Tsm 8 2013 en

No. 8 • March 2013 • www.todaysoftmag.ro • www.todaysoftmag.com

TSM

T O D A Y S O F T WA R E MAG A Z I NE

Education.Entrepreneurship.

StartupWeekend The Challenge of Leadership The Cluj IT History (III) The features of IT projects Usability in our day life Architectural problems in Liferay projects Local SEO through Google+ Scalability points on Cloud In-Memory Database - SAP HANA Real-Time Platform What is a Code Review?

Book review: Java Persistence with JPA

Leading a team Launching a website - basic steps Cheap Startup (II) - Microsoft Bizspark Cluj’s Startups Ecosystem Professional development in the SAP Gogu and chief’s cow

6 Education.Entrepreneurship.

StartupWeekend Startup Weekend team

7 The Challenge of Leadership - part I Martin Mackay

9 The Cluj IT History (III) Marius Mornea

11 The features of IT projects Dan Suciu

28 What is a Code Review?

Mădălin Ilie

32 Book review: Java Persistence with JPA Silviu Dumitrescu

34 Leading a team Andreea Pârvu

36 Launching a website - basic steps Attila-Mihaly Balazs

14 Usability in our day life

38 Cheap Startup (II) - Microsoft Bizspark

Bogdan Nastasa

Dragoș Andronic

17 Architectural problems in Liferay projects Alexandra Coldea

20 Local SEO through Google+ Radu Popescu

22 Scalability points on Cloud Radu Vunvulea

25 In-Memory Database - SAP HANA Real-Time Platform Horea Rațiu Victor Ionescu

39 Cluj’s Startups Ecosystem Mircea Vădan

40 Professional development in the SAP Oana Oprean

41 Gogu and chief’s cow Simona Bonghez, Ph.D.

editorial

Ovidiu Măţan, PMP

ovidiu.matan@todaysoftmag.com Founder & CEO @Today Software Magazine

I’m glad we got to Issue No.8 of TSM. I remember when last year we were preparing the first issue with a few friends and acquaintances. The request was to write a professional article in the same way someone would teach in front of a class. It was not an easy task because it requires giving up the comfort of the week-end and synthesizing ideas so that the reader is left with a learned lesson and perhaps he wishes to contact the author for more details. There wasn’t the case :). The feedback was minimal, if any, often praying friends to send us feedback, I then had Marius’s mailing list of a hundred people. All of these practically lead us to education, the culture making software, interaction in a community, understanding that involvement and feedback, either positive or negative, brings value. We can be proud of several authors who have written in the issues of TSM: Radu Popescu – the SEO articles series, Simona Bonghez - Gogu’s events, Radu Vunvulea - Microsoft technologies, Andreea Pârvu - HR, Tavi Bolog - Java / Agile / Ruby, Marius dead - Startups / IT History series Cluj, Michael Nadas - SAAS, Andrei Avadani – the series of articles on security, Attila Balazs - Java / Php / Good Practices. Along with them, there are many authors writing their first article, and this is beneficial to the community which it addresses, precisely out of the idea of starting a dialogue. We will continue to promote them all and the new site that is going to be released soon. The novelty will be a better interaction between authors and readers, the possibility to follow them, a responsive design adapted for desktop and tablets or phones, the possibility to directly send an online article for further review and publication. The ideal is a Pinterest concept containing technical articles instead of pictures and at the end of each month the best articles will be published in the magazine. At the same time, a feature being worked on is the printed magazine available to those who cannot attend the launching event or others where TSM is present. This will be achieved by integrating an ePayment system and the delivery will be made by the Romanian Post. The list of new services includes publishing the magazine in the Apple Newstand. Another novelty is the monthly issue of the magazine.

The current issue is a series of interesting articles, such as: The Challenge of Leadership written by the Neverfail CEO, Martin Mackay, showing directions that the head of a company must consider; The features of IT projects shows the difference between a classic and a software project, including the possibility to delay a project instead of increasing if we are adding resources during runtime; Usability in our daily life speaks about the way we should address UIX projects. We continue with an article about the architectural problems of Liferay projects. SEO with Google+ is very practical in this issue and presents an important issue for any local business. How to make a good Code Review, what a developer who writes the code and makes reviews should seek are widely discussed topics. Also, we start a series of articles on books reviews that begins in this issue with: Java Persistence with JPA. In the HR area, there are Team management, which is schematically approached, and Personnel management in SAP. Startups and their creation are stimulated by the invitation at Startup Weekend in Cluj, Launching a website and the presentation of the Tech Startup Ecosystem in Cluj.

We wish you a pleasant reading!

Ovidiu Măţan

Founder & CEO @ Today Software Magazine

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TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE Editorial Staf Fondator / Editor in chief: Ovidiu Mățan ovidiu.matan@todaysoftmag.com

Authors list Martin Mackay

Attila-Mihaly Balazs

CEO @ Neverfail Group.

Code Wrangler @ Udacity Trainer @ Tora Trading

mmackay@neverfailgroup.com

dify.ltd@gmail.com

Editor (startups and interviews): Marius Mornea marius.mornea@todaysoftmag.com Graphic designer: Dan Hădărău dan.hadarau@todaysoftmag.com Marketing:: Ioana Fane ioana.fane@todaysoftmag.com Translator: Cintia Damian cintia.damian@todaysoftmag.com Reviewer: Tavi Bolog tavi.bolog@todaysoftmag.com Reviewer: Adrian Lupei adrian.lupei@todaysoftmag.com

Dan Suciu

Andreea Pârvu

Director of Delivery @ 3Pillar Global

Recruiter @Endava

Silviu Dumitrescu silviu.dumitrescu@msg-systems. com

Radu Vunvulea

dan.suciu@3pillarglobal.com

Java Consultant @ .msg systems Romania

str. Plopilor, nr. 75/77 Cluj-Napoca, Cluj, Romania contact@todaysoftmag.com www.todaysoftmag.com www.facebook.com/todaysoftmag twitter.com/todaysoftmag

Radu.Vunvulea@iquestgroup.com Senior Software Engineer @iQuest

Marius Mornea

Simona Bonghez, Ph.D.

Founder of Mintaka Research platform

Speaker, trainer and consultant in project management

marius.mornea@todaysoftmag.com

Simona.bonghez@confucius.ro

Owner of Confucius Consulting

Made by

Today Software Solutions SRL

andreea.parvu@endava.com

Mădălin Ilie

Dragoș Andronic dragos@txtfeedback.net

Java discipline lead @ Endava

CTO

Madalin.Ilie@endava.com

@ TXTFeedback

Alexandra Coldea

Horea Rațiu

Java Developer @ ISDC

Departament Director SAP @ .msg systems Romania

Radu Popescu

Victor Ionescu

alexandra.coldea@isdc.eu

horea.ratiu@msg-systems.com

ISSN 2285 – 3502 ISSN-L 2284 – 8207 rpopescu@smallfootprint.com

SAP IT Consultant @ .msg systems Romania

QA & Web designer @ Small Footprint

Bogdan Nastasa

Mircea Vădan mircea.vadan@gmail.com

Bogdan.Nastasa@endava.com

Copyright Today Software Magazine Any reproduction or total or partial reproduction of these trademarks or logos, alone or integrated with other elements without the express permission of the publisher is prohibited and engage the responsibility of the user as defined by Intellectual Property Code

UX/UI Design Lead @ Endava

victor.ionescu@msg-systems.com

Co-founder & coordinator @ Use Together

Oana Oprean oana.oprean@msg-systems.com Center of Competence Manager @ .msg systems Romania

www.todaysoftmag.ro www.todaysoftmag.com

www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

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startup

Education.Entrepreneurship.StartupWeekend Education

F

ollowing the American model and under the global pressure of startups movement, Romania joined for some time the countries that are widely promoting entrepreneurship education. Materialized in conferences and events for startups, as well as theoretical courses taught to students, the promotion is still without the anticipated effects.

Sergiu Biriş argues that the adopted path is a good one, but he also says: „We are making great progress with events and conferences, but unfortunately we lack the basic entrepreneurial education. We are brought up to be good employees, not entrepreneurs. „

Entrepreneurship

IT Cluster was established in 2012 in Cluj Napoca, to support the development of an environment suitable for the growth of IT industry and respectively software entrepreneurship.This is a proof that the environment in Cluj is conducive to a large project implementation comparable to Silicon Valley.

Startup Weekend

idea is not the most important ingredient Startup Weekend, a part of the of a business, where the team is as valuable Kaufman Foundation, is one of the largest as the vision and the mentors are there to global movements which seeks to provide give directions. its participants with an environment for developing and optimizing their entrepreneurial qualities. If entrepreneurship Echipa remains fairly more or less theoretical in the Startup Weekend course rooms, here the conditions of a real cluj@startupweekend.org business are reproduced on a small scale – competition, pressure, team, investors and real market. The theoretical knowledge they find here is offered by mentors whose school was their own business and whose degree is success itself.

Asked about the business environment in Romania, Karen E. Willson, one of the members of Kaufman Foundation, stated how pleasantly surprised she was of how fast the business environment is growing here: ‘People realize that there are a lot of opportunities through entrepreneurship and innovation’.

As Marius Ghenea claims, what we lack are entrepreneurial models, the successful people who proved that you can build a million euros business in Romania.

And if for some this is bad (the lack of role models), we believe it should be the first and biggest impulse to succeed - the desire to demonstrate that things can be possible, Combining education and entreprejust like in Silicon Valley. neurship, Startup Weekend trains the business leaders of tomorrow, where the

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business

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

The Challenge of Leadership - part I

W

hen a new leader is appointed to an organisation it is almost invariably because the Board of Directors has determined that change is required to fulfil the company’s potential. Here in the first of a series of three articles, Martin Mackay, recently appointed as CEO of Neverfail Group, explores a framework he is employing to respond to the challenge of change leadership. The second article will discuss in more detail the five key responsibilities a leader has to recognise and the final article will review the seven behaviours a leader must exhibit.

Expectations of a new leader are high.

All stakeholders want to see rapid change and improvement in business outlook and short term results. The Board having made the change wants to be proven right in its judgement. Employees want to understand what the new CEO will bring to the organisation to justify the change made at the top; and of course they very quickly want to understand what impact it will have on them as individuals. The leadership team themselves will almost certainly feel uneasy and potentially under threat (as well as perhaps resentful of the new arrival). Customers and key business partners may be concerned at the potential upheaval caused by the change, particularly if it appears to those not on the inside of the process to be sudden or indeed unwarranted. The cliché runs that you only have one chance to make a first impression; but a cliché is only termed as such because it is a truism often repeated. Therefore very soon on arrival the new leader needs to set out to his (or her) new organisation the plan for success. Ultimately it is the confidence that the leader can inspire in employees which will determine how his tenure is viewed.

Employees want to believe in the future of the organisation because they want to work for a successful company – if they work for a successful company they will feel good about themselves, they will work harder and with more engagement; ultimately success will build on success in a virtuous circle. For employees to believe in the future of the organisation they need to have confidence in the leader. To inspire confidence in employees the leader needs to be able to articulate the plan for success.

The behaviours needed to establish authenticity which is at the core of successful leadership we will review in the final article of this series. Here we set out the five key components to such a plan which work based on my experience and which we are putting into practice at Neverfail.

The first step is to establish a vision for the business. Immediately the concept of the vision can have a very negative effect as we think of meaningless statements full of buzzwords or we remember fruitless debates about whether we need a vision statement, a mission statement or both and what the difference is between the two. Ultimately the vision for the business is critical because it inspires meaning and purpose; with meaning and purpose embedded in the employees’ psyche their engagement in their work increases materially and as we have stated employee engagement is at the heart of every successful business. There is the story of two stone-masons working on a building-site.

A visitor asks the first: “What are you doing?” and he says in response “I am carving this piece of stone into the right shape so it will fit in that wall over there”. He asks the second one the same question and he replies “I am building a cathedral”. What the successful leader has to do is to inspire all employees to believe they are part of a team building a cathedral and to do that there needs to be a clear vision for the business. This should not be set out in financial terms (although as we will see results are crucial) but in broader terms to give the company purpose and direction which can excite and inspire. In the second article we will explore how we have set about this challenge at Neverfail.

realising the vision. This is perhaps the most crucial element of all: for the vision to be inspiring it must be both aspirational and achievable. To be achievable there must be a clear path defined. The strategy of the business is the clear path.

Strategy essentially has three themes: innovation, customer intimacy and operational excellence. The leader needs to explain how these three themes interact, the broad steps that will be taken based on these themes and how progress will be measured. For example at Neverfail we have set our innovation strategy based both on development of our products and on internal process improvement; we have driven customer intimacy to the heart of our business so that our product plans are set based on customer (and market) demand rather than an introspective view and our processes are being remodelled to create what we call the memorable customer experience; our operational excellence (in terms of reporting and measurement and efficient backoffice processes) is already high but we are focusing on improving it through introducing a completely new performance management system across the company which will help us manage and retain our talent.

The third step which the leader must undertake is to build internal confidence across employees (and other stakeholders including the Board) in the company. Much of this comes from the behaviours the leader exhibits (and in the third article in this series we will explore these behaviours in more detail). The most crucial behaviour the leader must exhibit is authenticity.

This is absolutely fundamental because an There are of course many different ways authentic leader is trusted and with trust in which a leader can establish credibility The second step is to define the stra- comes employee engagement. As has been and approach the change planning process. tegy which will guide the business towards said you cannot “fake sincerity” – such lack www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

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business

of authenticity will immediately be obvious to employees. The authentic leader communicates regularly across multiple media (in Neverfail we use email, Chatter – the tool from Salesforce.com – as well as regular meetings in our different locations and one to one discussions) and communicates consistently and with clarity.

The traditional model of the hierarchical command and control approach really will not suffice in today’s world; employees are much more demanding and will not just respond to the demands of the boss.

