ySchool Project - Volunteers Welcome!!

ySchool project started rolling for some time now. We have a senior developer actively working on setting up the initial environment on git repository. The idea is to get something working initially, build a team around it and then go on to assign task to individuals. Without a ground model, its hard for us to accommodate volunteers especially the trainees and interns from Jaffna, the place we try to get as much as developers we could.

The technology stack is pretty simple, JSF2 with Hibernate/JPA. MySQL database and build environment is Maven. We may use template engines and SSO like Spring Security shortly.  Nothing to scare if you are a newbie, none of these stuffs are rocket science and if you are passionate enough, we are more than glad to train you guys before even get you started.

On that note, I need to mention few  students I recently had a chance to work with. Vanaja, Lakshitha and Saenthan,  three of the many passionate students who joined Yarl IT Hub recently. I was probably bit tough with these these to get their presentation right on the Yarl IT Hub launch day. Boy .. they pulled it through nicely and did their presentation beyond my expectations. Very next week Saenthan just called me and showed his passion to join ySchool team. I was bit cautions and not sure about his commitment, so asked him to do a small assignment on basic Java with some JDBC stuff. He came up with something in two days time, amazed with his commitment, now I am more than convinced that we can get this ySchool done by our own volunteer team from Jaffna .. and who knows if we could get the funding, we can even pay some complementary salaries for their work. All depends on the support we get for our initiative.

Now that we know at-least two people willing to join ySchool, I would like to run a crash course on the technologies and development practices we gonna have in ySchool. It could be a four weeks course which require immense commitment from participants, I would call it a development boot camp. If you are interested then give me a nod and your commitment level for this course and possibly the to ySchool project.

Why do we need to join ySchool project?

ySchool is a simple school management system especially targeting the rural schools. Not going to talk more on the project but the exposure of getting involved in ySchool as a developer, this is a pure open source project using widely adapted industry technologies based on J2EE platform. You, involving in this project will boost your CV and publicly available source repository will talk all your software engineering skills for yourself. Its a step towards to building a set of IT professionals from Jaffna and importantly in Jaffna.

Why do we need to join ySchool Tech Stack Crash Course?

ySchool is designed and managed by industry leading professionals. We try to adapt all the best practices in this project to give a taste of them to the participants. Which means joining the project and contributing to it from day one is not that straightforward. So we decided to setup a crash course introducing the glimpses of all these methodologies and technologies before hand. You gonna love this ... and don't miss it! If I am you, I would be the first person to jump in to attend this!

And one more thing .. Its Free!

Lunch Time Post : Yarl IT Hub : Time to join hands

Yesterday I made a call to one of the institutes' director in Jaffna, to brief our intentions about Yarl IT Hub. To my surprise, he had already read my blog about it in Tamil as well as Sayanthan's  visions in his blog. He was excited and thrilled to talk more about and even emphasized the need of giving more and more exposure to the prodigies from Jaffna, a city is known for its dedication and hard work for academic achievements, but often fall short of taking that extra step required to flourish in their research and business career. For various cultural and political reasons and the environment they are all coming from, they usually are desperate students looking for a stable job and shelter, and everything else come second to them.

The positive thing is, the intellects from Jaffna all understand this core issue. Barring the political cloud and confusions surrounded in anything related to Sri Lankan initiatives, there is a genuine and clear intentions from people I know (From both Tamil and Sinhalese communities) to do something for the betterment of the country. I hope they all extend their hands together with us in Yarl IT Hub. An initiative originated by group of professionals, having worked and spent years in Sri Lanka and continuously doing so, you won't find any better place than this to give a hand if you love contributing something to the city of Jaffna, IT sector in Particular.

Cheers Folks

Lunch Time Post : Sound of Color!

When Obama was successfully marching towards winning presidency in his first term, one of his famous interviews, he talked about the problem of others! Without being a victim, one never gets to know what does it take to be a victim. You can be a victim from a ruthless bloody war or even a man who gets cheated by a bus conductor simply because you feel embarrassed to ask the balance fare in-front of others in Colombo! I have been in both the situation, when a person not coming back from my "life" claims that people like me having no problem what's so ever and we living in harmony, it always reminds me what Obama told once on this. Stop!

