Paper Review: Software Development Processes for Mobile Systems

Hi again!

This is a departure from my usual weekly post to present to you a paper that is related to Software Engineering, and Agile Development specifically. This paper is

Software Development Processes for Mobile Systems: Software Development Processes for Mobile Systems
link: http://www.inf.unibz.it/~gsucci/publications/full%20text/full%20text/MOBS13.pdf

This paper focuses on determining whether Agile development practices are suited to Mobile Software development, and additionally provides many examples of how Mobile programming has evolved.

Before delving into some of the point presented in the paper, I would like to say that the research done in this paper, is presented sparsely. The information given is useful for those interested in mobile development from a research perspective. It can also be interesting from a mobile developer's perspective, in that one can analyze their own methodologies and frameworks and see how they line up with what this paper presents. I would recommend this as a general overview, but in terms of deeper data, I think this paper falls short.

There are five major points presented in the paper, which I will briefly summarize below:
I. Introduction
This section presents the problem and the researchers' desire and plan of course. In addition, the authors present information regarding the sources of interest that will be presented later in the paper. This basically gives the reader the knowledge that there are different types of Agile practices with regard to Mobile development, and that these different practices have at least in one instance made their framework public in the form of other research published. The authors attempt to  "introduce discussion in four thematic areas: (a) suitability of Agile methods to fit the needs of the mobile business environment; (b) suitability of Agile methods to fit the needs of the mobile operational environment; (c) adoption of the proposed Agile frameworks and evidence about their real use, and (d) the rise of new conditions that challenge some of the premises upon which the proposed methodologies were designed." I believe that they do touch on these points within.

II. Mobile Software Development
I found this section particularly interesting as it lays out some of the constraints of mobile development such as, "(availability, bandwidth variability), mobility issues (autonomy, location-based services), the variety of platforms and technologies, the limited capabilities of terminal devices (low power supplies, small-sized user interfaces), and time-to-market requirements." These issues keep mobile development in flux, and as this type of software engineering is a relatively new process, new technologies are continuously emerging making it even more difficult to assess the frameworks of development practices that are currently in place. To reinforce the notion, this is more so even than with traditional software development due to the new technologies and different constraints that present themselves as mobile devices continue to change.


III. Agile Software Development Processes for Mobile Applications
This is what I would consider the main section of this paper in terms of information. This section presents the methodologies of 5 specific types of Agile-like practices for mobile application. These are: Mobile-D,  MASAM, Hybrid Methodology, Scrum, and Scrum Lean Sigma Six (SLeSS). Unfortunately, while many of these methodologies have been reported to be in practice, only one, Mobile-D has any evidence of showing itself in use. Those that have used Mobile-D have case studies, and reports to show how and what they do, which allowed the researchers here to present some decent evidence in the next section. Each method offers main points of agile development while adding their own flavor. Some of the most noted of which are specific phases required during development to include test-driven development, continuous integration and pair programming.


IV. Discussion: Accomplishment, Evidence, and Evolution
 This section provides three main questions, Are Agile development practices the best fit to mobile, do they address the needs of mobile's fast-paced release cycle, and is there enough evidence. As these questions are addressed, the resulting conclusion is that it is hard to prove. The evidence is simply not there. Of the five different methods given, only one, Mobile-D, has more than 5 works citing application, at 17 reports citing 16 case studies. I would consider this to be severely lacking in order to come to a complete conclusion.
 
V. Future Work and Concluding Remarks
 What this leads us to is that mobile is like traditional software development continuously changing, and requires the developers to adhere to new rules, adopt new technologies, and find what suits their particular environment the best. Mobile development is growing in size as are the apps that are produced, and there simply is not enough evidence to show whether or not Agile currently suits this practice.

The authors write, "

To provide a final answer to our research question, there is a clear need of conducting evidence-based research that unveils what mobile development practices are actually used, to have a factual picture on how development teams are conducting and managing mobile software projects."

So there you have it, we need more research on the subject, and this paper clearly shows that this is currently not the case. Further research would likely improve mobile development by offering conclusive evidence of what works and what does not.

Cheers!

The Last Officially Required Weekly Post

Hey again,

This is the last post that is required of this class. I hope that I was able to give a bit of insight of how the class was and how I felt during it. I haven't really gone back and looked through my posts yet, so I also hope that they follow some sort of order and sense and that my ideas came across to you as intended.

