What is meant by project velocity?

The project velocity is one of the terms that you come across while discussing about the iteration planning and release planning! The project velocity has a got a very important and  not to be ignored part to play in these two mentioned planning processes but still most of us are not aware of its importance. 

This article is centred on the project velocity and has been discussed in detail. Like the normal physics velocity, the project velocity gives the speed of the development of a software project. 

In other words, the project velocity gives the amount of work being and efforts being spent on the software project. 

About Project Velocity

- The project is simply the summation of all the estimates of the user stories that were involved in the iteration. 

- For the release planning, you add up the estimates of the user stories and for the iteration planning the estimates of the programming tasks are added up. 

- But anyway, both the factors can employed for determining the project velocity in the case of the iteration planning. 

- In the iteration planning meeting, the number of the user stories chosen by the customer is same as it was in the previous iteration. 

- There is a rule that the project velocity of the consecutive iterations must not exceed their preceding iterations. 

- These programming tasks are nothing but a broken down or divided version of the user stories. 

- The development team is supposed to take up or sign up for only the same number of tasks that were present in the previous iteration. 

- Such an arrangement proves to be a great help to the developers when they stuck in a sticky situation and need to recover and clean up from it and thus getting the average for the estimates. 

- The project velocity is suppose to rise when the developers are allowed to question the customers for other user stories when they have already finished their work and tasks like cleaning up are also accomplished.

Please do not think that you will get the project velocity consistent throughout the development cycle! It is expected to follow through some ups and downs. 

- But if a dramatic change is observed in the project velocity, then it is an issue of concern. 

- But there is no need to worry since all this can be kept in check by re- estimation and re- negotiation of the release plan. 

- It is not just in this case that the project velocity may change! 

- Even when the system is put under production for the maintenance tasks, again the project velocity is subjected to changes. 

- Division of the project velocity by the length of the iteration or the number of people involved. 

- Furthermore, the number of the people involved in the iteration is not an appropriate way for making comparisons between the productivity of two products. 

- This is so because each and every team has got its own different criteria for estimating the user stories and so we get some high estimation and some low estimation. 

- Important is to keep a track of the amount of work being done on the project so that a steady project velocity for the development can be maintained that can also be easily predicted.

The problem comes while making the first estimation! 

- At least for the following iterations you will have a clue that what project velocity is required. 

- If this measure is used properly you may be able to detect a major fault in your project much before the time at which you would have known with the help of the traditional development methods. 

How are strings and arrays defined in C?

A string can be defined as a group of characters, usually letters of the alphabet. When C is either to compare a string with another string, output it, copy it to another string, or whatever, the functions are intended to do what they are called to do until a null, which is a zero, is detected. Such strings are often called an ASCII-Z string. C treats a string as an array termination with a NULL character. C does not have a separate data type for strings and so strings exist as the arrays of characters. An extra byte must be left to store the NULL “\0”. Strings are declared as the arrays of characters. For example:

char name[25];

Strings can be fully or partially initialized depending on the requirements of the user. For example:
char fill[10] = { ‘a’, ‘ ‘, ‘r’,’o’,’p’,’l’,’a’,’n’,’e’,’\0’ };

There exist certain predefined functions for modifying strings. The library cstring.h houses all these functions. Strcpy() is used to copy one string into another string. Strlen() is used to determine the length of the string. Strcmp() is function for comparing two strings i.e., which one is bigger in terms of length. Strcat() is used to concatenate two strings. The second string is appended to the end of the first string. Strrev() is used to reverse a string alphabetically.

An array is a C derived data type and can be defined as a collection of variables of the same data type that are referenced by a common name. All arrays consist of contiguous memory locations where the lowest address corresponds to the first element and highest address corresponds to the last element. Arrays are useful when quite many elements of the same data type are needed to be stored and processed. The numbers in [ ] are called indices or subscripts. A string itself is an array of characters. Arrays are of two types namely one- dimensional arrays and multi dimensional arrays. Multi dimensional array comprises of elements which themselves are arrays. The general form of an array declaration is as follows:

Type array-name [size];

Here type states the data type of the array elements. The array name declares the name of the array, and finally the size defines how many elements will be there in the array. The data type of the array is called the base type.

A multidimensional array consists of M*N elements where M is the number of rows and N is the number of columns. It can be declared as follows:

Type array-name [rows][columns];

Where single dimensional arras can be read using a single loop, it takes nested loops to read and access the elements of a multi dimensional array. One loop is used to process the rows and the other one is used to process the columns. The arrays can be initialized during the run time as follows:

Type array-name [size 1]……….[size N]= {value list};

The value list consists of the array elements. C allows you to skip the size of arrays in an initialization statement. These types of arrays are called unsized arrays. For example:
Int abc[ ] = {1,2,3,5,7};

The best way to assign values to an array is using a "for" or "while" loop because it’s not affordable to write a separate initialization for every element. Arrays can be passed s parameters to the functions to maintain a structured design. Always keep in mind that in C subscripts start from 0. A string from an array of strings can be accessed by using pointers. But keep in mind that pointers hold only address of the strings. From there it is able to obtain the whole chunk of the contiguous memory.