June 09, 2012

Bugs in software

Most painful things about software application are Bugs:

That has created virtually more than Billion Dollar Industry. ( Literally... ). For example, QA, QTP, Selenium and lots more...

After working on few iterations of same product.. old adage is powerful.

It is better to prevent rather than cure.

Use-cases:
1. Our client had virtually no patience during first iteration of consumer internet product.
2. He would present a page of ebay and ask to replicate it ... ASAP.

3. Poor developer, under pressure of project manager, recession and client tries hard to code
    fast and works on SATISFIABLE deliverable. After seeing that...client says okay.

4. Next day, Client asks the same to replicate for other type of classified of same page.
5. Again, under pressure -- poor developer with sheer force of his job security
    copies the module and in one case, it was so intense that, developer may not care about
    changing variable names either.

....these are the points, where i think, system becomes less and less usable. we had then, another 2 iterations at the cost of time and nonetheless to mention $$$$$.

Get to the market fast would be a good thing to follow, but, that has to be modified like

Get to the market fast in usable form. 


Lessons Learned:
1. Avoid working for clients with blind deadlines and rigidity of output/delivery
2. Avoid off-topic discussions in order to stay focused and keep shipping

3. Preset all use-cases in order to avoid possible unknown bugs.
4. Listen carefully and grasp N+2 level of requirement.
     i.e. if client wants to put a button with some operation.. try to understand,
           what exactly he wants to accomplish.
5. Avoid bugs from start :) it is better to prevent than cure.


Cheers!!

 

June 08, 2012

Optimism amidst 'recessionary fears'

Nice point to learn in Donald R. Keough's : Top 10 commandments for business failure"

We move slowly, but progress is being made at even the most hidebound bastions of what some politely call "traditionalism"

Father Ted Hesburgh at Notre Dame calls it: " Reactionary Pigheadedness".

Like, 1900 or 1929 or 1998 or 2007, we slowly progress for sure...

Get past the past.

Nicely written..

June 07, 2012

Web scrapping using python and beautifulsoup

BeautifulSoup is nicely written utility in python to parse the web page using.

It follows css selector style. Thus developer who is used to jquery selectors will find it very easy to parse the HTML/XML tags.

Here is sample example to get all the links.

Python:
 
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc)
 
soup.find_all('a')
#returns all links as nested data-structure
 
soup.find(id="link3")
#return node whose id is link3   

very Awesome.

Cheers!