This past week we had a guest lecture as well as the first round of presentations in class. The presentations on our project do not have a set format, but I think the first couple of groups set some standards for the rest of us. My group met up for a bit today to talk about our slides and prepare for our presentation tomorrow.

I hoped to fill the rest of this last weekly post with a grand summary of this class and my experience in it, but I received some terrible news that a dear friend of mine was killed by a drunk driver two nights ago. Any drastic change like this puts life into a different perspective, and this has affected me strongly. I am here, ready to graduate, and make this major change in my life, and someone close to me has just lost theirs while walking across a street. As they say, "you just never know," and you really cannot. So, while this blog is dedicated to writing about the experience of going through CS373, some real life events have crept in and taken up much of my head-space. This is part of my experience, even though it is not directly related to the course, and that is always a possibility when it comes to school. To wrap up, I will write a few lines about this class, and take some time to reflect on my own.

Overall, this class was great, I learned a lot, got to work with some really smart people, and I can say that I am proud of the work I have done during this course. I even have something to show for it, which is rare in the early CS courses. I feel privileged to have had Dr. Downing as an instructor, not only in this class, but another as well. He is a great teacher, and always offers insight to us students. And the feedback and knowledge of the TAs in the class were helpful when I needed it. Thanks.

And, thank you for reading. I hope you have a great experience in this class too. Take it!

~Sophie

Week 14 - IDB3

Hey,

It's Easter Sunday, and it's the day before the second to last week of classes. I know I should be talking more about the previous week, and I will, but I thought it might be nice to put this post into some temporal context. I'd like to detail here an overview of the process one specific feature that my team worked on to give a bit of insight of working on this project. If you are interested in learning more about the process, I believe we will be posting our technical report on our site in the future. Check it out -> http://blooming-shelf-7492.herokuapp.com/

This past Thursday, the third and final iteration of our latest project, SBIDB, was turned in. The turnin for this project gave us the first major Heroku issue that we have had thus far, and therefore we were unable to turn it in as a working project on time. My team, thank them mucho, met up on Friday to debug what the issue was. As it turns out, we were able to turn in our project from our last commit on the due date and still get graded from that point due to an obvious bug in our Heroku deployment. After all of the commits and headbanging, it is really confusing as to why the build did not work out from the start, but I am very glad that it is up and running and looking as we hoped it would. 

For this iteration, we were to implement a search functionality to our site to search through the contents of our database, and return contextualized relevant information via the search. At first, we attempted to use an add-on to Heroku, SearchBox Elasticsearch. To use this with Django, you use a modular search package called Haystack. Well, long story short, we had a bear of a time trying to get these to work together, with our code, and deploy correctly on Heroku, and in the end we scrapped it. We searched for another method of implementing this beyond using the ORM of Django for ourselves. 

We found another package called django-watson to search, and found this to work very simply out of the box for a simple search. Upon testing this search, however, we realized that this module, while its documentation described some functionality that we desired, did not seem to offer what we were looking for in terms of searching for ForeignKey relations in our Django models, and therefore our SQL database. This, along with creating search results that display multi-word OR results gave us some added trouble when needing to fulfill our requirements and get this project turned in. So, we modified the search to offer us both single results of each word searched as well as the built-in ANDed results from django-watson.

To take this part of the story back to the beginning, we also added a highlight function to our search to highlight the search terms on the search results page using a custom Django template filter. When implementing this functionality, we originally placed the code within the django-watson package, and realized that later, this would probably cause some issues with Heroku when rebuilding the virtual environment, so we moved the code into its own pseudo-package. Well, when we were at the final point of realizing that we had a problem with our turnin, we thought that this move, and implementation completely, is what caused our errors on the server. This last ditch effort was very frustrating as a team, and left many of us feeling pretty poorly about our final product. But at this point, again, I think this finally turned out to be just about exactly what we expected. 

All right, I'm out of here for this week. My team has a presentation to hammer out, and a test to start studying for.

See ya next time,

Sophie

Week 13 - A Good Week

Hey again,

We are back on an off week this week. By that I mean that there is nothing due or overly pressing this week to be worried about. Now that we have been working on the IDB main project, we have had a biweekly stress meter that runs up and down depending on when the next iteration is due.

