What is the need of Agile Process Improvement?

It is commonly seen that a number of change projects are designed and published but none of actually goes into implementation. Most of the time is wasted in writing and publishing them. This approach usually fails. We should stop working with this methodology and develop a new one. Below mentioned are some common scenarios in the modern business:

1. Developing a stronger project
2. Changing the people working on it.
3. Threatening that project with termination
4. Appointment of a committee that would analyze the project
5. Taking examples from other organizations to see how they manage to do it.
6. Getting down to a dead project
7. Tagging a dead project as still worth of achieving something.
8. Putting many different projects together so as increase the benefit.
9. Additional training

-Drops in the delivery of the normal work always follow a change. 

-Big change projects are either dropped or rejected.

-It all happens because the changes introduced by such projects are mandatory to be followed.

-This threatens the normal functioning of the organization. 

-So, the organization is eventually compelled to kill the whole process and start with the old way of work again. 

-Instead of following this approach, a step by step process improvement can be followed that is nothing but the agile process improvement. 

Now you must be convinced why agile process improvement is actually needed. 

- The changes needs to be adaptive then only the process will be balanced. 

- An example is the CMMI maturity level. It takes 2 years approx. for completion and brings in the following:

1. Restructuring
2. New competitors
3. New products

-Only agile methods make these changes adaptive in nature.

-The change cycles when followed systematically produce results in every 2 – 6 weeks.

-Thus, your organization’s workload and improvement stay perfectly balanced. -The early identification of the issues becomes possible for the organizations thus giving you it a chance to be resolved early. 

-By and by the organization learns to tackle the problems and how to improve work.

-At the end it is able to adapt to the every changing needs of the business.

-The responsibility of the deployment and evaluation of the improvement is taken by the PPQA. 

-Whole process is implemented in 4 sprints:

1. Prototyping
2. Piloting
3. Deploying
4. Evaluating

-A large participation and leadership is required for these changes to take place.

-Some other agile techniques along with scrum can also be used in SPI.

-We can have the improvements continuously integrated in to the way the organization works. 

-The way of working can also be re-factored including assets and definitions by having an step by step integration of the improvements.

-Pair work can be carried out on improvements. 

-A collective ownership can be created for the organization. 

-Evaluations and pilots can be used for testing purpose. 

-In order to succeed with the sprints is important that only simple solutions should be developed. 

-An organization can write the coaching material with the help of the work description standards.

-This sprint technique helps the organization to strike a balance between the improvement and the normal workload. 

-In agile process improvement simple solutions are preferred over the complex ones.

-Here, the status quo and the vision are developed using the CMMI and SCAMPI. 

-Status quo and vision are necessary for the beginning of the software process improvement.

-SPI when conducted properly produces useful work otherwise unnecessary documentation has to be produced.

-An improvement in the process is an improvement in the work. 

-Improving work is what that is preferred by people. 

What are different characteristics of installation testing?

Which software testing methodology pertains to the quality assurance work and is focussed up on what is to be done by the customers in order to set up and install the software system or application successfully on their system?

The answer is “installation testing”. 

The installation testing may involve the below mentioned testing processes:

1. Full install/ uninstall process
2. Partial install/ uninstall process
3. Upgrade install/ uninstall process

About Installation Testing

- The installation testing is carried out by the software testing engineer in collaboration with the configuration manager. 

- Running an installation program is considered to be the simplest approach to installation testing.

- This approach is some times called “package software” and it typically deploys a set up program that is nothing but a multi- configuration wrapper using which the software can be easily installed on a variety of machines as well as many operating environments. 

- All the possible configurations should be given an appropriate level of installation testing so that they can be released to the customers without any hesitation. 

- There are some cases of the distributed system in which the software is to be released particularly in to a target environment that is live such as an operational web site. 

- In such cases the installation or you can say software deployment involves changes in the database schemas and installation of the new software system or application.

- Some deployment plans are created for these kinds of circumstances. 

