST.

Before I read through this article, I had only a rudimentary
understanding of the REST pattern (I had missed the class that introduced it).
I now understand REST and RESTful, the architectural pattern and its
implementations. REST focuses on data sharing and a uniform interface to make its
data the emphasis of the pattern and not its specific implementations. This
allows for easier understanding with generality and assists with scalability.

 I read some of
Fielding’s dissertation and highly recommend it to anybody who is learning REST.
The descriptions of the architectural constraints are clear and provide simple
examples.

LINKS:
Article: https://blog.ndepend.com/rest-vs-restful/
Fielding’s Dissertation: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm

From the blog CS@Worcester – D’s Comp Sci Blog by dlivengood and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Path of Most Resistance

In my last blog, I sought
to cover Integration Testing and in doing so we covered the two distinct types
outlined by Mr. Fowler. Of these, Broad Integration Testing (BIT to save time)
is most relevant to the next subject I wish to cover: Path Testing. BIT covers
the interactions between all ‘services’ within a program – meaning a program’s
completed modules are tested to ensure that their interactions match
expectations and do not fail some tests created for them. In this way, Path
Testing is very similar but with a focus on how paths through various aspects/modules
of a program, hopefully, work or do not.

           As
opposed to BIT, Path Testing (PT) seeks to identify not just the interactions
between modules, but instead any and all possible paths through an application
– and discover those parts of the application that have no path. The ultimate
goal is to find and test all “linearly independent paths”, which is defined as
a path that covers a partition that has yet to be covered. PT is made up of,
and can integrate, other testing techniques as well, including what we’ve
covered most recently: equivalence testing. Using this technique, paths can be
grouped by their shared functionality into classes, in order to eliminate
repetition in testing.

           When
determining which paths to take, one could be mistaken for wanting to avoid the
same module more than once; as stated previously, we are seeking paths we have
yet to take. However, it is very often that the same path must be taken, at
least initially, which leads to several modules. In fact, a path might be near
or actually identical to one that has come before it, but if it is required
that several values be tested along this path then it as well is considered
distinct as well. An excellent example of this made by the article I chose
states that loops or recursive calls are very often dictated by data, and
necessarily will require multiple test values.

           However, after this point the author begins to move away from the purely conceptual to actual graphs representing these paths, specifically directed graphs. While it was painful to see these again after thinking I had long escaped discrete math, they provide a perfect illustration for the individual modules you expect a path to trace through, as well as possible breaking points. Directed graphs represent tightly coupled conditions, and in this way they express how a program’s run in order and the cause and effect of certain commands upon execution. In this way, it offers a much more concise visual presentation of the testing process as opposed to something like equivalence testing. As well, these graphs are quite self-explanatory but I look forward to applying these concepts in class to actual code.

Sources

Path Testing: The Theory

From the blog CS@Worcester – Press Here for Worms by wurmpress and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Finishing Initial Workflow Testing and Another Story Mapping Session

I began last week on Tuesday by preparing for the workflow story mapping session that would be held the next day. I did this by first quickly exporting all of the VMs I had created to an external SSD that way we could have them on our laptops at the meeting if we wanted to use any of the test accounts in their own environments. I quickly tested importing one of them on my laptop just to make sure this worked which it did very easily. I then finished the GitHub workflow testing as I wanted this done before the next day’s meeting. I ran into another error when I was trying to push commits to the feature branch with a shop developer account. I figured out that this issue was caused by the shop developers accounts’ not having permissions for the test shop repository. By adding the two shop developer accounts to the repository as collaborators and giving them write permissions this fixed the push issues and last week’s issue of not being able to create new branches in the repository. The reason for this problem was because when creating the GitLab group it automatically takes permissions from the group level and automatically applies them to the repositories, so I didn’t realize I needed to do this separately in GitHub. I tested this again in GitLab by creating a new repository to be sure and it does copy the permissions over for individual repositories. GitHub has separate permissions for repositories than organizations (Unlike GitLab) and it needs to be manually set, something that I didn’t do initially. After doing this I could successfully implement the rest of the workflow in GitHub Free and found it worked the same way as GitLab Gold. 

Wednesday was the story mapping meeting. During that meeting Dr. Wurst and Dr. Jackson created the entire story map for the shop-level workflow. I found this to be very helpful as it shows the complete sequence of events from applying to be a shop through developing stories to closing the shop. Even better is that the user roles for each step is marked clearly above each step in the story map. I am sure this will help me immensely in future testing and alleviate the issue of asking which users are responsible for performing which steps of the workflows when I am testing them. I found it was great to observe and participate in another story mapping session and to see how these workflows are developed. After developing this we briefly discussed any remaining questions I had and I was assigned new tasks including how to migrate issues from GitHub to GitLab when importing projects along with moving on to creating documentation for setting up shops and the processes involved. 

Friday I decided to test the original workflow on GitLab Free just to be consistent and make sure it worked on all 3 of the platforms before continuing. I found that it worked exactly like the GitLab Gold testing did and there were no issues with it. Dr. Jackson asked if I had any notes on testing so I then went through my old testing notes for GitLab Gold and GitHub Free and formatted it to be consistent and show which user was performing which step. I posted a link to the Docs file with these onto the issue card on the LFP GitHub. Dr. Wurst invited me to a LFP Discord server he created so I joined this and helped him setup his microphone. Once we got this working we briefly discussed project boards and moving cards and further testing that I would need to do on this going forward with the project / issue boards on the 3 platforms. Finally I figured out how to import issues from GitHub to GitLab. The reason it wasn’t done for the BEAR-Necessities-Market repository earlier was because forking the project first on GitHub removes the issues from the project. I found that if you directly import a GitHub project into GitLab from your own account it copies all of the issues over.

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

Expose Your Ignorance

Hello my readers and welcome back to my blog. Today I am going to write about another Apprenticeship Pattern called Expose Your Ignorance. I totally agree that it might sounds weird when you hear it but you will change your mind by the end of this blog post.

You have just started working for a company, its your first job and everyone expects a lot from you. You are now a Software Developer and its time to show your skills. Too much pressure I know!!

This chapter of the book talks about how you should not hide what you don’t know as that will make you more ignorant. Everyday of the job and everyday of our life is a learning process for everyone and you don’t make an exception. The authors strongly encourage every software developer out there (especially the inexperienced ones) to expose their ignorance by asking questions. By asking questions you are letting your team know that you want to learn and lower the level of ignorance.

Pride! Ahh pride, this is what holds most of the people back. I totally get it that it’s easier said than done, but you should really leave your pride aside when learning. Yes its true, you can go and do your own research about the matter but that it going to take you a bigger amount of time compared to the situation where you can just ask your teammate or your manager.

If my close friends were to read this blog post would say: “Look who’s talking!”. Yep I got the same issue, I am very afraid to the idea that my teammates will think how inexperienced or ignorant I am so I just keep going on my own and stress myself until I find the answers of my questions. However I have realized that working in a team with a great environment makes it way easier to address to your teammates or manager for questions you might have.

So yeah..long story short: Ask questions about what you don’t know or need to know! But keep in mind to try to shorten the list of the things you don’t know soon. There will be times where the list will get longer than usual and sometimes shorter but as you choose the shortest path to expose your ignorance, you will notice that by the end on the trip you will be an expert. Don’t get discouraged, ASK!

From the blog CS@Worcester – Danja's Blog by danja9 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.