Essentially they are looking for two things from their leader: they want clarity in terms of expectation, company performance and future direction and they want to feel engaged in the company so that it is evident to them that the role they are playing and the work they do are clearly relevant to fulfilling the vision. If the leader can deliver those two elements to the employees in their working lives then internal confidence will flow.

To balance the need for internal confidence we come to the fourth step in the successful change management process: developing external confidence.

External confidence is the way in which the broad market (customers, partners, industry analysts and observers) view the company. The most obvious projection

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of the company’s image to the market is through the website but it goes beyond this.

It is really the image the company has with business partners, analysts and most crucially customers. Reference-based selling is not a new concept but it remains true that word-of-mouth endorsement from peers in an industry is a more effective demandgeneration tool than any marketing campaign. Typically this endorsement will come from a memorable customer experience where the image of the company and the reality of the experience match. At Neverfail we have set the bar high with our name! We have to ensure that our name lives up to its promise so that our customers’ critical business applications indeed never fail.

of our financial performance and we are demanding on ourselves to deliver against our plan. However, we believe that we will do this as a result of proper implementation of the first four elements of the framework.

Therefore whilst financial performance is absolutely our core yardstick we focus on delivering against our targets by ensuring we have cohesion of vision, strategy and confidence across all our stakeholders.

So, the five step process to establish a vision, defining a strategy, building internal and external confidence and relentlessly measuring progress by financial results represents a framework for the new leader to drive change. The next evolution in change leadership is to understand the key responsibilities the leader carries; this will So with vision, strategy, internal and be the subject of the second article in this external confidence established we come to series. the final element of our framework: financial results. Financial results are absolutely crucial because they are the objective proof of the success of the framework. However, what typically happens is that the pressure from external stakeholders and the Board means that for most leaders this is all they Martin Mackay mmackay@neverfailgroup.com focus on and short term profit becomes the priority, damaging the key long term CEO @ Neverfail Group. value building which comes from employee engagement and the memorable customer experience. At Neverfail our approach is clear: we have rigorous measurement

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history

The Cluj IT History (III) Founder vs. Pioneers

A

n important question for any story is how it all started? Unfortunately, it rarely can be answered punctually and precisely because history tends to be rather a continuous flow of events and influences, of subjective perspectives and smaller and parallel stories. For the IT in Cluj the situation is largely the same.

We chose as a starting point the efforts of Tiberiu Popoviciu, a well-known mathematician, who in 1957 founded the Institute of Computing in Cluj, a later renaming for the Department of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy in Cluj, (the first also founded by T. Popoviciu in 1951 and the second by Emil Petrovich in 1948).

Why did I choose 1957? Because it was then when the term ‘Department of Computer Science’ was used for the first time. A prolific department that, just two years after it was founded, built up the first computer with MARICA Relays (1959), followed by the Dhaka-1 (1963) with tubes and transistors, and in 1968 the fully transistorized IF-200 computer. There were also certain educational concerns, so T. Popoviciu taught the first courses of Programming Languages and Computing Machinery in the country. However, nationally speaking, Bucharest and Timisoara were a little ahead and the achievements of Victor Toma, from the Institute of Atomic Physics in Magurele - Bucharest, placed Romania on the 11th place in the global ranking of countries with IT development.

Unfortunately, in 1975, the institute is no longer under the tutelage of the academy, being transferred to the Ministry of Education, which reduces the number of researchers from 48 at 6. This year will mark a major loss, Tiberiu Popoviciu’s death just 6 months after the institute transfer.

With the work of T. Popoviciu, specifically focused on research, a predilection inherited from a strong mathematicians’ movement from Cluj in 1920, led by Peter Sergescu; in 1960 the institutes of higher education enter the stage, being

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trainers and IT promoters from Cluj. In the Polytechnic Institute of Cluj (now TUCN), one could notice the efforts of Professor Alan Manduca, who founded the School of E l e c t rome chan i c s i n 1 9 6 0 and Electrical Engineering in1964, and in 1965 he appoints Marius Hangan as Professor of Automation.

This appointment involves a partnership with another important party, the Institute of Atomic Physics in Cluj (now ITIM in 1977 and INCDTIM in 1999), a subsidiary of IFA Bucharest led

by Victor Thomas. This alliance of research with education leads to an immediate development of the former and an accelerated one of the latter.

It is worth mentioning that the year 1965 is also a bifurcation point in the Cluj IT history. There are two different perspectives: one belonging to the Department of Computer Science and one to Automatics.

The first is led by Ion Dancea and his team composed of K. Pusztai, I. A. Letia, O.Negru and I. Ignat, and the second is led

by M. Hanganut with T. Colosi, C. Festila, etc. The segregation is also maintained among staff, the first choosing ITC for joint projects, while the ones from Automation strengthening the link with Bucharest

by IFA and IPA (Institute of Research in Automation). The insight on education is developed in 1975 with the establishment of a Computing Centre by UBB Cluj , led

by G. Moldovan and L. Ţâmbulea. The next step is the renaming of the Faculty of Mathematics in the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, due to the inclusion of IT specializations. Further education, both higher and in the form of a technical high

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school (proposed by M. Hangan) will take the leading role in the IT in Cluj until the private market appeared in the 90s and the ‘contemporary’ period started.

As shown above, there is no isolated founding initiative in IT Cluj, due to both the propensity of some to research and of others to education, some to mathematics, and others to automatic and computer science, but also due to political and administrative influence, and alliances with various local or national research and education institutes. In this fragmented landscape, I will allow myself to give up any attempt to prioritize and call them pioneers all those who contributed to the birth and development of the IT in Cluj, and I regard them as part of the same ecosystem, working directly or indirectly, each managing to build more than those before them did, to complement the existing initiatives and fill the gaps left by generational change or administrative and political changes.

Current success is due to the combination between exceptional individual contributions of a few pioneers and the inertia that have succeeded to give to others.

It is a lesson that can still be applied, in the fragmented entrepreneurial landscape in which successful people must understand the need to support the local community to create a moment of similar inertia.

Marius Mornea

marius.mornea@todaysoftmag.com Founder of Mintaka Research platform

communities

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Local communities

I

will continue the already established tradition of the previous issue, and I’ll talk about news in the local landscape. During this period, entrepreneurship has stood out, both by its activity and events, and the emergence of new initiatives and organizations.

Startup Lounge joined the regular meetings of OpenCoffee, OpenConnect, and Transylvania Innovation Ventures, being an initiative of ClujHub. They were also the ones who started Startup Transylvania, a self-professed „one stop shop” of startups in Transylvania.

With Startup Weekend on the verge of starting and StartUpLite already confirmed, I have exceeded the use of the term ‘startups’, so I wish all the entrepreneurs further success!

Calendar Transylvania Java User Group Java technologies community.

Website: http://www.transylvania-jug.org/ Started on: 15.05.2008 / Members: 521 / Events: 40 Romanian Testing Community Community dedicated to QA. Website: http://www.romaniatesting.ro Started on: 10.05.2011 / Members: 573 / Events: 1 GeekMeet Cluj Community dedicated to web technologies.

Website: http://geekmeet.ro/ Started on: 10.06.2006 / Members: 530 / Events: 15 (Cluj) Cluj.rb Ruby community.

Website: http://www.meetup.com/cluj-rb/ Started on: 25.08.2010 / Members: 128 / Events: 32 The Cluj Napoca Agile Software Meetup Group Community dedicated to Agile development.

Website: http://www.agileworks.ro Started on: 04.10.2010 / Members: 292 / Events: 22 Cluj Semantic WEB Meetup Community dedicated to semantic technologies.

Website: http://www.meetup.com/Cluj-Semantic-WEB/ Started on: 08.05.2010 / Members: 137/ Events: 19 Romanian Association for Better Software Community dedicated to IT professionals with extensive experience in any technology.

Website: http://www.rabs.ro Started on: 10.02.2011 / Members: 199/ Events: 11 Comunitatea TSM Community created around Today Software Magazine.

Website: http://www.todaysoftmag.ro Started on: 06.02.2012 / Members: 456 / Events: 5

28 February Monthly Meetup www.meetup.com/Tabara-de-Testare-Cluj/ 1-3rd March Startup Weekend cluj.startupweekend.org/ 3rd March Ubuntu Global Jam – Cluj-Napoca loco.ubuntu.com/events/venues/Romania/936/detail/ 6th March Monthly Meetup - Tabăra de testare www.meetup.com/Tabara-de-Testare-Cluj/ 7th March Ruby 2.0.0 www.meetup.com/cluj-rb/ 12 March Ruby 2.0.0 - AgileWorks Remote Open Space www.meetup.com/The-Cluj-Napoca-Agile-SoftwareMeetup-Group/ 15 March - TSM recommandation ...even mommoth can be Agile colorsinprojects.ro/eveniment-cluj 15 March Yonder Open Days yonderopendoors.eventbrite.com 20-21 March Cluj IT - Innovation days www.clujit.ro/cluj-it/agenda/ Thursday/weekly OpenConnect www.facebook.com/groups/355893314491424/ Wednesday/bi-monthly OpenCoffee www.facebook.com/opencoffeecluj www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

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programming

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

The features of IT projects

O

Dan Suciu

dan.suciu@3pillarglobal.com Director of Delivery @ 3Pillar Global

ne of the first things you note when you read an article or a book about IT project management is that IT projects differ greatly from all other projects.

Even when the main topic is related to project management in general, there are direct references on the ineffectiveness of some methods when we are dealing with software projects. Unfortunately those differences are not always explained and the focus is rather on describing solutions, which are more or less efficient.

This article aims to highlight and of 20-30% being unthinkable in any of the analyze the main specific features of IT other fields, from the construction of builprojects. One of the most highly cited dings or machines to health services. statistical reports on the success of IT projects is the Standish Group Chaos Report, which publishes a survey once a year that Year Success Completed Failures highlights the percentage of successfully 1994 16% 53% 31% completed projects, of those that failed and 1996 27% 33% 40% those that have experienced difficulties to 1998 26% 46% 28% be completed. The criteria underlying this 2000 28% 49% 23% report are very simple and refer to aim, 2002 34% 51% 15% time and money or more precisely: 2004 29% 53% 18% ■■ the compliance and implementation 2007 35% 46% 19% of specified requirements 2009 32% 44% 24% ■■ the compliance with the initial estimated budget and ■■ the timeliness of agreed delivery.

We can, of course, discuss more about statistics and their relevance. Because „IT Successful projects were considered to project” is a term covering a large and hetebe those complying with these criteria, the rogeneous area of projects, it is unclear how failures were the ones that stopped due to the projects were considered. Between 1994 non-compliance with one or more criteria and 2000, for example, in USA only, around and the finished projects were the ones that 30,000 IT projects were studied. In 2004 the were finally completed, their result being report states that over 50000 projects aroimplemented provided that some criteria und the world have been considered (58% were significantly reassessed and adjusted. U.S., 27% Europe, 15% otherwise) from the Standish Group International, ensuring The following table shows some of the that they comply a balance between the report results over time, starting with the number of small, medium and large „shocking” result in 1994, revealing a very projects. low success rate, close to the one there is today. Moreover, this statistic confirms the In other words, it is quite restrictive to existence of an obvious difference between measure the success of a project considecomputer projects and others, a failure rate ring only the criteria of purpose, time and www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

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programming The features of IT projects money. Product quality or service is in its turn an important criterion. Also, there are projects that did not meet the three criteria but were considered by the organizations where they were conducted as very successful because they later attracted new important projects. And there are projects that have excelled in all three directions but the pressure made the project team to fall apart quickly after the project completion, losing the experience and expertise gained during the project.

As can be seen in the chart below, in 2012 the report shows some aggregate information on different types of methodologies used in managing projects. As expected, the Agile methodology significantly decreases the number of failed projects, but it cannot be successfully applied for all IT projects.

performed an experiment questioning a Since there is nothing concrete to be number of 44 experts about the number of shown to the customer in the requirements instructions that appear in the code below: analysis phase, he forms his own picture of the final outcome, which often does not #define LOWER 0 match the developed product. #define UPPER 300 #define STEP 20 main() { int fahr; for (fahr=LOWER; fahr<=UPPER; fahr=fahr+STEP)

printf(“%4d %6.1 f\n”, fahr, (5.0/9.0*(fahr-32))) }

Their answers cover all numbers from 1 to 9 inclusive (11 experts replied 6, others 11 have responded 9, the rest choosing in response a different number from the period)! The conclusion is immediate: if some experts in software fail agree on a simple question based on a program of 9 (!) lines, this means that it is expected that estimates in a software project would greatly differ from one person to another, these estimates being relatively small connected to gained experience.

Therefore, a common practice is that given estimates (when it comes to estimates of time and not points of complexity) to be increased by 20% by the project manager before they are sent to the client, to ensure some „quietness” (although there are situaBut we pretty much removed from sta- tions where this 20% is far from sufficient). ted purpose of the article. I only wanted to emphasize at this point that there are signiAnother direct consequence of this ficant differences between IT projects and aspect is the difficulty of managing changes other types of projects and that these diffe- in a project team, the people to replace cerrences appear to adversely affect success. In tain members of the team rarely following what follows, we are going to describe the their estimations. And for things to be most important „complete”, it is very difficult to control progress for many of the estimated activi1. The software is immeasurable ties. The most representative examples here are the analysis and design activities where Fortunately or unfortunately (depen- we know we have finished these activities, ding on the perspective from which we but we cannot specify whether we are, at look at things) the software development some point, at 50% to 75% of the activity. activity is creative. There is, as it happens in other activities, a nomenclature to indicate 2. The software is invisible and intangiwhich is the time usually required to imple- ble ment a window that contains, let’s say, two drop down lists, a grid and two buttons.