- These deployment plans consist of back out procedures that are aimed at rolling back the target environment if the deployment does not show up as successful. 

- The deployment plan should be tested before deploying them in an environment that is an exact copy of the live environment. 

- Synchronizing the data in the test deployment environment with minimum disruption can increase the organizational requirements of such a plan. 

- This type of implementation plan includes:

1. Up grade of a multi tier application and
2. Testing of the processes which are carried out during installation.

- Such kind of testing is often compared with the “dry run”. 

- Implementation testing is nothing but another name for installation testing. 

- A successful installation of the software system or application will surely make the customer happy but an unsuccessful installation will disappoint the customer. 

The situation can get even worse; it can badly damage the user’s system. This is an example of how a lack of proper installation testing can ruin your impression of the customer. Now you must be wondering what you should do to avoid such embarrassing situations? 

- You should test the installer thoroughly and also with the combinations of manual and automated processes on various machines with several kind of different configurations. -“Time” is the factor that limits the scope of the installation testing. 

- Executing even a single test case takes a hell lot of time. 

Steps involved in Installation Testing

Below we are mentioning the steps involved in the installation testing:

1. Decide for how many different system configurations you want to test the installation.
2. Prepare a basic hard disk drive and format it with the default file system.
3. Install a common OS like windows on this hard drive.
4. Install some primary required components on this hard drive.
5. Create images of this HDD and this will enable you to create configurations on the drive.
6. Make different sets of each configuration like OS that can be used for further software system.

Phase 4 of Unified Process Life cycle - Transition

Unified process is one of the best development processes we have of the iterative and incremental form. The whole unified process is completed in four phases which have been mentioned below:

1. Inception phase
2. Elaboration phase
3. Construction phase and lastly
4. Transition phase

This whole article is all about the last phase i.e., the transition phase. In this whole article we are going to discuss about the last phase. 

What is a Transition Phase?

- The final phase of the unified process i.e., the transition phase involves the deployment of the system for targeting the customers.

- The feedback that is collected on the account of the previous releases helps in further refining or improving the software system or application. 

- It can also be decided over the further functionality that have to be added to the software system or application under development to make it much better. 

- Transition phase like all of the preceding three phases is composed of several timed iterations that are time boxed. 

- Apart from just targeting the users, the transition phase also involves user training and the system conversions. 

- The transition phase has been named so because it is in this phase that the transition of the whole system from development to production takes place and software is made available to the users. 

- Along with the end users in some cases the maintainers might also be treated. 

- This phase also witnesses the beta testing of the software system or application so that it is validated against the expectations of the end users. 

- A certain quality level is set in the phase i.e., in the inception phase which is tested in against by the quality of the software system or application in the transition phase. 

- The point at which all the objectives are met is called the “product release milestone”. 

- At this point the product is declared finished and the development is also declared to be complete. 

- The unified process is quite a robust software process that is meant for addressing the development as well as the production needs of the users and the customers. 

- We need a software development process that serves the scope of our real world quite well and provides us with a balanced perspective of the alternative programming methodologies available from all around the field. 

- In this transition phase, if there are any legacy systems that you are going to replace, then your whole software system or application is operated in parallel with those legacy systems. 

- This leads to the conversion of the legacy data bases and the systems in to an improved one that supports your new software system or application. 

Goals of transition Phase

The transition phase has got three main goals as mentioned below:

1.Evolving the final product baseline or the production base line of the software system or the application.

2.Training the materials for the software system or application.

3.Creation of the documentation which is inclusive of all the user manuals, operations documentation and the support documentation.

Issues faced during Transition Phase

- This phase is concluded with the product release milestone. 

- Achieving this milestone is not so easy since you have to satisfy all the expectations of the end users and also justify the actual expenditures against the planned expenditure. 

- Issues such as finishing the features that were postponed usually arise after the product has been transited to the end users or customers. 

- The production baseline ought to be mature enough to be deployed in the end user domain. 

- The operational data bases are also converted and the final product is released for marketing, distribution and sales team. 