Today I read this fascinating article about an Artist Neil. A man who is born color blind. Still wanted to become an artist, and allowed to do the whole course in black and white. Obviously we all are at certain extent color blind. How do we know there are colors other than the colors we can sense!

Interestingly this guy found a friend who developed an electronic device to play harmony every time the camera in his forehead detects a color. You get a sound for red, another sound for green .. a combination. I guess its designed in the way how music notes structured. How amazing coincident that the world's best two senses sound and colors are common in nature. Combinations of uniquely identifiable notes/colors. Amazing.

Ironically, whoever you think look better and smart doesn't need to be sounding better. It depends on inception. We humans generally got that inception from our parents/culture/ancestor. Being color bond and freshly listening to color, Neil won't have any premeditation judgement on colors! would be nice to ask him ...

"How do I sound buddy?"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16681630

Lunch Time Post : Testcase First Project!

Its been a long talked argument on where exactly the Quality Assurance(QA) team in IT department belongs to. They are usually on the point where it could either go cold or hot from no where. The success stories of a project would be attributed to dev teams/PMO and the failures would boil down to QA team.  Poor chaps,  often the scape goats of this IT corporate "politics" and soft target like Indians for looters in western countries!! And irresponsibly quoted for "If you pay peanuts you get monkeys!"

Now I have seen in my short carrier (apparently ~9 years now!) seen companies using QA under three different teams.

1) A separate team.
2) Engineering/Technology Team.
3) Business Analysis Team.

Separate Team.
As seen in many companies, especially in software companies, QA is a dedicated separate team often with a silo of lead, engineers, PM and processes. This would be handy if your company got 10s of projects, and you got 10s of QA engineers. More suited to Accenture/IMB like companies, where there are long running products with customization projects. QA resources are well trained and knowledg-ed on the products and their learning curve would be lesser if nothing at all.

In contrast, if its a small company with number of projects without having any core platform, having a dedicated team is like boiling in a hell. You don't get trained often about the new projects until the project gets released in its eleventh hour. In fact, nobody knows what exactly it is until, the customer bashes it back. You will have to test something which is virtual,vague and often contradicting. Being separate team will be like .. ehh Iran building a nuclear weapon ... Best of luck!


Engineering/Technology Team

Some companies are keeping resources permanently under their project teams, reporting to project manager. QA resources will be able to join the team upfront in the project life cycle, start working on the testcases when the developer starts developing. This parallel workflow will immensely help during the QA testing phase, QA by then will have inside out knowledge on the project. Even aware of the flaws of the system, since he or she is part of team through out.

The danger ofcourse is the same! Knowing and living with development life, QA sometimes wouldn't be able to find the most obvious bugs and fall to the developer amnesia. In Steve Job's terms, one's own shit wouldn't sometimes smell bad at all!

Business Analysis Team

Few years back, I have had a chance working with an IT department of a bank. International bank it was. I asked the developer who is your client. Not getting the question right, his answer was unintentional but surprising, "Business Analysis Team".

Although the question was not exactly expecting this answer, at least on his context, I would expect an answer of either QA or Professional Support department. I given it a thought and it made lot of sense! A project life cycle starts requirements from BA and ends with the same team when accepting the realization of those requirements. Sounds great.. Isn't it?

In Australia, with the limited knowledge I got, I often seen BA people do the testing irrespective of whether there is a QA team/resource or not. BA is responsible for singing off acceptance with customer, since customer wants them to do the UAT, rightly so, they are the very same people agreed the requirements at first place. Internally, for more accountable sectors like banking, they is an acceptance phase between dev team and BA team too.

I kinda starting to like this idea, if you have a QA, then bring them under BA at-least, make them part of requirements process (Testcase First Requirement?), and make them test and perform the acceptance.

Without QA in your BA team, and letting them be the forefront of your project cycle, probably you better stop talking about test first approach!

WDYT?