The result of a team developing a Despite the development of sophisticated software product is composed of a collectools for automatic code generation or the tion of „texts” of various kinds: analysis and implementation various class libraries or design documents, source code, operating frameworks, each new project comes with manuals and so on. Only some of them its own challenges in terms of creativity. are interesting or have any significance for those who will use product. The final user A clear example of this is given in the tends to evaluate an information product book „The Healthy Software Project: A based on what he sees, and what he sees is guide to Successful development „(1993, generally a graphical user interface. authors M. Norris, P. Rigby, M. Payne) who

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In addition, there is the tendency to include in the specifications elements that are desire, rather than the real business needs. A point characterized by a high degree of frustration is reached, where the project team knows they developed according to functional specifications but the client cannot use the final application because it is not what he imagined that it will be. This can be improved by a presentation of one or more prototypes in the early stages of product development, but the customer will not always make the difference between him and the final product, believing that meanwhile there was no significant effort, the user interface remaining almost unchanged.

All this happened because of software invisibility and its default complexity, the initial requirements appearing to be very easy to modify and implement within an application.

3. The software has a high complexity Undoubtedly, software products have a very complex structure. There are many connections in a medium-sized application between the various software elements that make almost impossible their testing and complete validation. A simple example of using nine interleaved successive conditions may result in an impressive number of possible ways to be tested individually for complete validation. This however may not be feasible even in a week, even if the test for each path would take a second.

Moreover, these tests should be repeated whenever a change is made. Therefore many bugs persist for a long time (even years) in an application to be discovered or, worse, to show their effects.

As said in the book previously mentioned “The Healthy Software Project: a Guide to Successful development „: „... in the case of software projects, the so-called quality control procedures were sometimes dealing with limitation of failures rather than assuring the quality of the final product.’

And this remained true in 2012, despite all modern methodologies of software development recently appeared.

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE The software complexity is given by the number of transitions and „translations” that must be made between the life-cycle phases of a product. The functional specifications (written in natural language) is translated into an analysis model (visual diagrams modeling all possible solutions to the problem stated in the specifications), which is then translated into a design model (which customizes the analysis model for a specific solution) which is then translated into source code, the latter being translated In an executable model (through compilation or interpretation). All this chain of translation, despite the fact that some transitions are automatic, makes the soft development process more vulnerable to human errors. This is caused by mistakes of „translation” or the persistence of errors undiscovered on time during specification or analysis phases until the executable model.

4. The software is dynamic The dynamism faced by software projects is manifested in three relevant directions. On the one hand there is the attraction for the technological novelty. We know that technology is rapidly advancing and each year libraries and new frameworks occur and improved versions of language and development environments. From the point of view of a project manager, keeping the original frameworks where certain software has been developed is a basic condition for the storage stability of the software. On the other hand, one should not ignore the team’s desire to work with the latest technologies (inherently unstable and still with shortcomings unresolved or

undisputed on specialist forums). There and bring a decisive contribution in placing is a constant effort which should not to be them on a leading position among the top neglected to store a balance between stabi- failures on types of projects. lity and the reduction of restrictions for the development team.

Together with difficulties in measurement, invisibility, intangibility, complexity The second direction that gives and dynamism of software projects, there dynamism to software projects is staff are other aspects, too. For example, increafluctuation, which is very high in IT. A sing resources in a delayed software project „healthy” fluctuation for an organization does not eliminate the gap but increases the is somewhere around 10 percent. A study delay as the effort capacity of team memmade by The Financial Times shows that bers decreases with an amount equal to the the IT staff fluctuation in Romania is 20%, effort to communicate with a new member. and it is not due primarily to wages (as These things do not happen in most of the in the case of other areas) but to cultural projects in which mostly routine activities differences and the feeling of professional take place. unfulfillment.

The purpose of the article was not to The effects of such fluctuations, also state some features management solutions, emphasized in Section 1, consist in a which may be the subject of a future article. reconsideration of previous planning and Certainly, however, Agile software developadaptation to the project newcomers. But ment methodologies cover a large part of newcomers tend to neglect the writing these features. code of their predecessors, even trying to take complete responsibility for its replaceWe do not want to end the article ment, an action which leads to cancellation without asking a natural question that of earlier validations. follows this analysis: „How it is possible that despite all these shortcomings, the Finally, a special dynamic for other software industry survives and even thriprojects is given by the frequent custo- ves?” The answer is optimistic, referring to mers’ requests for changes in various life the benefits of software project results and stages of a software project development. the need for them. Undoubtedly, software This feature of software projects led to the applications are designed to make our lives development of Agile methodologies inclu- easier in many aspects of everyday life. ding it as an active component of process Even if sometimes they break down or work development. erroneously, we accept them; we easily get over many of these errors and find ways to Conclusions work around them, because the benefits I tried to highlight some of the issues overshadow those shortcomings. that we believe clearly differentiate other software projects from the existing ones

www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

13

UIX

Usability in our day life

T

he power of processing various information using small devices allows us to conduct our work efficiently even outside the office. In the context of continuous development of technology, the storage and display of information capacity is improved and the communication possibilities between devices are unlimited.

Bogdan Nastasa

Bogdan.Nastasa@endava.com UX/UI Design Lead @ Endava www.nastasabogdan.eu

In such an environment, a real challenge in usability is represented by the desire to satisfy every wish of the persons that are using such devices. Obviously, there were made software which can support the daily tasks (ex: document editor, email client, calendar, etc), but all has to be thought and realized so that you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to be limited only at a specific device.

You wish to be able to use phone, tablet, laptop, personal computer, even your smart TV, in order to fulfill your usual tasks (ex: keep in touch with friends, read emails, etc). Unfortunately, not all the devices will support all your demands, for example the printing of a document or email, but due to their possibility to work together, offering an increased mobility of info transfer, you will be free to realize every targeted task.

In the middle of this group of devices, the main objective is finding a balance so that the experience for a user to be a natural one.

Therefore, it is vital for a designer to do a flow of information and steps very

precisely, but also he has to be always in contact with usersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; opinions: how and when it can be used, how it influences them, the time allowed for a task, etc. Depending on these steps followed by the users, the designer will be able to find all bugs in the project, what works and what has to be improved.

If you want to show off some property or functionality, you should use some designing concepts, in its early stages. This way, the vision is easier to transmit and it could be possible to see how a design can have an emotional impact on the user. Yes, a good design, a perfect and natural navigation course inside the application, can create a peaceful state of the user and can enhance the trust for using that specific application.

One of the most simple and accessible project concepts is wireframing on the paper or in digital format with the help of an application (ex: Balsamiq, Mockflow, Mockingbird). If you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have yet a great idea capable to change the world, relax and make the first step and that is having ideas.

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TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE The target of this design concept is the rapid find of a solution from the graphic perspective of the application (positioning the elements on the screen).

After doing the wireframes for your idea or an already existing project which needs improves, show them to a small group of friends, colleagues and ask their opinions. After this, you will be able to improve your idea. Next step is to establish the steps that the user has to follow.

Of course, show the changes again to the group of friends/colleagues and consider again their opinions.

Another designing concept is represented by the achieving of some prototypes which can offer interactive support for refining a certain flow and observing the usability. These prototypes can be done with different applications, such as: Justinmind, Axure,Invisionapp.

When you want to catch this interaction between the application and the user, you must consider, as already mentioned, the emotional impact that takes place and that is because you desire o long-term relationship during the use of the application.

I think that you have already noticed The ecstatic clients are faithful clients. how important is to consider the observations and commentaries made by the testers Now that we have noticed the conin this early stage. It will help to make a cepts used, shall we go further and see strategy and anticipate the things that can them in action. But before everything, we appear and are hard to predict. And if you must be aware that the wireframe can take didn’t notice, now you have the answers to some time, and this is why it is enough to your questions: How will the application do some low fidelity mockups first. Let’s look like? How will it work? What kind of take for example the next mockup, for a experience it will be for the users? part of the site www.endava.com. Time needed was approximately 5 minutes, but with this mockup, the owner of the site will know exactly where it will be the company logo on the page, the menu, news, etc. After this step is done and approved, the next step is a higher fidelity graphic. Thus, the time for the project

is considerably reduced and the client can compare the mockups with the project specifications, having an enhanced control and a better vision on what is going to be done.

Of course you need to evaluate your wireframes and I describe here some methods on how to do it: • Consistency- Use the same layout, style, messages by keeping any conventions throughout the application.

•

• •

Standard - Users must find what they expected in the exact places.

For the example when the user clicks on the logo, the expected action is to redirect him to the home page.

Minimalistic Design - Screens should only contain relevant information to the users.

Error messages - Error messages should indicate the exact problems encountered and suggest a reliable solution.

Let’s take for example the www.bostonglobe.com, which have a responsive design. In the next wireframes I simulate a page that adapts to desktop, tablets and mobiles. The average time used to create

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15

UIX Usability in our day life

the wireframes was only 25 minutes, but with these sketches, the stakeholder can observe the difference between the version and he can evaluate and easily request any change for the design.

The wireframes help you to define the main structure of each page or a section, and the main objective is to reduce the costs and the time for the project implementation. This is important because in

MONITOR

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this phase of wireframing and prototyping, you can easily modify and the design problem and the involvement for the client is considerably improved, and also in the same time the communication between the analysts, developers and the users is improved. I want to mention that the wireframes from this article was created using Justinmind (www.justinmind.com) The need to be functional on major platforms represents a real challenge in usability. The latest applications with the best user experience are a real inspiration for the newest variety of products.

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arhitecture

Architectural problems in Liferay projects

I

n an increasingly agile business environment, with an increasing number of companies competing for the same market share, the possibility of developing applications with many “out of the box” functionalities, Liferay framework is at least interesting. This article analyses the architectural problems that must be addressed at the beginning of the project in order to obtain a flexible product and to not to need major adjustments later on.

With or without Liferay

Alexandra Coldea

alexandra.coldea@isdc.eu Java Developer @ ISDC

Liferay is an open source portal under GPL license, for enterprise applications. It comes together with many personalized functionalities: user management, multi-tenant and multilanguage, CMS, integration with rule engines, with search engines and many other “out of the box”. It functions on a series of application servers (among which JBoss, GlassFish), servlet containers (Tomcat, Jetty, Resin) and with many DBMS-es. It can be deployed in the cloud.

Before starting any project, one must ask the following question: is Liferay really needed? Thus, if a complex portal is needed, an application which administers a lot of content, then it fits. If the application is big in size, but it is not content oriented (“content-centric”), Liferay may be useful, but not recommendable. However, if the application is simple and handles little content, then Liferay adds on too much complexity. It must take into account as well the fact that Liferay is a portlet container and it is not worth to be used for classical web applications.

Service Builder or own services Layer

Service Builder is a tool developed

by Liferay in order to automatize the creation of interfaces and classes used by the portal and portlets for layers and data access services. The code for the beans is generated, the Persistence, the

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Model and the Spring mappings. This is the tool used as well by the Liferay developers in order to generate the Liferay core services. For this reason, it has been tested for a long time and the problems have been solved or at least identified.

The problems encountered are logged in Jira and are public: http://issues.liferay. com/browse/LPS. The Service Builder ensures a transactional service; it has a clustering mechanism and even offers the possibility of internationalising any entity with a minimum effort.

Nevertheless, from the point of view of the documentation, the Service Builder benefits only by a wiki page that is not very detailed. This means that, if you do not understand exactly what specific attributes do, you must investigate the generated code in order to anticipate the manner in which it will act. Usually the need for these interventions can only be identified during implementation and this means unforeseen delays. However, there are training sessions organised by Liferay where one can acquire the needed knowledge.

On the other hand, one can choose to develop an own services layer. The advantage consists in having complete control of the written code and the possibility of defining your own documentation. However, the overhead of defining two layers – persistence and services – with the interfaces and abstractised level offered by the Service Builder is very high. Thus, the time for

arhitecture Architectural problems in Liferay projects implementation and delivery (“time to market”) will be very long.

Nevertheless, there are some cases in which the Service Builder is not necessary.

For instance, if one communicates with a 3rd party system which administers data and exposes services, only their appellation will be required.

In what follows we will be discussing the projects in which the Service Builder is being used

Decoupling the application components

Like for any other layer architecture, the components must be kept separate, but the decision on the granulation level on which it is separated into artefacts, it must be carefully weighed, because it may bring a performance penalty or may make the code hard to understand and to maintain.

Figure 1 presents the logical division of the components of a Liferay project.

Implicitly, the Service Builder generates the api separately from the implementation, in a WEBINF folder. This is the Ant manner of structuring the project. The Maven manner is to generate it in a separate module.

In what concerns the packing of the components, there are several manners of doing this, according to the project’s requirements. For the simplest project, it is enough to pack the api in a jar and the portlets together with the implementation in a war. The advantage of this solution is that once the contract is defined, the implementation may change and can be hot deployed. In theory, one can change the business logic and the server does not have to be stopped in order to have the solution in production. However, unfortunately, in practice it happens very seldom to work on a sprint in services and not

Figure 1

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change something from the interface. The hot deploy is rather more for the hot fixes.

In order to maintain a “separation of concerns” and to increase the level of isolation, it is possible that the service implement at ion would constitute a separate model and would be deployed as a jar, as shown in Figure 2. This would mean that, if at a given moment, the client decides that they want to store the data in a different manner, one must replace only the implementation module. The disadvantage is that the deploy lasts longer, which is felt especially during development.

From this point of view, if the project is a big and fragile one, with an unpredictable client, the best solution would be to separate the service implementation in a different module from the start, but one gives up at the same time the possibility to deploy hot fixes on services. For development one can use a similar configuration to the one in Figure 3, in which this module is wrapped together with the portlets in a war and thus one can perform hot deploy and an overhead is not created for this.

Another aspect that differs from project to project is the manner in which the portlets are separated into plugins.

