How to be a One-Man Coding Army for a Startup
Jon Kinney - CTO
Doug, Brad, Brian
Topics:
- Agile Methodologies at Bolstr
- Effective Communication with User Stories
- Error Tracking and Bug Fixing
- Code Management and Deployment Scripting
AGILE
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Ironic for this talk
Agile teams have one overarching purpose: Deliver Customer Value
- "Do so while setting up for delivering value in the next round."
- http://3pvantage.com/articles/is-your-team-busy-producing-legacy-code.htm
Design for Activities, Not Individuals
Activity Centered Design vs Human Centered Design
"A product team that bootstraps their design process by identifying several individual personas doom themselves to create a bloated product."
- http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/content/stop-designing-"users"
HCD vs ACD
Our users: Small Businesses, Attorneys, Future - Accountants and of course Investors - Martin Fowler - Mike Long
Sprint Estimating/Release Planning
Weekly release planning session
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- Story Points
- Velocity
- Team Strength
Pivotal Story Types
- Feature
- Bug
- Chore
- Release
Estimate Everyting
- "Tracking points on bugs and chores improves predictability. Not tracking points removes the predictive value from Tracker and should be avoided."
Estimation Thresholds
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"The product of a spike is a set of estimated stories, not code."
3 steps to a maintainable codebase
- Make It Work
- Make It Right
- Make It Fast *
Make It Work
- Write tests focusing on the feature's basic behavior. Only write enough code to make the test(s) pass.
Make It Right
"If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?"
Make It Right
- With the feature working (all tests passing), focus on refactoring the code.
- Clear up structural and aesthetic issues, remove duplication, rename variables, etc.
- Tests will provide the necessary feedback to ensure working code in the end.
Make It Right Cont: Small Steps
- Refactor "under green" as much as possible
- Constantly run tests
- Use guard or autotest with spork or spin or something
Make It Fast *
- Once the the tests are passing and the code is clean, focus on tweaking performance.(* if necessary)
- New Relic is a huge help with tuning an application.
Creating Effective Communication With User Stories
Acceptance tests express what the software needs to do
in order for the stakeholder to find it acceptable
A project faces serious problems when its language is fractured
When a team uses language consistently in their conversations, documentation, and code, the friction of translating between everyone’s different little dialects is gone, and the chances of misunderstandings are greatly reduced
Entrepreneur, Issuer, Small Business
User Stories:
- Create Ubiquitous Language
- Living Documentation
- Source Of Truth
Feature: Sign up
Sign up should be quick and friendly.
Scenario: Successful sign up
New users should get a confirmation email and be greeted
personally by the site once signed in.
Given I have chosen to sign up
When I sign up with valid details
Then I should receive a confirmation email
And I should see a personalized greeting message
Scenario: Duplicate email
Where someone tries to create an account for an email address
that already exists.
Given I have chosen to sign up
But I enter an email address that has already registered
Then I should be told that the email is already registered
And I should be offered the option to recover my password
Declarative
Feature: anyone can sign up
In order to grow the userbase
As a non-registered user interested in Bolstr
I want to create an account without an invite/reg code
Scenario: registering as a new entrepreneur
Given I am on the self register page
When I fill in valid personal registration information
And I choose "Entrepreneur"
And I submit the registration form
Then I should see "Please create a company before starting a campaign"
And I should see "New Company"
Declarative and Imperative
Using Cucumber with Other Platforms
| Platform | Tool | Further Information |
| iOS | Frank | https://github.com/moredip/Frank |
| Flash/ActionScript | Cuke4AS3 | https://github.com/flashquartermaster/Cuke4AS3 |
| PHP | Cuke4PHP | https://github.com/olbrich/cuke4php |
| JavaScript/Node.js | cucumber-js | https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-js |
| Java and other JVM languages | cucumber-jvm | https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-jvm |
| Microsoft.NET/Mono | SpecFlow | http://specflow.org/ |
| C++ | Cucumber-CPP | https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-cpp/ |
Have A Transparent Workflow
"When managers don't understand the work, they tend to reward the appearance of work. (long hours, piles of paper, ...)"
Workflow Demo
Steps are on iPad
Error Tracking And Bug Fixing
Tools
- Airbrake.io
- Hotfix with git-flow
Code Management
Code Management
- Use GitHub, for EVERYTHING! no seriously...
- OK... if you have to have code behind a firewall (and can't / don't want to afford a GitHub instance), check out - GITLAB
Code Reviews
Use pull requests!
Branch management
Deployment Scripting
Deployment Scripting
- Deploy early, deploy often
- Have a staging/test environment!
- Capistrano (or similar) to eliminate errors
- Deploy from a specific branch of your source management tool (git-flow uses master)