So this past week, my team and I took some time to go over the new requirements for this project and try and lay it out a bit more structured in terms of front-end/back-end/mixed teams to get some work done on the project while we all have such different schedules. I think this was a good way to start, though checking in over the course of the week has been less than informative. Nonetheless, I think we are doing ok on time. Of course, this project completes this coming Thursday, so I can expect that as that day grows closer, we will be ramping up with work.

As far as the class goes, this past week we went over some more SQL stuff, and some design patterns. We took a look at the singleton pattern the previous Friday and on Monday we went over Reflection in Java. Still waiting to get to the Python version of this though.

Wednesday we had a guest speaker/lecture about working in the industry. This was probably one of the best talks I have heard in a class since I have been in school here. The main reason for this is that Trung Vu, from The Zebra, went through his slides very quickly and then had a lengthy Q&A section, which turned out to be really informative and helpful. He had worked at three different sized and types of companies since graduating four years previously, which I feel shed some really good light on to what could be expected shortly after graduation. I especially liked the tips and hints he gave about prepping for interviews as well as how to feel about working and timing and estimation. It made the class feel really relevant, and put the Django stuff that we have been working on in perspective. Overall it was a pretty good week.

But, now I have some other things to do.

~Sophie

Week 12 - Project 4 aka IDB v2

Hi again,

The 12th week of school is over!!! Extreme, though short lived joy must be expressed for the end of that week. I had two projects due and an exam this past week, and then an exam tomorrow that I should still be studying for right now. All of these deadlines made for a crazy busy week, not to mention the perhaps overly lax approach my group and I took on this second iteration of (SB)IDB.

I’ll be able to take a breath after tomorrow, only to begin working on the last part of this project right afterward. One good thing about this last project is that it’s deadline is two weeks before the end of classes. So, it will not coincide with deadlines for other classes, or any other tests really, which for me is quite nice.

I don’t really have much to talk about this week because much of the work that was done this week was so close in context to what happened last week, but we do have a requirement to meet so, the blog must go on.

One thing you may note if you read any of the other students’ blogs from this semester is that the deadline for this project was extended by a day, due to a misunderstanding/oversight on the spec. The spec for this project was therefore updated with a clear representation of what was due at a late hour, and most of us realized at that point that we had quite a bit of work ahead of us. This last adjustment was about the API. The last iteration of the project required that we have documentation for an API using apiary.io. One cool thing about Apiary is that it allows you to set up the API and run your tests against a mock server. One thing that is not cool about this, is that it is not a full implementation of the API for your app. So, you have this API documented, but have to then implement it using another method, and need to run your tests against the real API, which could lead to some inconsistencies that you later find need adjusted. In the end it worked out, but I give much credit for the API to one guy in our group, and would like to say thanks for that, Yoan! Sitting in the lab with him and writing tests against the API was really helpful in gaining a greater understanding of what was actually going on.

My last thought for this week, “Hope the grades go well this time.”

Until next week,

Sophie

Week 11 - Classes Continue

Hi,

Wow! Am I really going into the 12th week of classes? My, how the time flies. And, it is jam-packed with stuff to do.

Last week seemed really busy, and after meeting with my group today, this coming week seems like it is going to be even more full with meetings, and deadlines and preparing for some exams. I am sure that I am going to need to take some time off of work to get it all done. Well, that is how it goes. So, enough with the rambling, let's talk about last week.

As I mentioned in my last post, my group and I had turned in our project and were waiting for a grade and some feedback to get started on the second part. Earlier in the week, Alex, the grader for this project, gave us that feedback to help us improve our app. Much of what was given had to do with the implementation of our django models and our API, and the apparent couple of areas where the two were disjointed. Overall we did quite well, and have been working to get our models down correctly in accordance with the feedback we received to continue with this project, part 2. In general, I think with the models, we have been having some difficulty trying to relate the way that they are formed compared to what we have read in class regarding database design, but after our meeting today, I feel like we were able to sketch out some ideas and get a better grasp on what these models mean and how we will be able to tie them into the site. This project has proven thus far to be a really great learning experience.