The variations are very big: in one of the projects I worked on, we used one plugin per portlet, while in another project there was one plugin for all the portlets. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages. In the first case it is very easy to control what functionalities you make available to a tenant, but the deploy lasts longer and the inter-plugin communication may be expensive. The second option is quicker, the entire business being in one place. But this latter one is advantageous only up to a certain number of portlets.

The decision depends on the client’s needs and on the size of the project. When the latter start growing, the functionalities that have a logical connection or make sense together for business

is grouped in the same plugin. Even if at the beginning of the project everything is

Figure 2

developed together, it is possible that at a certain moment the client would want to make available to various tenants different functionalities.

Interaction between components

One problem that is often raised far too late is the standardisation at the project level of the communication between components.

Liferay follows a Model Driven Architecture, where the Service Builder acts as a Model Driven Transformation Tool. Thus, the service layer is the one responsible with transforming the back-end entities into entities that may be used by the portlet layer. But, in the same way as the portlets, the services for the entities that have business value together should be grouped and these groups should be isolated one from another. Because it may be decided at any point that certain functionalities must be moved in a completely different environment. For instance, in an application handling student management, all information regarding exam grades should be moved into a “trust centre” for legal reasons.

Under these conditions, in order to connect the presentation and the back-end, we need composite services, called wrappers. Figure 4 presents this architecture.

Communication between the wrappers level and the portlets level is done using DTOs or business objects. The service layer exposes Service Builder entities and all operations it undertakes are atomic, because everything is in a transaction. Because of this, the granular level at which services divide in functional units must be carefully weighed in order not to remove from transactions the operations that should be atomic (e.g. erasing a student separate from erasing his grades). Moreover, the client may decide that they want to present

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Conclusions

In conclusion, there is no standard manner of structuring a Liferay application; there is only a series of questions which must be asked at the beginning of each project. The later these questions that standardise the manner of work are asked, the more expensive the re-factorisation will be, in order to have a consistent project, and the flexibility and extensibility will be affected.

Figure 3

their business as a service (Software as a Service). If the project is efficiently modularised, the business logic for functionality is centralised, this change should be easy, because the Service Builder offers the possibility of showing REST or SOAP services only by writing an implementation in the service layer. However, if the wrapper layer is the one ensuring the consistency of the data base, the transition will be a painful one.

Figure 4

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www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

19

business

Local SEO through Google+

A

bout 40% of Google’s mobile search is local. Given this figure, there is a great potential to increase the number of local customers by local SEO. With Google+ for Business companies can increase their online visibility in the geographical area in which they operate.

Radu Popescu

rpopescu@smallfootprint.com QA şi Web designer @ Small Footprint

Google+ for Business is a free tool offered by Google, which targets small and medium businesses. With its help companies can attract new customers from their proximity. The integration with Google+ and Google Maps make it a great tool in promoting local online. Another key feature is the Zagat system which uses a 30 point scale where anyone can give a rating to a company or its services.

Business can help, let us take an example. Suppose we have just arrived in Cluj-Napoca and want to look a certain café. We go to Google and then type „starbucks”. Because of search settings, Google will know that we are doing a local search and its results will include some details from the Google+ for Business café (if it exists). After the search, we can see that in Cluj-Napoca there is a Starbuck café (Figure 1). Without Google+ for Business How Google+ for Business pages can we wouldn’t knew this because the café in help us Cluj-Napoca does not have its own website.

To understand how Google+ for In addition we see that the rating is very

Figure 1

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TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Figure 2

good and its location.

A second way local business owners can attract new customers using Google+ for Business is through Google+ social network. In just 2 minutes we can find accommodation in a city where we are for the first time. By using the „Local” button from our Google+ account, we can search for a „5 star hotel” (current location will be Cluj-Napoca due to IP Geolocation), and the results will show us all the 5 star hotels in the city (Figure 2). Based on the score and location we can choose our accommodation.

Local results of a search can be modified according to reviews and ratings provided by friends from your Google+ profile.

If someone from your circles appreciated a restaurant it you will show up (between the first results) in your search for a restaurant.

Basically this integration between Google’s social network and local pages creates a recommendations service and this can lead to a constant increase in the number of customers.

Based on these examples, we can see that by not having a Google+ for Business page you will prevent your business or shop to appear in these local searches, losing many potential customers.

To create a Google+ for Business page we need a Google+ account. From this account we select “More” and then “Pages”. In the page that opens select “Create New Page” and then the page type (Local Business or Place in our case). Next steps involve completing the profile with necessary information, and then verifying it. This process will be done through a code which you will receive by classic mail, at the address specified in the profile.

How to optimize you Google+ for Business page

Every few weeks we need to make sure that all the information in our page is up to date. This will prevent situations when we lose clients because of our old email or contact address. Besides this there are other elements that you should consider: • •

• • • •

Your page must have photos to make it more attractive; In “External links” section you should add a link to your Contact or Localization page from the business website; Ask your customers to provide a feedback and write a review on your Google+ page; Prepare a strategy to use in case of a negative feedback on your business page. In this way you can win back an unsatisfied client.

Use a land line phone because it’s area code will help search algorithms determine whether is in the proximity of the person which searches; Don’t use keywords in you page title, it may create confusion. Use the keywords only on the business description; www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

21

programming

Scalability points on Cloud

C

loud - another buzz word that we hear almost every day. For the moment the providers that offer this service are: Amazon, Microsoft (Windows Azure), Google, Rackspace.

Radu Vunvulea

Radu.Vunvulea@iquestgroup.com Senior Software Engineer @iQuest

When we think about cloud what comes to our mind? One, two or more instances that we keep on the cloud and when we need more resources we can grow very easy the number of instances.

HTML that doesn’t change every second (at every request). Normally when we observe that the loading on our machines is quite high we will try to increase the instance number. This seems to be a good idea for our problem, but in terms of cost it might At the moment a cloud provider like not be the best.

Microsoft gives use some scalability points.

In this article we will find out how to create Even though we try to make some a scalable cloud application and how to use cache at the server content (through IIS the services that Windows Azure provide or other methods) all the request will still us. reach to our machines. That’s why for every request they will have to respond and so we Content Delivery Network consume our available resources.

Let’s say that we have a web application A solution for this case may be using that has a lot of static content. When we say Content Deliver y Network (CDN). static content we think about images, CSS, Through this service the static content can

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programare be cached on different CDN’s depending on the physical location of the client. All the requests for this kind of content will be solved by the CDN’s. Normally a CDN can handle only static content, but newer version of CDN can also handle a dynamic content. This service is also provided by Windows Azure and can be easily integrated in our applications.

By using this kind of content delivery mechanism our machines that host our application will not be hit at every resource request. Automatically the load level will decrease.

Cache The next place in our application where we can easily introduce a scalability point is the cache. To avoid making numerous requests to external services or to recalculate different parameters, we can use a cache mechanism.

Windows Azure provides this service in different ways. The advantage of using a service to cache dates is in the moment when we need to scale the cache mecha-

nism and we don’t have to buy a machine, licenses or to synchronize these nodes.

Currently when we create machine with Windows Azure we can specify how much RAM to be allocated to the cache.

Another caching system is to create some dedicated machines for this where the entire RAM will be allocated for caching.

In both cases synchronize data between two and more instances cache instances is natively supported. These settings are made before deploying the solution.

The third option available is to use a

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

dedicated cache service. In this case, we don’t have to manage our instances; these resources are entirely seen as a service.

Using a caching mechanism of this kind takes off the problems that can occur in traditional caching mechanism.

Problems like synchronization or adding a new cache node disappear.

Video stream Until now we managed to analyze two classic problems that appear on every web application. But what can we do if we need a video stream? As we all know this thing is extremely costly not only in terms of resources consumed on the server side and the internet band.

Normally we can have machines to handle the video streaming. The moments when we have a lot of active users can cause us some pretty big problems. For this situation Windows Azure helps us with a dedicated service. Windows Media Services handles completely the video streaming starting with the encoding and ending with the encryption and delivering the content (offline and online).

This service frees our instances which would have had to handle the delivering and processing part. Being a dedicated service for this the scalability is ensured from the start.

Web services Until now we’ve seen three methods where we can scale using different cloud services without the need of increasing

the number instances. Depending on the application we can expose different web service, which collects much information from the clients.

What can we do if there are times when a big number of clients want to connect to us? Usually we would try to allocate a bigger number of instances to handle this.

One solution that Windows Azure offers is Service Bus Relay. Through this service we can expose any web service of type “fire and forget”. All requests will be store in the form of message and our service will be able to process them anytime.

Even though the number of requests increases greatly, the service will be always available.

Windows Azure Service Bus Relay can be easily integrated in our application.

The only change you need to do on your application that uses WCF is altering the configuration file.

Communication between instances Generally when we have a complex application we will have different types of machines on which will run different components of our application. It will be necessary to ensure a persistent and independent way of communication between these instances.

We can try to implement a communication system through a database or through another instance to handle only this thing. When we will have to scale it will be necessary to think about a way of resolving issues like synchronization between instances.

Windows Azure comes in our help by providing different ways of sending messages. All this services are accessed using a URL and can be accessed from anywhere www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

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programming Scalability points on Cloud on the Internet.

Most basic service, but also with the lowest cost is the Windows Azure Queues.

This queue allows us to distribute messages in a very simple, quick and cheap way. If we have to distribute messages to more consumers, to have support for death-letters or to guaranty the message order than we have to work with Windows Azure Bus Queues and/or Windows Azure Service Bus Topics.

Data transmission

A client-server application could mean a permanent exchange of data. Many times this thing means exposure of various web services through which our clients can execute queries on a database. In this case our application will have to contain instances that expose this service and a database (relational or non-relational). Besides keeping this instance we will also have to deal with the maintenance of the web services.

When we want to use such a solution we may end up with two questions: what information can access each client and audit. Through some tokens which we can generate for each client we can define what content the customer has access, what kind of operations can perform and how long a token is valid. This functionality is called Shared Access Signature and allows us to eliminate from the equation the instances that should offer data to the customers.

These tables should not show how we internally store our data, but the data that we want to offer our customers.

with different cache systems or systems for sending messages to services that allow us to do video streaming without raising any problems of allocation or security.

The most important thing that we have to do when we think on a cloud application is to try to identify all the points where we need scaling and to look for services that can offer this. If we need features that are not already on the cloud we find it is better to separate them on different instance or at least different processes. If we will need to scale it will be easier for us to increase the number of instances that deal with a specific function.

Windows Azure Storage Service natively supports the audit, all we have to do Today a cloud solution means more is to activate it and to specify what kind of than several machines running our applioperation we want to do audit. cation with a load balancer â&#x20AC;&#x201C; horizontal scalability. Cloud means a multitude of serUsing such a solution we will need to vices that come to our aid to create more have a component to handle the generation complex applications and to scale where and management of these tokens. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t we need.

In such cases we imagine our system need other components. from another point of view. We can stock and expose dates through Windows Azure Conclusion Table Storage Service. This non-relational table allows us to stock hundreds of GB of We analyzed different ways in which we content without any problems. can make our application scalable starting

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programming

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

In-Memory Database - SAP HANA Real-Time Platform

D

evelopment of SAP business solutions represents a continuous challenge which extends on two levels, the technical and the knowledge of the business environment. The need for performance and high adaptability in creating a SAP business software also requires innovation whose already applicable revolutionary results we would like to reveal in the following paragraphs.

In-Memory Database Concept Horea Rațiu

horea.ratiu@msg-systems.com Director Departament SAP @ .msg systems Romania

Victor Ionescu

victor.ionescu@msg-systems.com SAP IT Consultant @ .msg systems Romania

•

However: logging in is done on disk/ data recovery is also done on disk Main memory access is the new challenge; Cache algorithms/data structures are crucial.

The volume of data in current busi• ness systems is continually growing and the quality differs from structured data to • unstructured data. The way to access data has changed with the occurrence of Mobile technologies so much so that users have Current Generation SAP Enterprise Solureal time access and the response time must tions be minimal (<1s).

Current generation business systems architecture reflects business conditions In the case of classic database mana- and the evolution of business systems: gement systems, because of technological • Database layer: Database managelimitations, the loading of data is done by ment systems were built to optimize separating database management solutions hard disk access performance, for in transactional processing (OLTP - Online example by minimizing the numTransaction Processing) and analytical ber of disk pages read in the main processing (OLAP - Online application memory while processing a query. processing).

• Business application layer: The In-Memory DB – IMDB Example: business software was built using the • Data remains permanent in the sequential processing paradigm. The memory; database tables were brought from • Primary „persistence” is the main the database processed row by row memory; and then put back in the database.

Figure 2 below illustrates a typical situation for enterprise type software from the current generation of solutions. Large companies posses multiple resource planning (ERP) enterprise type solutions, each with its own database for operational data. Analytical data is consolidated in an enterprise data warehouse and consumed by business users with the help of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions.

Figure 1 Exemple of BD In-Memory structure

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In-Memory Database - SAP HANA Real-Time Platform brings significant improvements regarding the optimization potential of operations At the C++ layer level there have been developed a series of libraries meant to ease the implementation of business logics within a database. Examples of these types of libraries are: „Business Function Library” (BFL) and „Predictive Analysis Library” (PAL).

Parallelism

Figure 2. Enterprise SAP current generation solution

How SAP HANA Revolutionizes Interfaces SQL Script Business Applications and the Immediate Compared to a normal DBMS the SAP Benefits It Brings HANA platform offers beside the standard In business and financial applications different types of total balance persist under the guise of materialized aggregates.

In the case of SAP HANA and the saving of data in memory these materialized aggregates can be eliminated so that all the balance calculations and sums needed for reports are determined real time with a high document performance, accounting reports are a good example.

When using a classic DBMS system the permanent need to have access to updated information leads to the creation of additional tables for storing those data. In SAP HANA those tables are eliminated, the needed information can be determined in real time, thus simplifying the data model.