What is Deployment Level Design ? What are Design Metrics?

DEPLOYMENT LEVEL DESIGN

The Deployment-level Design creates a model that shows the physical architecture of the hardware and software of the system. The Deployment Diagram is made up of nodes and communication associations. Nodes would represent the computers. The communication associations show network connectivity. To develop deployment level design, distribute the software components identified in the component-level design to the computer node where it will reside.

DESIGN METRICS

There are many sets of metrics for the object-oriented software. Chidamber and Kemere Metrics suite consist of six class based design metrics:
Weighted Methods per Class (WMC)
- This is computed as the summation of the complexity of all methods of a class.

Depth of the Inheritance Tree (DIT)
- It is defined as the maximum length from the root superclass to the lowest subclass.

Number of Children (NOC)
- Children of a class are the immediate subordinate of that class.
- As the number of children increases, reuse increases.
- Of course, as the number of children increases, the number of testing the children of the parent class also increases.

Coupling Between Object Classes (CBO)
- It is the number of collaboration that a class does with other object.
- As this number increases, the re-usability factor of the class decreases.

Response for a class (RFC)
- It is the number of methods that are executed in response to a message given to an object of the class.
- As this number increases, the effort required to test also increases because it increases the possible test sequence.

Lack of Cohesion in Methods (LCOM)
- It is the number of methods that access an attribute within the class.
- If this number is high, methods are coupledtogether through this attribute.

High-level Best Practice Six(6) in Software Configuration Management

There are six general areas of SCM deployment, and some best practices within each of those areas. The first five areas and there practices are already discussed.

Process

- Track change packages. Even though each file in a codeline has its revision
history, each revision in its history is only useful in the context of a set of related files. Change packages, not individual file changes, are the visible manifestation of software development. Some SCM systems track change packages for you; if yours doesn’t, write an interface that does.
- In order to make propagating logical changes from one codeline branch to another easy, tracking change packages has a benefit. However, it’s not enough to simply propagate change packages across branches; you must keep track of which change packages have been propagated, which propagations are pending, and which codeline branches are likely donors or recipients of propagations.
- SCM process should be able to distinguish between "What to do" and "What was done".
- Every process, policy, document, product, component, codeline, branch, and task in your SCM system should have an owner. Owners give life to these entities by representing them; an entity with an owner can grow and mature.
- The policies and procedures you implement should be described in living documents; that is, your process documentation should be as readily available and as subject to update as your managed source code.

High-level Best Practice Three(3) in Software Configuration Management

There are six general areas of SCM deployment, and some best practices within each of those areas. The first and second areas and there practices are already discussed.

Branching
In Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems, branching allows development to proceed simultaneously along more than one path while maintaining the relationships between the different paths. A branching strategy consists of the guidelines within an environment for the creation and application of codeline policies. There are different tools that support branching Creating a branching strategy consists of :
- identifying the categories of development that can be easily characterized,
- defining the differences and similarities between them,
- defining how they relate to each other, and
- expressing all of this information as codeline policies and branches.

High Level Practices associated with branching workspace are :
- Branch only when necessary.
- Don’t copy when you mean to branch.
- Branch on incompatible policy.
- To minimize the number of changes that need to be propagated from one branch to another, put off creating a branch as long as possible.
- Branch instead of freeze.

Introduction to Grid Computing

Grid Computing can be defined as applying resources from many computers in a network to a single problem, usually one that requires a large number of processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.
- Grid computing is the act of sharing tasks over multiple computers.
- These computers join together to create a virtual supercomputer. Networked computers can work on the same problems, traditionally reserved for supercomputers, and yet this network of computers are more powerful.
- The idea of grid computing originated with Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman and Steve Tuecke.
- Grid computing techniques can be used to create very different types of grids, adding flexibility as well as power by using the resources of multiple machines.
- Grid computing is similar to cluster computing, but there are a number of distinct differences. In a grid, there is no centralized management; computers in the grid are independently controlled, and can perform tasks unrelated to the grid at the operator's discretion.
- The computers in a grid are not required to have the same operating system or hardware.
- At its core, Grid Computing enables devices-regardless of their operating characteristics-to be virtually shared, managed and accessed across an enterprise, industry or workgroup.