The class part of the week was spent looking at different SQL files to get an understanding of selects, projects, subqueries, and joins. From what we've reviewed, I can say that there a lot of different ways to do a single queries, and SQL handles complex searching under the covers, which is really nice. Again, from dealing with the django models and learning a lot more of database nuance, there is definitely much more to SQL to learn.

That's all I've got for this week

Until the next one,

Sophie

Week 10 - IDB1 is Done

Hello again,

So, last time I wrote a bit about the project that was due on Thursday of this past week, and as you may have noticed, I was feeling pretty good about it. Now the project has been turned in, and I am feeling really good about the product we submitted. Our group met up quite a bit throughout this week to add to, move around, and decide on the generalities of the project while making sure to understand and meet the requirements that were laid out by Dr. Downing. I also feel like we got a relatively large chunk of work done for the amount of time that was spent working. I shared the project with some friends to show some of what my school work is like and I think they were fairly impressed.

My group chatted for a few after class on Friday so we have a reasonably good idea of where we need to start to tackle part 2 of this project. We changed some ideas on our Django model structure during the course of the project and I think we are still needing to really solidify this before moving on. In addition, while I think we are all feeling like our site is looking damn snazzy, we talked about getting some basic design decisions going for the look and feel and will want to get that going as well before/while we are setting up our templates to pull in data from our database. From the discussions in class this week and the end of the last week, I have an idea that Dr. Downing will want us to really focus on getting our databases working well with our apps and possibly get some thought down for refactoring.

This week was the first week we were assigned to read from the Refactoring book, and there was a quiz on it on Friday. I did not give myself time to read from it before class, so my quiz grade was a whopping 1 point for putting my name down, nice. This week was also the week following Spring Break, and I have to say that I am glad that the second iteration of this project has not yet been formally posted. I feel like I have not had a break since the week before Spring Break and am happy to have this time to relax, even if it is only for a couple of hours. I had a project meetup today for my computer graphics class, so I did not get the entire day off, but it still feels quite nice.

Speaking of relaxation, I think I may have a few more moments of it before getting back to the grind.

I'll be back!

~Sophie

Week 6 - Keeping On

Hi,

Thanks for coming back to see what happened this week in class. Unfortunately, without a project assigned and the test still a week out, there isn't really much to report.

One thing interesting did happen, and that is that Downing decided this semester to switch up the overall project format for the rest of the semester. What this means is that this semester we get to form teams and propose a project, more or less in the same vein as the project from the earlier iterations of the  class, but with something that may be more interesting for us to design than a site about world crises. Of course, our idea must be approved, but we still have some creative freedom, which is fun! Now I just need to figure out what team I'm in before it's decided for me.

On that note, I would like to let folks in my class who are looking for project partners know that I am available to group up. I know some web dev stuff and I'm alright with Python too.

Since the week was pretty chill, I'll take the rest of this post to continue on talking about the extra credit in the class. If you've taken a class with Dr. Downing before, you may already have an idea about all of this, but for those of you who don't know, there are a lot of opportunities in this class. One is the blog. We write a weekly post to you to tell you about the class in at least 350 words, and it is worth 10 points. Next, each of the earlier projects has an extra credit component. For Collatz, if you get your program to run really fast, and you can pass a different version of the problem, you get 5 points. For the second project, if you pair program you get 5 points. For Netflix, if you best the RMSE of 0.94... you get 5 points! If you write a blog post about an approved article, 10 points! And, if you create a portfolio to showcase your work, 10 points.

Hope that gives you some more insight into the class. I'll be back again next weekend.

~Sophie

Week 5 - Project 2 is Done

Hey,

This week project 2 - Netflix was due. I was able to work with a pair programmer, Keyon, on this one and we met up to get coding and just about finished it in one evening. So we turned it in relatively early when we thought we had it done. Little did we realize that we had not actually gotten the code running to spec, under one minute for reading in a ~1.4 million line text file along with calculating the RMSE values of our predicted movie rating data compared with that of the actual rating data. So our first attempt, while it did seem to solve the problem, still needed a bit of tweaking. Of course, we had to meet up again. After a bit more reading into the problem and a little refactoring of our code, we got it running in time and turned in the project a day before it was due. Then, the due date was extended. We could have used the time to try and get our prediction values to be even tighter, but we did not.