All the SAP modules together with the new releases are and will be adapted for the SAP HANA In Memory platform. Because SAP HANA’s success up to date it is contracted by the new SAP-ABAP developed applications.

Another important aspect which was taken into account in the development of the SAP HANA platform is the massive capacity to parallelize the current generation of multi-core processors. A benchmark performed by Intel together with SAP on the HANA platform and utilizing Intel processors has revealed an almost linear relationship between parallelism growth (the number of threads) and the decrease of execution time for operations at database level.

The secret behind these performances lies in using an optimized „computational model”. SQL Script instructions are compiled and represented in the form of a „data flow graph” – an acyclic orientated graph in which every graph node represents a transformation that must be applied upon the data set.

SQL interface other interfaces such as SQL Script or MDX (multidimensional expression). Their existence brings a plus when it comes to platform flexibility and allows development of optimized applications for real time processes.

With the large scale implementation of In Memory databases it is expected that the “Code Push-down” phenomenon to become more frequent – this implies the migration of business logic considered to be „data-intensive” from the application level to the database level.

The SQL Script interface of SAP HANA is designed to meet this phenomenon, Operation types embedded in these SQL Script being a language developed by nodes are:

Figure 3. Migration of applications to SAP HANA

SAP HANA Technical Platform

The SAP HANA platform in not limited to addressing the SAP concept of In Memory Database, but comes with a series of innovations meant to make maximum use of the technological progress of the last years. Next we will discuss the internal structure of the platform, highlighting these innovations which make SAP HANA stand out from other IMDB solutions.

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Figure 3. Internal Structure of SAP HANA Technical Platform

SAP with the purpose of supporting the implementation of a complex logic at the database level.

SQL Script instructions have at their core standard SQL operations and predefined procedures, thus from a conceptual standpoint SQL Script is very much alike stored procedures, although SQL Script

• • •

Set operations (aggregation, union, intersection) SQL instructions Scripts comprising of complex operations, which cannot be modeled under the form of a „data flow graph”

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Figure 4. Processing times for a 120 million set of data entries. Time variation with parallelism growth.

Representing instructions under this form allows a better data partition in independent subsets which can be processed in parallel. Using this kind of approach allows the SAP HANA platform to take maximum advantage of the processing power of todays “multi-cores” thus explaining the astonishing results in the Intel benchmark.

Column/Row Store One of the distinctive properties of SAP HANA is the fact that it has at its disposal both a row based (row store) storage model and a column based one (column store).

Although a table is by definition 2 dimensional a computers memory is organized as a sequential succession of locations, thus the decision to store a table under the form of a succession of rows and columns may have great impact on the performance of the application. SAP HANA gives the possibility to take this decision for each individual table taking into consideration its nature.

Table 1 presents the situations in which either a “row store” or a “column store” is recommended.

Row store

Column Store

Table with a low number of rows, for example configuration tables

Operation executed on a single (or few) columns

The application processes a row

Large numbers of rows, column operations are necessary (aggregation, search, so forth)

migration to a SAP HANA platform?” To quantify this gain countless benchmarks have been made, probably the most relevant ones carried out are those within the Data Warehousing context.

Next the results of such a benchmark made on the SAP HANA platform will be a briefly presented. In this test the main focus was the investigation of the analytical power of SAP HANA in BI real time context.

Execution of the test was done on a 100TB set of data this being stored in a facts table with 100 billion entries and in tables of related dimensions. The data set represents appropriate entries for a 5 year interval a SD (Sales&Distribution) module.

Operations chosen for the evaluation are of mixed nature covering a large part of normal BI activities: • General reporting, • Iterative querying (drill downs), • Ranking, • Year-over-year analysis.

improvements by a factor of several thousands.

This claim is backed up by the various clients who have taken this step: “[R]eplacing our enterprise-wide Oracle data mart and resulting in over 20,000-times speed improvement processing our most complex freight transportation cost calculation . . . our stand-alone mobile applications that were previously running on Oracle are now running on SAP HANA. Our 2,000 local sales representatives can now interact with real-time data instead and have the ability to make on-the-fly promotion decisions to improve sales.”

– Nongfu Spring “[O]ur internal technical comparison demonstrated that SAP HANA outperforms traditional disk-based systems by a factor of 408,000.”

– Mitsui Knowledge Industry Co. Ltd. “With SAP HANA, we see a tremendous opportunity to dramatically improve our enterprise data warehouse solutions, drastically reducing data latency and improving speed when we can return query results in 45 seconds from SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA versus waiting up to 20 minutes for empty results from SAP NetWeaver BW on a traditional disk-based database.”

– Shanghai Volkswagen

Testing sought both execution time of a query and determination of throughput (expressed as a number of queries per hour).

Results

Most queries had a response time of less than 1 second, even the most complex operation done on the whole 5 year data set Aggregations are not Large numbers of colnecessary umns within a table finished in less than 4 seconds1.

The columns contain The table is covered What matters in the end is the way distinctive values, only on the basis of thus the potential the values in some in which this performance improvement of data compression columns is low is felt by the end users in the productive environment. It is rumored that migrating Performance Evaluation from a standard DBMS (with storage on Evidently the discussion about the SAP a magnetic drive) to SAP HANA brings HANA platform cannot be ended without 1 Test details: http://download.sap.com/download.epd answering the question “What is con- ?context=CCBE2C4417A4583A96A74DC0E2D820576429CADB38 C81772D70FE496C29B362BCBBAB6D377ADC5D7063F40D27A0 crete performance gain obtained with the 790298C2238F3F161645E www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

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What is a Code Review?

C

ode review is systematic examination (often known as peer review) of computer source code. It is intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers’ skills.

Why Reviews are important?

Mădălin Ilie

Madalin.Ilie@endava.com Java discipline lead @ Endava

Q uot ing f rom C o de C omplete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition1 .. software testing alone has limited effectiveness — the average defect detection rate is only 25 percent for unit testing, 35 percent for function testing, and 45 percent for integration testing. In contrast, the average effectiveness of design and code inspections are 55 and 60 percent. Case studies of review results have been impressive: • In a software-maintenance organization, 55 percent of one-line maintenance changes were in error before code reviews were introduced.

After reviews were introduced, only 2 percent of the changes were in error.

When all changes were considered, 95 percent were correct the first time after reviews were introduced. Before reviews were introduced, under 20 percent were correct the first time.

• In a group of 11 programs developed by the same group of people, the first 5 were developed without reviews.

The remaining 6 were developed with reviews. After all the programs were released to production, the first 5 had an average of 4.5 errors per 100 lines of code. The 6 that had been inspected had an average of only 0.82 errors per 100. Reviews cut the errors by over 80 percent.

• The Aetna Insurance Company found 1 h t t p : / / w w w . a m a z o n . c o m / Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Construction/dp/0735619670

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•

•

•

82 percent of the errors in a program by using inspections and was able to decrease its development resources by 20 percent.

IBM’s 500,000 line Orbit project used 11 levels of inspections. It was delivered early and had only about 1 percent of the errors that would normally be expected.

A study of an organization at AT&T with more than 200 people reported a 14 percent increase in productivity and a 90 percent decrease in defects after the organization introduced reviews.

Jet Propulsion Laboratories estimates that it saves about $25,000 per inspection by finding and fixing defects at an early stage.

The main goals of code review are: 1. To spot and fix defects early in the process.

2. Better-shared understanding of the code base as team members learn from each other 3. Helps to maintain a level of consistency in design and implementation.

4. Helps to identify common defects across the team thus reducing rework.

5. Builds confidence of stakeholders about technical quality of the execution.

6. Uniformity in understanding will help interchangeability of team members in case of non-availability

management

of any one of them.

7. A different perspective. “Another set of eyes” adds objectivity. Similar to the reason for separating your coding and testing teams, peer reviews provide the distance needed to recognize problems.

8. Pride/reward. Recognition of coding prowess is a significant reward for many programmers.

9. Te am cohesiveness. Working together helps draw team members closer. It also provides a brief respite from the isolation that coding often brings.

You can see above how important is to fix potential defects from the development phase. The main areas a reviewer is focusing on are as follows: • General Unit Testing • Comment and Coding Conventions • Error Handling • Resource Leaks • Thread Safety • Control Structures • Performance • Functionality • Security • Compliance with existing Design & Architecture • Proper use of 3rd party libraries

Roles and Responsibilities

Developer: is the person who has written the code to be reviewed and has initiated the review request Reviewer/s: are the people who are going to review the code and report the findings to the developer.

Like any skill, good peer reviews come with practice. Some tips that should help you get started on the right track are as follows:

Tips for the Developer

1. The primary reviewer is the author i.e. YOU. 2. C reate a checklist for yourself of the things that the code reviews

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE tend to focus on. Some of this Don’t be the guy coding in the dark checklist should be easy to office emerging only to buy cola. The put together. It should follow guy in the room is out of touch, out the outline of the coding stanof sight, and out of control and has dards document. Because it’s no place in an open, collaborative your checklist, you can focus environment. on the thing that you struggle 10. Please note that Review meetings with and skip the things that are NOT problem solving meetings. you rarely, if ever, have a pro11. Help to maintain the coding stanblem with. Run through your dards. Offer to add to the coding code with the checklist and fix standards for things discussed that whatever you find. Not only will you aren’t in the coding standards. One reduce the number of things that the of the challenges that a developer team finds, you’ll reduce the time to has in an organization with comcomplete the code review meeting— bative code review practices is that and everyone will be happy to spend they frequently don’t know where the less time in the review. next problem will come from. If you 3. You are not your code. Remember document each issue into the coding that the entire point of a review is to standards, you can check for it with find problems, and problems will be your checklist the next time you found. Don’t take it personally when come up for code reviews. It also will one is uncovered. help cement the concept into your 4. Understand and accept that you mind so that you’re less likely to miss will make mistakes. The point is to opportunities to use the feedback. find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except Tips for the Reviewer for the few of us developing rocket 1. Critique code instead of people guidance software at JPL, mistakes – be kind to the coder, not to the are rarely fatal in our industry, so we code. As much as possible, make all can, and should, learn, laugh, and of your comments positive and orimove on. ented to improving the code. Relate 5. No matter how much “karate” you comments to local standards, proknow, someone else will always gram specs, increased performance, know more. Such an individual etc. can teach you some new moves if 2. Treat people who know less than you ask. Seek and accept input from you with respect, deference, and others, especially when you think it’s patience. Nontechnical people who not needed. deal with developers on a regular 6. Don’t rewrite code without consulbasis almost universally hold the tation. There’s a fine line between opinion that we are prima donnas “fixing code” and “rewriting code.” at best and crybabies at worst. Don’t Know the difference, and purreinforce this stereotype with anger sue stylistic changes within the and impatience. framework of a code review, not as a 3. The only true authority stems from lone enforcer. knowledge, not from position.

7. The only constant in the world is Knowledge engenders authority, and change. Be open to it and accept it authority engenders respect – so if with a smile. Look at each change to you want respect in an egoless enviyour requirements, platform, or tool ronment, cultivate knowledge. as a new challenge, not as some seri4. Please note that Review meeous inconvenience to be fought. tings are NOT problem solving 8. Fight for what you believe, but grameetings. cefully accept defeat. Understand 5. Ask questions rather than make that sometimes your ideas will be statements. A statement is accusaoverruled. Even if you do turn out to tory. “You didn’t follow the standard be right, don’t take revenge or say, “I here” is an attack—whether intentiotold you so” more than a few times nal or not. The question, “What was at most, and don’t make your dearly the reasoning behind the approadeparted idea a martyr or rallying ched you used?” is seeking more cry. information. Obviously, that ques9. D on’t be “the guy in the room.” tion can’t be said with a sarcastic www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

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or condescending tone; but, done correctly, it can often open the developer up to stating their thinking and then asking if there was a better way.

Avoid the “Why ” questions.

Although extremely difficult at times, avoiding the”Why” questions can substantially improve the mood.

Just as a statement is accusatory—so is a why question. Most “Why” questions can be reworded to a question that doesn’t include the word “Why” and the results can be dramatic. For example, “Why didn’t you follow the standards here…” versus “What was the reasoning behind the deviation from the standards here…”

Remember to praise. The purposes of code reviews are not focused at telling developers how they can improve, and not necessarily that they did a good job. Human nature is such that we want and need to be acknowledged for our successes, not just shown our faults. Because development is necessarily a creative work that developers pour their soul into, it often can be close to their hearts. This makes the need for praise even more critical.

Make sure you have good coding standards to reference. Code reviews find their foundation in the coding standards of the organization. Coding standards are supposed to be the shared agreement that the developers have with one another to produce quality, maintainable code.

If you’re discussing an item that isn’t in your coding standards, you have some work to do to get the item in the coding standards. You should regularly ask yourself whether the item being discussed is in your coding standards.

Remember that there is often more than one way to approach a solution. Although the developer might have coded something differently from how you would have, it isn’t necessarily wrong. The goal is quality, maintainable code. If it meets those goals and follows the coding standards, that’s all you can ask for.

You shouldn’t rush through a code review - but also, you need to do it promptly. Your coworkers are waiting for you.

Review fewer than 200-400 lines of code at a time. nr. 8/2013 | www.todaysoftmag.com

Security Code Review

If the applications requires a very close attention to security then www.owasp. orgis the right place for resources. This is a very good Security Code Review document to consider: https://www.owasp. org/images/2/2e/OWASP_Code_Review_ Guide-V1_1.pdf.

Assign Severity to Review Findings

The severity to find issues with code should go as below. Reviewer must focus on issues with High severity first and then to Medium severity and then Low severity issues A. Naming Conventions and Coding style = Low B. Control Structures and Logical issues = Medium or High C. Redundant Code = High D. Performance Issues =High E. Security Issues = High F. Scalability Issues= High G. Functional Issues =High H. Error Handling = High I. Reusability = Medium J. Design & Architecture = High K. Proper use of 3rd party libraries = Medium

Checklist for developers and reviewers

Checklist for Developers Description My code compiles

Confirmed?