Benefits of Grid Computing

When you deploy a grid, it will be to meet a set of business requirements. To
better match grid computing capabilities to those requirements, it is useful to
keep in mind some common motivations for using grid computing.
- Exploiting under utilized resources
One of the basic uses of grid computing is to run an existing application on a
different machine. The machine on which the application is normally run might be
unusually busy due to a peak in activity. The job in question could be run on an
idle machine elsewhere on the grid.
- Parallel CPU capacity
The potential for massive parallel CPU capacity is one of the most common
visions and attractive features of a grid. A CPU-intensive grid application can be thought of as many smaller sub-jobs, each executing on a different machine in the grid.
- Virtual resources and virtual organizations for collaboration
Another capability enabled by grid computing is to provide an environment for
collaboration among a wider audience. Grid computing can take these capabilities to an even wider audience, while offering important standards that enable very heterogeneous systems to work together to form the image of a large virtual computing system offering a variety of resources.
- Access to additional resources
In addition to CPU and storage resources, a grid can provide
access to other resources as well. The additional resources can be provided in
additional numbers and/or capacity.
- Resource balancing
A grid federates a large number of resources contributed by individual machines
into a large single-system image. For applications that are grid-enabled, the grid
can offer a resource balancing effect by scheduling grid jobs on machines with
low utilization.
- Reliability
High-end conventional computing systems use expensive hardware to increase
reliability. They are built using chips with redundant circuits that vote on results,
and contain logic to achieve graceful recovery from an assortment of hardware
failures.
- Management
The goal to virtualize the resources on the grid and more uniformly handle
heterogeneous systems will create new opportunities to better manage a larger,
more distributed IT infrastructure. It will be easier to visualize capacity and
utilization, making it easier for IT departments to control expenditures for
computing resources over a larger organization.

Stages and Goals of Data Mining

Data Mining is an analytic process designed to explore data (usually large amounts of data - typically business or market related) in search of consistent patterns and/or systematic relationships between variables, and then to validate the findings by applying the detected patterns to new subsets of data. The process of data mining consists of three stages:
1. Initial exploration :
This stage usually starts with data preparation which may involve cleaning data, data transformations, selecting subsets of records and - in case of data sets with large numbers of variables ("fields") - performing some preliminary feature selection operations to bring the number of variables to a manageable range. Then, depending on the nature of the analytic problem, this first stage of the process of data mining may involve anywhere between a simple choice of straightforward predictors for a regression model, to elaborate exploratory analyzes using a wide variety of graphical and statistical methods.
2. Model building and validation :
This stage involves considering various models and choosing the best one based on their predictive performance. There are a variety of techniques developed to achieve that goal - many of which are based on so-called "competitive evaluation of models," that is, applying different models to the same data set and then comparing their performance to choose the best. These techniques - which are often considered the core of predictive data mining - include: Bagging (Voting, Averaging), Boosting, Stacking (Stacked Generalizations), and Meta-Learning.
3. Deployment :
The final stage involves using the model selected as best in the previous stage and applying it to new data in order to generate predictions or estimates of the expected outcome.

GOALS OF DATA MINING :
- Prediction : Data mining can show how certain attributes within the data will behave in the future. In such applications, business logic is used coupled with data mining.
- Identification : Data patterns can be used to identify the existence of an item, an event, or an activity. For example, intruders trying to break a system may be identified by the programs executed, files accessed, and CPU time per session.
- Classification : Data mining can partition the data so that different classes or categories can be identified based on combination of parameters.
- Optimization : One eventual goal of data mining may be to optimize the use of limited resources such as time, space, money, or materials and to maximize output variables such as sales or profits under a given set of constraints.