Most of the week in class we went over some of the neat little features that Python has including assignments and unpacking. During the last couple of weeks we touched a bit on Python generators, and for project 2 Keyon and I used a generator and some fun syntax that we had never seen used before in other languages. All in all, I think that this language can be a bit confusing, even after taking a programming languages course, when looking at the different types, and how list comprehension works. As soon as I felt like I had a grasp on some of it, we had a quiz, and I ended up mixing around what I thought would work and what I thought did not work. But, as I usually find is true for myself, making mistakes and being shown the correct answers helps me out in the long run to hopefully not make the same mistakes twice.

One new thing this week was the book we are reading. Our weekly assigned reading had us finish up the XP Installed book the week before last and onto Database Design with UML and SQL this week. This is the second of three books used in the class and is available online. Hooray for saving some money!

Well, with the project turned in and the weekend coming to a close I wonder if we will begin looking at some Project 3 information and get started with that, or if we will be diving even deeper into Python before continuing on that way. Our first test is next week, so it's definitely time to look back at what's been learned and taught thus far.

Talk to you next time,

Sophie

Week 4 - Netflix and the Snow Days

Hey,

Continuing on from the last post, this past week, and current semester thus far, has been interesting for us at UT Austin because of the many school closings. School was cancelled on Thursday and Friday of this past week giving us much to catch up on in our classes that fall on those days. This class in particular has now only had one full week of classes with a day being cut out of each of the earlier weeks due to the school closures for inclement weather. No matter how people are viewing the days off, we know that the closings put us behind in our studies, though it may be better to be safe than sorry when dealing with cold weather in Texas.

So, we turned in Project 1 the week before last, and this past week we were given the next one, Netflix, as I mentioned in my last post. Well, this project is due this Thursday and I have just gotten a pair programming partner to work with today. The articles we were given to read this week consisted of a lot of pair programming information, so I am definitely glad to be working with another classmate. In fact, the next three projects in this class will be done with at least two other people, I believe, so Downing has been pushing us to work with someone on this project to see if we have compatible schedules and could possibly form groups later on.

The Netflix assignment's due date comes one day after another class's project's due date, which I am lucky to have already pretty much done. But, this is always a reminder for me to look to the future due dates and see where they coincide in order to prevent deadline scheduling with homework. In all cases, Murphy's Law rules, and it is better to give oneself some leeway with turning in assignments.

The last couple of classes consisted of a lot of information for Netflix, and for the RMSE problem I mentioned last week. I expect the quiz tomorrow to have some questions either about those two things, or about the book reading that was due before Friday of last week. We have a quiz at the beginning of each class, which I am certain will help us to study for the exam coming up in a couple of weeks by showing us what types of things Dr. Downing likes to look for.

And with that, until next week, I bid you adieu,

Sophie

Week 3 - Project 1 is Done

Hi again,

So, Project 1 was due on Thursday. This project was one of the problems from Sphere Online Judge, spoj.com. This online oracle takes submissions for solutions to the huge project set they have, and "grades" your submission based on its ability to solve the problem as well as timing the solution. For the purposes of this project we wrote code in Python, and had to implement a cache in order to speed up our solution in addition to being one of the base requirements for getting a non-zero grade.

Dr. Downing gave us examples of the different types of caches available for us to use, and I found that with some tweaking and changing of my code, the fastest iteration that submitted was one with the simplest solution, a lazy cache. I later realized that had I not used recursion I probably could have sped up my code, but I did not go back to adjust it. I decided this time that the solution I turned in was good enough. And, because I know that the semester will ramp up pretty quickly with multiple deadlines and exams in the same week, I thought it would be better to use any extra time I had to be sure to be caught up in my classes for now.

Then, I was reminded that the career fair was on the same day that the project was due, and felt really glad that I got my project ready to be turned in ahead of time. The career fair was exhausting. I spent a lot of time talking to a bunch of different people about some of my past projects, what I like to do, why I would like to work for their company, or be a good fit, all while standing for hours, and feeling overly hot in that building. Even though the conditions can be overwhelming, I did enjoy talking with all of the recruiters and engineers, and know it was well worth it. I have some interviews coming up, and those require some study time too.