My code has been developer-tested and includes unit tests My code includes javadoc where appropriate My code is tidy (indentation, line length, no commented-out code, no spelling mistakes, etc)

I have considered proper use of exceptions I have made appropriate use of logging

I have eliminated unused imports I have eliminated Eclipse warnings

I have considered possible NPEs The code follows the Coding Standards

Are there any leftover stubs or test routines in the code?

Are there any hardcoded, development only things still in the code?

Was performance considered?

Was security considered?

Does the code release resources? (HTTP connections, DB connection, files, etc)

Checklists are a highly recommended way to find the things you forget to do, and Corner cases well docuare useful for both authors and reviewers. mented or any workaround a known limitation Omissions are the hardest defects to find – for of the frameworks after all, it’s hard to review something that’s Can any code be replaced not there. A checklist is the single best way by calls to external to combat the problem, as it reminds the reusable components or library functions? reviewer or author to take the time to look Thread safety and posfor something that might be missing. A sible deadlocks checklist will remind authors and reviewers Does the code do what’s to confirm that all errors are handled, that supposed to function arguments are tested for inva- Does my change have any effects on existing lid values, and that unit tests have been side functionality created.

Is the code consistent Another useful concept is the personal with the current design/ checklist. Each person typically makes the architecture same 15-20 mistakes. If you notice what Checked for existing methods/utilities before your typical errors are, you can develop implementing new ones your own personal checklist (PSP, SEI, and CMMI recommend this practice too).

Reviewers will do the work of determining your common mistakes. All you have to do is keep a short checklist of the common flaws in your work, particularly the things you forget to do. As soon as you start recording your defects in a checklist, you will Checklist for Reviewers start making fewer of them. The rules will Description Confirmed? be fresh in your mind and your error rate The code meets the will drop. We’ve seen this happen over and business requirements over

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE Description

Comments are comprehensible and add something to the maintainability of the code Comments are neither too numerous nor verbose

Types have been generalized where possible Parameterized types have been used appropriately Exceptions have been used appropriately Repetitive code has been factored out

Confirmed?

issues, architectural flaws or project specific JaCoCo is the new default. functionality and this is where the reviewer skills are the most important. I’ll present JaCoCo6 below the most used tools for Java projects.

JaCoCo is a free code coverage library for Java, which has been created by the PMD2 EclEmma team based on the lessons learPMD is a source code analyzer. It finds ned from using and integration existing unused variables, empty catch blocks, libraries over the last five years. unnecessary object creation, and so forth.

Findbugs

Findbugs is a program which uses static Findbugs is a program which uses static analysis to look for bugs in Java code. analysis to look for bugs in Java code.

Monitoring the Code Review process

Frameworks have been used appropriately – methods have all been defined appropriately

Command classes have been designed to undertake one task only JSPs do not contain business logic

Unit tests are present and correct

Common errors have been checked for

Potential threading issues have been eliminated where possible Any security concerns have been addressed

Performance was considered The functionality fits the current design/architecture

Checkstyle4 Checkstyle is a development tool to help programmers write Java code that adheres to a coding standard. It automates the process of checking Java code to spare humans of this boring (but important) task.

This makes it ideal for projects that want to enforce a coding standard.

Sonar

Each time you talk about Code Quality in the Java world there are very high chances that Sonar is mentioned one way or The code does not use another in the discussion. Sonar aggregaunjustifiable static methods/blocks tes and displays code quality metrics on The code complies to a web site allowing drilling down to the coding standards source code to view the details of violatiLogging used approprions. Sonar’s main purpose is to display the ately (proper logging level and details) metrics in a nice visual manner and uses various plugins to produce these code quaNPEs and AIOBs lity metrics. All the below tools integrate The code does not reinvent the wheel with Maven, Ant and are also available as The code does not have Eclipse plugins. In order to get the same set any side effect on exof rules for both Sonar and these Eclipse isting functionality plugins, Sonar publishes the rules for PMD, Automating the Code Review process Checkstyle and Findbugs associated to a You can split the Code Review process specific profile. into 2 parts: the Low Level part (styling, code duplicate, naming conventions, etc) Cobertura5 and the High Level part (architecture, Cobertura is a free Java tool that caldesign, business). culates the percentage of code accessed by Starting from a Coding Standards tests. It can be used to identify which parts document, you can easily automate the of your Java program are lacking test coveLow level part of the Code Review process. rage. It is based on jcoverage The automation tools for Code Review Since Sonar 3.2 Cobertura is not will eliminate most of the styling issues, the default code coverage tool anymore. naming conventions, cyclomatic comple2 http://pmd.sourceforge.net/ xity, duplicate code, code coverage, etc.

3 http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/ 4 http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/ They can’t though detect major design 5 http://cobertura.sourceforge.net/.

The code is unit testable

Findbugs7

3

Until now I presented advises about what to pay attention on when implementing a Code Review process within a project and how you can automate a part of the process, allowing the reviewer to focusing on the important things like design, architecture and business requirements.

What’s the best way to track the review progress: through emails, excel files, just talking or using specialized tools?

Although the obvious answer is specialized tools, each team has its own particularities. Usually each team will found its own mechanic when dealing with reviews: ■■ You can have a rule that no one does a commit until another colleague will review the code ■■ Each team member will check all the commits when doing an update ■■ You have a person assigned per day/ sprint/iteration that does the code review for everyone ■■ You do peer code review ■■ You have a dedicated that does the review team formed only by senior and architects If you are in an environment where you already use Atlassian tools (JIRA, Confluence, FishEye), the wise choice is Crucible as it integrates with the whole stack of Atlassian products. Currently I think this is the best tool for keeping track of code reviews. There are also other choices like: Gerrit (dedicated to Git projects) or ReviewBoard

6 http://www.eclemma.org/jacoco/ 7 http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/

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Book review: Java Persistence with JPA - dr. Daoqi Yang

O

ver time the mode in which data persisted created a number of problems.

Problems that can be approached from multiple points of view, but in the case of application developers, are related with the database interaction, the organization of data at the level of module persistence being of less importance for a software developer (for example: relational schematics, hierarchical schematics, network, semantics, etc. ) Silviu Dumitrescu silviu.dumitrescu@msg-systems.com Java Consultant @ .msg systems Romania

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At interaction performance level two major problems arouse: decreasing response time and increasing the degree of trust in the data contained in the database.

Solving them depended on many factors from the type of bridge used for the connection through to security or maintaining integrity.

For data organizing, at the persistence module level, the relational model of databases has endured over time as being one of the most widely used models.

Introduction of numerous theoretical constraints of this model (Armstrong’s axioms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Armstrong%27s_axioms for example) and the implementation of much of these constraints has lead to increasing trust relative to data integrity.

As far as the application developers are concerned, they work on the application module and this has to interact with the persistence module. There have been a number of ways realize this interaction. Four types of bridges are known for the possibility to connect to a database: JDBC-ODBC Bridge, Native-API Driver, Network-Protocol Driver and Java to Database Protocol. Each new type brought a growth in response speed, in the number of available connections and in security. I do not wish to discuss these now but for

those who are interested we can elaborate.

As good as the connection was there were other challenges: the connection had to be created, requests were to be made for the created connection, and the database server had to send a response and many others. Some of these were resolved, for example there are connection pools, the connections aren’t recreated they are reused.

At application software level a major problem for a long time was SQL injection. This caused significant destruction or unwanted replicas of the database. We are now ready to identify the books “Java Persistence with JPA” written by Dr. Daoqi Yang utility.

The book is a medium and advanced explanation of the role of Java Persistence API (JPA) in stand alone application development (with distributed access or not – the database being local) or purely distributed who interact with databases, especially organized after the relational model.

As stated earlier JPA can be used stand alone application developers, but its performance is truly highlighted for distributed applications, which use application servers as middleware. This is the widely debated case presented in this book. Aspects regarding EJB, which were covered in an earlier

business

review must be supplemented by going through the material of this book entirely.

The JPA version considered is 2.0 which emerged in 2009. The main idea is that every table is mapped to a class; more precisely a line of a table represents an instance of a class also called an entity.

Therefore a table is a collection of classes.

This process of mapping is described in the “Object Relational Management” chapter, also you can find the annotations used.

For those who think they know enough, a question, do you know the usefulness of the annotation @Secondary Table? Details, of course, in the book at page 56 Chapter 2.2.11.

Tables then have to be related and the relations are mapped with special strategies: attributes instance or collections of instances to the classes who map out tables. To increase performance we have to take into consideration the type of collection used to map out relations or the way in which the collection is refreshed, relative to the modifications in the database.

All of this is described in the “Relation Mapping” chapter.

Database operations are done in a persistent context, managed by a container, if we discuss about its usage in an application server. The persistent context manages the

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

entity states, some of the operations cannot be carried out in all states. Describing states and how to transition between them is in “Entity Lifecycle”.

We manage competitive access through various ways of blocking the entities. Optimistic and pessimistic blocking are just two of these means described in detail in “Locking and Concurrency”.

I come back to the idea of performance in developing an application. How could we choose between the two management persistence modes: by the container or by the application (user)?

Another advantageous aspect of using entities is that data stored in entities is practically managed internally, in memory.

We have to take advantage of this making as many validations at middleware level.

Also the rational use of cache leads to increased performance.

An important facility offered by JPA is the possibility to inherit entities. Entities being classes subject to POO rules, hence subject to inheritance. The most interesting part is that derived entity classes can be in turn mapped. Mapping strategies lead to choosing between keeping Normal Form 3 rules or Boyce Codd, the payoff being a larger access time or a table with null fields but smaller access time.

The last and the most important part of the conferred material is linked to the query language used to access the data in the databases. Java Persistence Query Language (JPQL) and Criteria API are the two choices debated. The two being the most commonly used. The first one uses a language similar to SQL with modifications regarding the use of classes instead of tables. With the introduction of entity aliases the possibility to use SQL injection is almost completely suppressed. The second version uses a pure object oriented language, if we take into account the type dependency introduced in Java, this language eliminates many of the errors which can appear rolling phase.

On the whole the exposure of the theoretical concepts by the author is accompanied by numerous examples and fragments of code which are very useful in fully understanding of the functionalities of JPA. So far the book can be regarded as a complete guide to using a framework. If we take into account the additions made in the final chapters the book becomes a reference for using best practices or design patterns.

A question for those who posses more advanced knowledge in this field: have you ever used a “thread local pattern”? A very good example is given in this book starting with page 319, Chapter 8.1.5.

This book ends with a chapter entitled “Resources” which supplies details about used technologies.

Maybe the only problem one might encounter while covering the pages of this book is with using JBoss application server instead of the more frequent Glassfish.

I see this as a challenge and the differences in configuration are minimal, easily overcomed by those who are addressed by this review.

As always I eagerly await any comments, opinions and discussions on the topics addressed in this work.

Enjoy reading!

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HR

Leading a team

T

he workshop from the last edition of launching Today software Magazine, determined me to approach one more topic on leadership and management, because of all the questions raised during the panels about being a leader, overcoming the situational leadership theory, which are the limits of managing a team and once again, the difference between being a manager and a leader. Because of that, this article I am going to make a short presentation of the roles and responsibilities of a leader and a manager. As mentioned already in the previous article, the leader is the person who has a vision and has followers, and the manager is the person oriented on the strategic part.

•

A Leader •

•

•

•

•

•

Envisions: has a vision and knows how to guide the team in reaching it and defines the norms and behaviors agreed in the team.

Sustains and implements: is the person who encourages change and defines the necessary steps for a better understanding of the changing process.

It is open-minded: encourages brainstorming and each team member’s opinion is important. Implements new ideas that bring an added value for an efficient and effective working process in reaching the objectives set.

Leads by example: it is important for the leader to act accordingly to the values that he promotes. The leader is the person who defines the behavior and the communication style in the team. The transparent the leader is in the decisions that he makes, the more followers of his behavior he will have.

Trusts: the leader transmits based on the actions taken, that is a trusted person by the team members.

In order to have a big impact in the creation of a trustful climate in the team, the leader offers support and rewards every positive result. More than this the leader is the person responsible for coaching the team members.

Offers support and help: is the person oriented on solving problems and encourages new solutions, analyses pluses and minuses and implements the best solutions.

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•

Reveals the best of the abilities of all team members: through constant feedback, coaching and other instruments the leader creates the appropriate environment in developing his team members and improving their strengths.

Listens actively: listens carefully and empathizes with the thoughts and feelings of the persons with whom he interacts, does not interpret, does not judge and understands the intellectual and emotional signification of the facts.

A manager:

stages of development of group development and the role of leader in each stage. It is a theoretical presentation which defines the 5 stages of team development with its specifics: team member’s feelings, understanding of rules, roles, responsibilities and objectives.

Stages of group development (Tuckman, 1965)

Plans: creates an action plan in order I. Forming to achieve the objectives set, defines Stage characteristics: the strategy and the dead lines, and • Feelings and behaviors of team defines internal politics and promembers: cedures. Has an important role in »» Fear; planning the budget. »» The communication in the team • Organizes: defines roles and resis difficult, because of an inseponsibilities, delegate tasks, and cure feeling that team members establishes hierarchical relationsdeveloped; hips and the role of each person in »» The involvement of the team the organizational chart. members is low and inefficient • Coordinates: defines the resources »» Each person searches to establish needed: people, structures, deadlian identity in the team. nes and establishes how processes will be implemented.

