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Lecture notes for the Fall 2017 iteration of ELSE.

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BU ELSE 2017 - Notes

Lecture notes for the Fall 2017 iteration.

Overview of course topics

Throughout this course we will cover (and utilize within the context of ongoing projects) a variety of topics, concepts, and techniques. A rough enumeration is provided below.

  • Design, development and implementation
    • Identification and assembly of requirements
    • Researching existing libraries, frameworks, and components
      • Choosing an appropriate license
      • Identifying open source components
        • Back-end/server-side
          • Registration/authentication
          • Storage and security
        • Front-end/client-side
          • Paradigms (e.g., MVC)
          • Frameworks
          • Platforms/environments and compatibility
    • Selection of development stack and tools
    • Specification
    • Project management
      • Planning
      • Lifecycle/workflow/team organization paradigms
        • Agile/scrum
    • Documentation
  • Evaluation
    • Testing
    • Validation
    • Verification
    • Usability testing (think-aloud, alpha, beta)
    • Continuous integration
  • Deployment
    • Adding to open source repositories
    • Posting on content distribution networks
    • Release planning
    • Staging and production environments
    • Phases (alpha, beta, etc.)
    • Continuous deployment
  • Maintenance
    • Dependencies and compatibility
    • Updates
    • Feature requests

Feasibility, requirements, and use cases

Feasibility

  • Usability
  • Architecture
  • Data
  • Security
  • Maintenance

Functional requirements

  • Gathering: Discuss with the client and end users (or collect via surveys, questionnaires, and so on) to understand their expectations of the software artifact(s) to be built.
  • Organizing: Prioritize and arrange the requirements in order of importance, urgency, and convenience.
  • Negotiation and discussion: If requirements are ambiguous or there are some conflicts in requirements of various stakeholders, it is then negotiated and discussed with stakeholders. Requirements may then be prioritized and reasonably compromised.
  • Documentation: All formal & informal, functional and non-functional requirements are documented and made available for review.

Non-functional requirements

  • Logging
  • Storage
  • Configuration
  • Performance
  • Cost
  • Interoperability: does it need to work with other services or frameworks
  • Flexibility
  • Accessibility
  • Security
  • Disaster recovery

Use cases

Use cases are another way to organize requirements (grouped by the tasks with which they are associated from a user perspective). Thus, they usually deal with behaviors that are observable to the user. They can be functional or non-functional (e.g., performance).

  • General characteristics/guidelines
    • As detailed as possible
    • Not the same as design criteria
    • Concrete actors and actions
    • Rich scenarios (skill level, motivation, condition)
    • Not likely to be exhaustive (focus on the main goal of a user)
    • Preferably few in number
    • Avoid nesting conditions
  • Some links of interest

Use cases should more closely match user acceptance or usability tests rather than unit tests.

A possible outline of a use case:

  • Brief description
  • Actors (primary and secondary)
  • Flow of events
    • Basic flow
    • Alternative flows

Design

There are three design stages for a user-facing software application that can be identified. Sometimes dedicated UI/UX designers take on these tasks.

  • Wireframe
    • Low-fidelity representation of the design
    • Main content groups (what is visible)
    • Structure of information (where it appears)
    • User interaction (how it reacts/behaves in response to user actions)
    • Should be done quickly
  • Mockup
    • Has visual representation and content
    • Demonstrates functionalities in a static way (need not be interactive)
    • Could include a storyboard-like walkthrough of use cases
    • Sometimes useful to promote idea or gain support to move further
    • Could be an iterative process to gather feedback/changes
  • Prototype
    • Looks close to the final product (has visual representation and content)
    • Simulates user interaction (but actions need not be tied to one another)
    • Can be used for usability testing (e.g., a think-aloud study)

One possible tool that can be used for assembling designs during both the wireframe and mockup stages is Balsamiq.

Notes on mobile development

Existing mobile app development frameworks can be broken up into a number of categories.

  • Native
    • Direct access to all features within the OS (Android, iOS, and so on)
    • Effectively need to have two teams work on two different code bases
    • Need to manage synchronization issues between teams
  • Cross-platform
    • Use a dedicated cross-platform framework
    • Compilation to native code
      • This may lead to "lowest common demoninator" features
    • Will not have too singificant performance impact
  • Hybrid
    • Relies on web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript)
    • Application is essentially running a web browser
    • App displays content that looks native but is a webpage in the browser
    • No native access to device capabilities unless bridges are built
    • Examples include Ionic framework
  • Responsive Development
    • A website that renders itself accordingly depending on the device

Some factors might play a role in your decision about which type of framework is appropriate for your project.

  • If speed is important or need device features, use a native framework
  • If there is a tight budget or deadline, use non-native approach
  • Assess the community around the framework
    • Absence of community support can be slow you down

Version control systems and associated workflows

Below, we briefly enumerate some points of interest in the history of version control systems (VCSs).

  • Source Code Control System (SCCS)
    • Developed in Bell Labs in 1972
  • Revision Control System (RCS)
    • Only works on single files
    • Primarily useful as a locking mechanism
    • Version history can be edited by users
  • Concurrent Versions System (CVS)
    • No new releases since 2008
    • Client-server with checkout of complete copies
    • Concurrent work possible; only changes to latest version of a file are accepted
    • Changes require an account and password
    • Support for branches
    • Delta compression to store changes
  • SVN
    • Created to be mostly compatible with CVS
    • Support for binary files
    • Still used for some major open source projects
    • Many access control options
    • Support for branches exists (but is cumbersome and used sparingly)
    • Centralized model
      • One of the creator's stated goals: prevent "insecure programmers" from hiding their code
      • Only one copy of the complete history is present
        • Backups of the one central repository must be maintained independently
      • Users only need to keep a copy of files on which they are working
    • User interfaces more mature (and arguably easier to create)
  • Git
    • Distributed architecture
      • Multiple redundant repositories
      • Every user has a complete copy of the repository stored locally
    • No centralized access control
      • Users individually decide from whom to merge changes
    • Users have their own local version control at all times
    • Branching is a standard and frequent part of the workflow
    • Merging is a standard and frequent part of the workflow
    • As repositories grow, storage cost of redundant copies can be an issue
      • Large projects sometimes slit their codebase into separate components, each with their own repository
  • Mercurial
    • Distributed architecture
    • More user-friendly command line interface
  • Version control systems are now being developed for professional target audiences in other domains (music, law, medicine, and so on).

In this course, we will use Git. Git offers a variety of features; its flexibility allows developers to use a variety of different workflows that are all compatible with Git. While there are many options, in this course we will adopt a branch-oriented Git workflow that is similar to the following one: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/. In addition to the branch management practices described, we will adopt a few additional practices:

  • Feature branch names should always begin with the prefix feature-
  • Feature branches should be added to origin in order to avoid loss of code
  • Every feature and hotfix branch must have exactly one corresponding GitHub issue.

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Lecture notes for the Fall 2017 iteration of ELSE.

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