The next day in class we talked about Z scores, standard deviation and a root-mean-square (RMSE) problem. We went through some of the code for solving this problem in class, and we will be using this information for our next project, Netflix, which we will be learning about this coming week. I'm looking forward to hearing the specs on this one.

Reading this blog post over, it reads a bit disjointed to me, and I feel like I must be extra tired right now. The weather has been fluctuating between 30 degree ranges nearly every two days, and my allergies have been kicking my butt. I have been trying to keep from getting a cold, and stress is not a good agent for keeping the immune system high. So, I think I had better rest up, and stay on top of my studying.

I'll be back to write some more next week.

~Sophie

Week 2 - A One Day Week

Hey again,

Well the week was, as usual, a full 7 days, but due to unforeseen weather changes this class only met once. On Wednesday the proctor for the class, Alex Coomans, gave a lecture on getting started with git. We had a quiz at the start of class over the reading, which I found particularly straight forward having already read the two articles assigned to us in previous classes. Then with little time to spare at the end of the class we went over some of the Collatz changes that Dr. Downing made. He changed some of the starter source code for us from Python 2.7 to Python 3.

Because the class time this week was so short, there is not much to report on for the actual class experience. I think this may have put us back on schedule a bit as far as understanding how to improve the performance of our Collatz program. Our original schedule had us discussing caches on Friday, the day the school was closed due to inclement weather.

Outside of this, we have a discussion board for the class, Piazza, which gives us a forum to ask each other questions over the material, share what we know, and get helpful input from the TAs and Downing himself. He has this week been very forthcoming with his advice to us, imploring us to post on Piazza, and attend the weekly study sessions. I have already found a post there from a classmate about a feature of Python that is pretty cool.

There are two scheduled study sessions a week on Tuesday and Wednesday that we can attend in the evening to study for the class and help out our classmates with anything they may be uneasy on. The sessions are run by the TAs and proctor, all of whom have experience with the class structure and can be helpful with both the class assignments, as well as any general questions. And, this is time outside of their regular office hours. Sadly, however, I have not attended any of the sessions thus far. I have been easing into my new school/work/life schedule slowly, and I hope to be able to schedule myself to get to at least one a week. I know that these sessions can be immensely helpful with studying for the exams in the class, of which we have two coming up, and no formal final!

Despite the short week, I had enough to share about generalities of the class, and how they affect me, in order to reach our 350 word minimum requirement for the blog posts. And just in case I didn't make this explicit in the last post, this is an extra credit assignment. We are to write a weekly blog post to you the audience, who is hopefully interested in taking the class and wants some personal insight on it. I personally enjoy having this as an assignment as I think that it will help me to improve my writing skills, while also giving me some perspective on how I am doing in the class. We have two additional extra credit opportunities in the class, which I may expound upon later.

Until next week...

~Sophie

Week 1 - Course Description and Introduction to Project 1

Hi,

Here is a little recap of my first week of this class. On the first day we went over the course description and some of the details of turning assignments in, a daily quiz structure, and what books we will need for this class. Professor Downing said that this class has a writing flag, which everyone in CS needs,  and I believe is one reason that many students will opt to take this class. In order to fulfill this writing flag we have to write a 3000 word report! Wow. Luckily the professor said that we will be breaking this up, so it will not seem like a huge task.

Over the rest of the week we moved on to talking a bit about the Python programming language, and then specifically about the first assignment, which is done solo by each student. I found it quite helpful that Downing gave us pretty full Java code examples and then compared them to the same bits of code using Python, which is the main programming language in this course. I have not used much Python before, so getting started with a new language while getting started with the first project adds a bit of work, and the comparisons with a familiar language seem to make the transition easier. In addition to Python in this class we will be using many different languages and frameworks in order to get some experience with full stack programming. This should help to prepare us to get a job, and I like the sound of that!

On Friday we had our first quiz, which surprisingly took me by surprise with its questions. I thought I had a handle on it, but I missed a couple of simple details, and that is what good programming is all about! Happily, I am not worried about it this early into the semester. I have been having some severe allergy attacks lately due to the record pollen highs and overly long "Cedar Fever" season here, and feel like once my head clears up I will be able to gain my focus during quiz time.

I'll let you know how this next week goes!

~Sophie