• Rules and objectives: • Controls: defines performance »» Objectives are established by the standards, measures processes and manager of the team, because the evaluates results. team members are new and they • Motivates: hires, fires, involves, do not understand the business engage, learns and develops the needs; employees. »» Objectives are not clear and are not understandable by the team For a better understanding of the members; differences between leaders and managers • Tasks and responsibilities: in the following lines you’ll see a graphic »» Are not known by the team memillustration. bers, even though during the The second part of the article will be hiring interview the tasks were oriented on the Tuckman’s Theory on explained; •

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programare

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

»»

Are not understandable, even the leader in this situation is to prothough the team members were vide support and create unity within allocated on a similar project, the team. because the context of the business is new and most of the times III. Norming different; Stage characteristics: • Feelings and behaviors of team Leader’s Role members: • Creates the environment that faci»» Consensus and acceptance; litates communication between the »» Team members start to trust each team members. In this stage team other; buildings activities are encouraged »» A common language is developed in order to facilitate the integration between the team members; process in the team.

• Defines together with the team • Rules and objective: members the working rules in the »» Objectives are known by the team. team members, because they • Guides the team members and explahave a high level of understanins the tasks and responsibilities. ding of tasks and especially the • Communicates with the team impact that their role has in the members and explains the vision, organization; objectives and strategy to the team »» Team members are directly members. involved in setting goals and esta• • Makes decisions, but in the same blishing the steps of achieving the time encourages the ideas of each strategy; team member. »» Rules are accepted as they were mutually agreed;

II. Stroming •

•

Stage characteristics: Feelings and behaviors of team members: »» Feelings of conflict and tension; »» Competition and resentments; »» C on f l i c t s i n i nte r p e rs on a l relations; »» Failure to meet targets due to conflict situations; »» Lack of confidence;

Leader’s Role: Delegates tasks, because employees already reached a level of understanding of the job and are more comfortable with their tasks.

• The risk at this stage is due to the fact that employees want to perform as many tasks and sometimes they tend to be interposed over the activities of the others.

• Motivates and offers support to team members. The leader is a good coach and helps the team members to increase performance and efficiency at work •

Rules and objectives: Objectives are known, but the team members still don’t adhere to them, because objectives are set by the manager who has a better understanding of the business; IV. Performing »» Rules are defined, but are not Stage characteristics: respected; • Feelings and behaviors of team members: Leader’s Role: »» High efficiency of team members • Solving conflicts that may arise to achieve performance; between team members, by recalling »» Team members create a high the team working rules defined in degree of interdependence at relathe previous stage. tional and functional level; • Focused on explaining tasks, res»» Team develops a common idenponsibilities and strateg y for tity that was defined based on the achieving the results. values of each individual; • Turns the conflicts in favorable situations that can generate new ideas, • Rules and objectives: procedures and work rules. »» Team members know how to • Motivates the team, because the risk accomplish objectives and they to leave it is very high and the role of are dedicating all their energy in »»

this purpose; Leader’s Rol: • The role of the leader is low; • Delegates tasks and trusts team members; • Uses resources to maxim potential, especially the human resources.

V. Finalizing This is the last stage of group development. It is the stage where the team falls apart and the cycle starts again when new projects will start. Most of the times this stage is not even mentioned, because is redundant step.

Both in theory and in practice there is no separation in time of these stages, because there were instances where the steps were „burned” faster. Leader’s role is critical in implementing the integration process and making the team members understand their tasks through an appropriate guidance. To remember is that the biggest challenge is the “Storming Stage” because people have different personalities and the conflict will be inevitable, in terms of division of power and authority in the team. I think that it is the stage in which the leader must constantly remind his role and that each one of the team members has different roles in the team. The leader is the one who guides them and should have the ability to change the mentality of conflict in problem-solving mentality. Norming and performing will come by itself. Each team member knows his responsibilities.

In this way cohesion and unity will be established and the results will come by default.

Leader’s role will be to monitor and coordinate tasks with continuous motivation of team members. What I would like to mention in the conclusion of the article is that there are some stages that may come back.

Team dynamics is not a linear process. Each new member that is integrated into the team brings the team back in “Forming” phase. Integration is really easy, but can create storm stage (again) with all the characteristics of this stage and in this way all the process starts again. The dynamic the working environment is, the faster the team will “burn” the stages of development.

Good luck with creating the most performance teams!

Andreea Pârvu

andreea.parvu@endava.com Recruiter @ Endava

www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

35

programming

Launching a website basic steps

L • •

Attila-Mihaly Balazs dify.ltd@gmail.com

Code Wrangler @ Udacity Trainer @ Tora Trading

aunching a website cannot be simpler in theory: write ten lines of HTML , save it in a file named index.html and poof, you have a website. For the site to be able to fulfill the purpose for which it was built, it must have two qualities: to be usable by the users who need to access it potential users need to be able to learn about its existence

This article it will show the basic steps required to achieve these qualities.

The inspiration for this article came during the launch of the site it-events. ro, a central calendar for all events from the IT field in Romania. The site is useful both for those who want to attend events (because they can be notified about all new events in their preferred way - email, RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Google+) and for organizers who can ensure that their event does not overlap with other similar events and who have access to a group of interested people through the site. With that being said, let’s see what is necessary for a website to have chance of success.

Hosting

The first question before the launch of a website is usually „where to host it?”. There are many options depending on the technology used and the available budget. My personal recommendations are: • the micro instance1 from Amazon EC2 - it’s free for a year and you have full control over the virtual machine (you can install any software required for your site). Another advantage is that security settings are quite strict. The disadvantage is the limited resource available (one processor, 30 GB hard drive and 613 MB of RAM), which can create problems if many users access it in parallel. I recommend testing the site performance using services like 1 http://aws.amazon.com/free/

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•

blitz.io2 or a simple Apache Bench (ab).

Google App Engine 3 - is a specialized solution which cannot run general platforms (such as WordPress, Drupal, etc). On the other hand, can be easily used for static sites. For dynamic sites written for the GAE platform it offers the advantage of easy scaling and increased reliability

/robots.txt

is a text file that specifies for search engine crawlers which parts of the site (not to) index. It is important to note that respecting the rules from this file is purely voluntary, so do not rely on it as a security measure. A simple robots.txt looks the following way: User-agent: * Allow: /

robots.txt is also used for specifying the sitemap and the indexing speed4 (defined as the delay of seconds between successive 2 https://www.blitz.io/ 3 https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/ quotas 4 h t t p : / / e n . w i k i p e d i a . o r g / w i k i / Robots_exclusion_standard

tehnologii

page fetches) of the site by search crawlers.

Similarly to robots.txt there is a humans. txt5 movement, but it is not widely used or considered by search engines.

Monitoring

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE Favicon is short for „Favorites Icon” and is the icon which appears near the site title in bowser, in the list of favorite sites and so on. It helps create the visual identity of the site (the users learn to subconsciously recognize the site based on it). Another advantage is the elimination of errors 404 („not found”) web server log (they appear because web browsers automatically try to fetch the file when visiting a site, even if there is no link to it on the page).

Other files which are downloaded automatically (and may result in error 404 if any) are: • apple-touch-icon-*.png - images used by browsers on Apple devices (iPad, iPhone) to represent the site if it is saved on the home screen (think of it as a Favicon with higher resolution). Useful addition of the same reasons as the favicon: visual identity and eliminates errors 404.

• crossdomain.xml - - the Adobe Flash Player uses it to determine how the site can be accessed from other sites using Flash. If you do not want to let other sites to use your content content using Flash, you can add the following crossdomains.xml file to eliminate 404 errors from the log:

There are two types of monitoring: monitoring that site running - not dead web server, database, etc..

There are many companies that offer such services. IT-Events.RO use Pingdom6 offering free SMS alert option for site, • visitors on site monitoring (where they come from, what operating systems used, etc.). For this use and recommend Google Analytics7.

Also recommend adding the site in Google Webmaster Tools8 and peri- <?xml version=”1.0” ?> odic messages there. GWT provides <cross-domain-policy> alerts and information on issues </cross-domain-policy> that are of interest to owners of sites (response rate, which could not be Sending emails accessed addresses, malicious conSending emails has become increatent, etc.). singly difficult these days because of unsolicited email (spam). Email service Sitemaps providers have responded by introducing It is a file (or a collection of files) which strict filters to eliminate these types of contain a list of all pages of the site. This is emails. Thus it became difficult to create useful if the search engine crawler has dif- emails that are not filtered by these rules ficulty finding all the pages of the site or the and are actually delivered to the recipient. content changes frequently. Most platforms For simplicity you can use services like provide functionality to automatically MailChimp10. If you want to send emails generate sitemaps, for example IT-Events. from Amazon EC2 instances, you need to RO use BWP XML Sitemaps9. setup Reverse DNS11 (RDNS) and look into There is no standard name for the file SPF12 . As an alternative it offers Amazon containing the sitemap, search engine SNS (Simple Notification Services), but it crawlers use robots.txt to discover it or is restricted to 1000 messages / month in find out about it by direct notice („ping” / the free version. submission). For example, Google’s search robot can be notified about the existence Checking site compatibility with differof a Sitemap using the Google Webmaster ent browsers Tools mentioned in the previous section.

Depending on the type of the site users will use different browsers. It is important Favicon to verify that the site is displayed as intended and is functional using all variants •

5 http://humanstxt.org/ 6 https://www.pingdom.com/ 7 http://www.google.com/analytics/ 8 https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ 9 h t t p : / / b e t t e r w p . n e t / w o r d p r e s s - p l u g i n s / google-xml-sitemaps/

10 http://mailchimp.com/ 11 h t t p s : / / a w s - p o r t a l . a m a z o n . c o m / g p / a w s / html-forms-controller/contactus/ec2-email-limit-rdns-request 12 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6688251/ spf-record-for-amazon-ec2

which we want to support. An easier way than installing all the browsers is to use services like BrowserStack13 or BrowserLab14 . Another important thing is to verify that complies with W3C HTML standard using tools such as validator.w3.org. This is important because treatment of nonstandard HTML varies from browser to browser thus using standard code reduces the likelihood that the site will be displayed differently in different browsers

Improved loading speed

Load speed is important for users and for Google considers a faster site „better” than a slow site. There are many tools that can be used to measure load speed of which I will mention four: • YSlow 15 - e- a Firefox extension from Yahoo that analyzes the site and suggest ways to improve page loading speed.

• mod_pagespeed16 - is an extension to Apache created by Google that optimizes page content for better loading speed.

• CDN-urile (C ontent Deliver y Network) - help by placing servers (physical) close to users. A good example is CloudFare17 .

• Platform-specific extensions - for example W3 Total Cache 18 for WordPress.

Conclusion

Creating a website is easy. Creating a site that is easy to use by users and automated systems alike is an ongoing process.

A more complete list of steps to maximize the impact site can be found at webdevchecklist.com. It is also worth reading the related discussion on HackerNews19 .

13 http://www.browserstack.com/ 14 https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html 15 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ yslow/ 16 https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ mod 17 http://www.cloudflare.com/ 18 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/ 19 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022523

www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

37

startups

Cheap Startup (II) - Microsoft Bizspark

W

hen I founded the company (Ab Mobile Apps) one of the challenges was to ensure that all our computers were running with licensed software and we had access to adequate IDEs. This meant: Microsoft Windows, Office and programming in .net, Visual Studio. Advised by a friend who had passed through this stage, I came across Microsoft’s BizSpark, a program that addresses startups and IT professionals.

It’s been a year since we were accepted in BizSpark and the experience is quite positive so far.

“What is Microsoft BizSpark?”

Microsoft BizSpark is a program which addresses the companies / startups that create products & services, which have access to a (limited but sufficient) licensed Microsoft products, access to cloud resources (Azure), access to the services / products of BizSpark’s partners at promotional prices (or free), training and support.

Licenses & packages offered by the program are extremely varied, changing quite often. For a „sneak peak” you can look at http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark / Offers / Default.aspx What we specifically got from BizSpark (so far) • Licenses for Windows 7 and Windows 8 • Licenses for Visual Studio (Ultimate & Professional) – you can also choose Team Foundation Server • Access to Windows Azure - 1500 hours on the ‘small’ virtual machine (or an equivalent) per month + 10 free websites (providing an acceptable speed). More about the BizSpark Azure at: http://www.windowsazure. com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0012p. We still do not fully take advantage of Azure (focusing on Amazon’s cloud) so I cannot give details about the ‘sufficiency’ of provided resources but we are to push the boundaries of Azure subscription in the near future • Access to Pluralsight (3 months free). Note: as a developer, I can warmly recommend Pluralsight as an online training resource the quality of trainings offered is

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generally excellent and it is worth but a year ago when we completed the all the money. application admission form, we had to give details about the company and what exactly Who is eligible for BizSpark? we wanted to develop. When I had all the Companies that: required information, the entire procedure • have more than 5 years, lasted more than 1 hour.

• have annual incomes less than $ After you apply, your application will 1,000,000, be evaluated by Microsoft Romania or • their field of activity is creating a Microsoft partner (if you chose not to software products and services. The apply directly from Microsoft but to one development must be (at least par- of its partners) and if all goes well you will tially) on Microsoft technologies. receive in a short tome all that BizSpark has Registered sole traders or freelance to offer. developers who: • want to develop a product / service How can I learn more? on Microsoft + want to become a Online at http://www.microsoft.com/ registered sole trader or an indivi- BizSpark/Faqs.aspx dual developer for a company Speaking directly to those dealing with BizSpark in Romania: Zoli Herczeg (Zoli.

These are general criteria – based on Herczeg@microsoft.com) and Simona Lica what you are developing / want to develop (v-silica@microsoft.com) and your future plans, you will / won’t be accepted by BizSpark - that will be decided Personal impressions by your application evaluation committee.

About what is included in the proNote: it will be easier to access BizSpark gram: If you are just starting out and as a company than as a registered sole tra- develop on Microsoft technologies, on der or individual developer.

Azure or Windows Mobile, then BizSpark is for you. Many benefits which require How long does the program take? only seriousness from your part - I do not Three years – the licenses you receive think you can find a better deal. during the program will remain yours About support and the relationship (without other costs). Additionally, at the with Microsoft Romania: There were end of the program, you have access to some problems with some services provioffers that will allow you to buy more dis- ded by BizSpark (in our case Azure) but counted licenses (if the company has grown this was resolved. Our relationship with and you need more than what BizSpark is those from Microsoft Romania has been a offering you). good one - you get your emails responded and you always find someone on the phone How do I apply? if you experience some problems https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ signup/default.aspx is the place to start.

Dragoș Andronic You’ll need a Microsoft account (the old dragos@txtfeedback.net Windows Live ID) – with which you will CTO manage BizSpark - and also patience to @ TXTFeedback complete all required Microsoft information. Maybe something has changed lately

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startups

N

TODAY SOFTWARE MAGAZINE

Cluj’s Startups Ecosystem

ow we can clearly feel the startups wave in Romania too. In Cluj, in 2012, niche events and startups which were funded appeared. In recent weeks I have participated in several discussions about startups, investments and accelerators. But all these discussions were in smaller circles and I haven’t seen an event or a meeting to gather all active and interested people on this topic. So putting all this information together, we discussed the issue at Open Connect Cluj #6 in January (summary can be found here) in order to bring out all the ideas and projects that together could form a solid startups ecosystem.

I felt that there was no overview of all the actions, it felt more like Brownian motion and that things need time before settling down (initiatives appear and sometimes overlap in time and content). I believe it is perfectly normal for the beginning, but now we should enter a phase of clarification and better communication from what we have right now, with the hope that the ideas will complement each other and the ecosystem will develop with the contribution of each party involved (for clarification, in my sense, startups = „high growth, technology oriented companies”).

In the next lines, I will analyze this ecosystem in terms of an early stage startup development (startup early life). I will refer to the kind of events, programs that a startup needs and where the ecosystem can help until the startups gets an investment, accelerator or reaches monetization.

Idea generation and pre-validation

When I say pre-validation I mean the feedback coming from people with experience or potential clients, even before having a product, as a true validation is given by the existence of users/ customers - which comes much later).

Here I would say that we are well covered by Startup Weekend and Startup Live, both backed up by the international networks behind (Startup Weekend and STARTeurope ), so Cluj became a point in these networks. What advantages will appear remains to be seen, but certainly are. For example, the fact that UseTogether won SW Cluj in 2012 was a proof for accelerators/events where we applied, that the project has potential. Ideally, it would be

that the events take place with plenty of Startup Peer Support - would be often time between them so that they do not organized in a narrow circle in which adversely affect each other with a competi- startupers meet and presents a problem tion on participants and resources. to the others and together they try to find solutions (the idea was implemented Valley of death last year and several meetings took place, The term „valley of death” describes the known as AntreprenoriCluj.info) period in which there is a high probability that a startup dies before reaching the stage All these might happen in various locaof obtaining external finances or income. tions in Cluj, but especially in the locations In our case, I’d say it’s the next period after where these startups can grow (a nurturing SW, SL, when most startups initiatives are space), where they can have meetings or dying. For example, out of the 11 ideas that where the above events can be held. I refer were worked on during SW Cluj 2012, only to Cluj Cowork and Cluj Hub, which can UseTogether is visibly alive and developing. be a great support for startups crossing this period called „valley of death”.

If there would have been more educational support, mentoring probably more Early-stage would have been alive. And on this side It’s the moment when a startup is able we don’t have a coherent support program. to enter into an accelerator and take off (of Here is how we can help with what we have course, it can happen earlier, there is no now in Cluj, several types of events (some rule about it). We don’t have [yet] accelealready happening, some are still ideas): rators in Romania, so access is a bit more Networking - already occurs through difficult. But I have heard of several initiOpen Connect, Open Coffee (and other atives in this regard and in 2014 I’m sure IT events but not necessarily oriented we’ll have at least one in flesh and bones (to startups), and soon maybe another event be read “with money and physical space”).

“Startup Invasion” will appear. These events I would not be too surprised if we will have may also be the right place to give feedback 3 of them (with various forms of organizaon ideas which might develop into startups. tion) by 2015 (in Bucharest, Timisoara and Startup Lounge – is an event with Cluj). But an accelerator is the second step, panel talks, informal discussions which will until then we have to take care of the first be held once a month at Cluj Hub. step done: building the ecosystem.

Startup Education Program – comThere will appear more initiatives and plements networking, switching to the next the scheme will change for sure. This is just level: educational events for tech startups a personal view, a basic roadmap. Some on specific topics (for example: growth, of those events mentioned have not yet finances and investment, lean development, occurred publicly but they are in the design pitching). Basically it’s all about workshops/ phase. However, I think this spring of 2013 trainings of 3-4 hours where someone with will be defining for the startups ecosystem experience in the theme presents, does case in Cluj. Let’s hope for the best. studies or some practical exercises.

Have any suggestions, comments, things to add? Please contact me on www. mirceavadan.ro Mircea Vădan mircea.vadan@gmail.com Co-founder and coordinator @ Use Together

www.todaysoftmag.com | nr. 8/2013

39

HR

Professional development in the SAP

S

ince my activities do not coincide with those of an HR Manager, who is responsible for the industrial HR part of a company and neither with those of a recruitment specialist, the idea of writing this article is based on the situations met while interacting with the colleagues from the department I am responsible of on a daily basis. 90% of this people are ABAP developers or consultants.

Why the SAP/ABAP segment defines different from other IT segments and what the challenges in the HR area respectively regarding the professional development are, will be a few of the open points that will be answered below.

Why ABAP? Because at the moment ABAP is one of the programming languages that goes through a period of maximum ascent characterized by innovation and change, easily adapting to changes that occur at the business and technological level. ABAP-ers say it is more pleasant than ever to experience in ABAP and greet with confidence, „The Age of HANA - Evolution or Revolution?”.

Why do I see a future in ABAP and I highly recommend this IT niche, less accessible, to the public? I often encounter situations and large discussions, mostly on a technical basis, with the topic Java vs.

ABAP. Every time they reach the same conclusion, if there is disregard shown for this programming language, frequently used worldwide and which still has a low profile in Romania, why do this debates exist and why do developers invest their time debating on this issue - which programming language is more interesting? Who offers the best developing environment? Who uses the most exciting new technologies?

An eternal verbal competition which often ends without proclaiming a winner.

It’s pretty simple, with ABAP and SAP, referring here to the ERP technologies, the chance of developing on professional level, both for IT developers and people specialized in other technical or socio-economical fields, is increasing considerably. As a former SAP end user of the FI, MM and HR modules, it is more than an opportunity to work with those who are behind these architectures, facilitating at maximum the daily tasks of the end user clients and allowing the customer to use a single platform which supports the different areas of a business. If the ERP is running optimal it means that the Customer -> IT Consultant -> IT Developer relationship worked perfectly.

They each other understood which their needs are and more than that

40

understood the business requirements and knew to communicate them properly, the cooperation between the three parties functioning successfully.

No matter if fresh graduates from the University or IT architects oversaturated by the programming languages used among the years and looking for innovation, I also noticed a certain openness to the new and to the unknown of those who decide to start a career in ABAP. In this direction we can easily observe 2 perfect delimitated trends: those who do not recognize the ABAP as programming language and refuse from the start collaboration in this field and nonconformist people who have the curiosity to try and explore another side of the IT world.

At this point the HR and professional development departments start to play their role in close liaison with the technical management of this niche, building up the next years of the career, of future SAP consultants. It is good to know that the first 2 to 3 years of an SAP Consultant career are decisive and represent the foundation of their professional future in this area.

Those who successfully pass this period will be integrated into international teams to sustain and develop ERP systems for worldwide known companies.

Nowadays the professional development specific to this environment is no longer limited to develop an experienced programmer, but requires an IT specialist with advanced technical knowledge, communication skills and profound knowledge of the business he is going to develop for, all this together meaning a bundle of requirements much higher than used to during the previous years; also, we should not forget the standards referring to the willingness to travel on a long term, the knowledge of foreign languages and also a high sociability level, the ability to negotiate and the leadership potential.

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From my perspective the deficiencies of this niche are very few and very easy to fix. On one hand the fact that in Romania the IT companies offering SAP ERP solutions still lack on presenting the advantages of programming in ABAP and also do not mention the different consultancy models which are representing the future of an ABAP developer or the final product and the advantages and business improvements offered by the SAP ERP platform to the end user… somehow this fact is specific for the young generation to engage in career and start to build their future with accessible technologies already known and used.

To access a new area means to get out of the box and be interested to learn something new, the interest to know in turn requires further study and additional study involves interest and sacrificing part of your free time, that why so easy to understand why most prefer the simple way.

I end this article with high hopes regarding the future of talent management in the ABAP area in Cluj-Napoca.

Get out of your comfort zone, test other available technologies in IT than those with which you are familiar, there are always surprises and unexpected situations, but in the end it remains the choice of everyone which way to go.

Oana Oprean oana.oprean@msg-systems.com Center of Competence Manager @ .msg systems Romania

others

Gogu and chief ’s cow

G

ogu looked at his watch for the hundredth time, he was already exasperated; two hours had passed without any tangible result. He was under the impression that whenever they were near a decision point, someone from the other departments intervened and turned the whole discussion upside down.

Simona Bonghez, Ph.D.

simona.bonghez@confucius.ro Speaker, trainer şi consultant în managementul proiectelor, Owner al Confucius Consulting

41

Chief tried at first to impose himself but there were also the heads of other departments who „jumped” at any attempt from his side. Initially, it seemed that the main purpose was to identify the guilty person, from others’ departments, of course. The Witch Hunt didn’t seem to have any result, each department fiercely defending itself; the rescue came when someone mentioned a customer’s error. It was a crucial turning point in the course of the meeting that, from that moment, focused on identifying all the problems caused by the customer, his answers, his lack of responses or even his pure existence. The discussion had degenerated into a monotonous wail, where each party was complaining and invariably concluded that it was the client’s fault.

Chief became more and more quiet, pensive, dark.... In a last attempt to conclude the meeting with some results, he went to write the next steps on the flipchart, who should do what, and until when. As was the meeting’s trend so far, all tasks were put in the client’s responsibility and Chief declared the end of the meeting. Gogu hurried towards the door, with the clear intention to consult with the Chief, but the Chief wasn’t

nr. 8/2013 | www.todaysoftmag.com

in the mood for discussion. He threw over the shoulder one remark that sent Gogu in a complete darkness: - We’ll see what the cow gives us...

- What cow, what do you... Gogu started talking, mainly to himself. What does the cow have to do with this strange conversation? Uff...

He went to find Misu hoping that it might explain what’s with the cow. Within minutes, Gogu’s entire department found out about the evolution of the super-meeting and its magnificent results. But no one knew what was the cow doing in the sentence; the animal, domestic as it was, managed to trigger a general frenzy: presuppositions and acid lines were drifting.

- The cow is milked, right? He probably wants to...

- What? To milk the customer or the big Boss, ha-ha...

- Maybe Gogu didn’t hear well and it wasn’t a cow, maybe it was count, or account?!

- You smart one!

- Wait a minute, it’s simpler if you know the context, Misu intervened. Chief was upset when he left because the agenda and

others

Gogu and chief’s cow

duration of the meeting hadn’t been sent previously, nothing had been planned. You know too how important are theses aspects for him: Failing to plan is planning to fail – Misu quoted Chief ’s saying, rather pompously.

- That’s right Misu, you smart boy! I remember when I was a kid, in the country; the cow wouldn’t stand to be milked, if the agenda hadn’t been sent prior...

- Good thing you’re smart. Now, think for minute, how many times did Chief tell us the agenda must be send before, so that people know what subjects will be discussed, how long will the meeting last and who will participate. And doesn’t he always draw a conclusion to every topic so that we know the associated decisions? Now, if the situation is like Gogu said, it means that Chief got annoyed and rightly so. Nothing was made by the book...

- And where’s the cow? Gogu asked, almost resigned. You’re right, Misu, that’s what anyone should do in order to have clear results during and after a meeting but our dilemma was related to the ruminant.

Some continued to comment, to share opinions, but it was clear that no one was able to find a reasonable explanation. Chief didn’t return to the department, so by the end of the working day the mystery was still in its place. Gogu finished his work and left home without thinking any more about the cow.

- Dad, what does the cow give us?

Gogu got stuck. It was the second time that day when the insolent ruminant appeared during discussions, without him having a clue about its meaning. He looked glumly to his son who was standing brightly before him: no, it was impossible for him to know anything about what had happened at work. However, it was clear that he was savoring the moment; one could probably see that his father was in a mess. He’s starting to resemble me more and more, Gogu thought with satisfaction, but he didn’t show the embarrassment, on the contrary, he roughed to the little one: - What did it come to you with the cow? It’s a kindergarten question, or if I remember well - but correct me if I’m wrong - last time I checked, you were in school. Am I wrong?

- Dad, I asked a simple question. If you don’t know the answer, confess that don’t know; ultimately you can’t know them all, right?

He clearly resembles me, thought Gogu, this time wondering if it was a good thing. It was clear that he had to respond. However, could it have anything to do with Chief ’s cow? Neah... Angry, he tried the classic answer: - Milk, meat... uh... cheese and butter, he gained courage.

Satisfied?

- Ha-ha, nope dad! You’re not even close. The cow gives us... he took the tone of a kindergarten child and took a dramatic pause... dung! Then he continued, completely satisfied by his father’s shocked figure: those you mentioned we take by ourselves, but the cow voluntarily gives us nothing but sh…dung, he straighten his language; his father didn’t find appropriate the use of a certain

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language.

But Gogu didn’t hear him anymore. Therefore, that was Chief ’s problem: it’s useless to wait for good results if we’re not proactive and don’t collaborate with the client. Damn boss, damn ruminant...

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