Are you our perfect Senior Java Developer? 17 June 2009
Posted by Tracey in team.Tags: developers, do-it, java, recruitment, team, vbase, youthnet
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Yes, we’re still recruiting. For details of the role, please see the Work for Us page on the YouthNet website
More recruitment… argh!!! 20 May 2009
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: recruitment
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Our next round of recruitment is underway, as we look for a replacement for Ben, who was working on the NVD/do-it integration part of V-Base 3. After 7 years at YouthNet, he’s migrated back into the private sector – we wish him every success in his new role and look forward to hearing what it’s like doing agile development in a much bigger organisation.
Recruitment has been one of the biggest time-eaters on this project. We spent almost a full year recruiting a team of developers in a highly competitive market and although we’d finely honed our recruitment process by the end, it’s been great not having to deal with recruitment agencies, poorly written resumés and disappointing interviews for a while. Keep your fingers crossed that we find someone soon!
3…2…1…Lift Off! The first VDAG pre-release 17 April 2009
Posted by Tracey in VDAG, v-base.Tags: do-it, VDAG v-base vbase youthnet
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Olivier posts the VDAG pre-release
V-Base 3 had its first official outing recently when we presented a demo of the client application to the VDAG (V-Base Development Advisory Group). It was lovely to meet in person all the people with whom we’ve been having online discussions about V-Base 3 and the day was a great success. Comments about our fledgling application were very positive which is great for the morale of the team who’ve been working so hard on it.
Today’s another significant milestone: we’re sending out a pre-release of the client application to VDAG so that they can play with it and feed back their comments to us. This is to be a vital ongoing part of our development process and we’ve been trying to get to this point for some time now. There’s still much to be developed so VDAG’s input will be key to making sure that we get things right.
Finally we see our baby take its first steps into the big wide world… how exciting!
Volunteer Opportunity – Software Tester 9 March 2009
Posted by Paul in agile, do-it, technical, v-base.Tags: agile, agile software testing, opportunity, software testing, software testing volunteer, volunteering, volunteers, youthnet
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Software Tester for YouthNet (volunteer, remote/on-site, min 6 hours/week)
YouthNet is developing the latest version of our V-Base software, version 3. V-Base is the UK’s leading software for volunteering management. Developed by YouthNet in partnership with volunteering agencies, V-Base is a Windows based, easy to learn and use application. It has a range of tools to help you manage your volunteering programme and is the only software that enables you to post your opportunities directly to the do-it.org.uk database of volunteering opportunities.
We are looking for a Volunteer Software Tester, responsible for improving the quality assurance of V-Base 3. This opportunity is open to people who are looking for a way into or have an interest in software testing.
(more…)
Hello and Merry Christmas 22 December 2008
Posted by Sau in stakeholder involvement.1 comment so far
Hi everyone,
I’m Sau and I am the new IT Project Coordinator/SCRUM Master at YouthNet. I have been in YouthNet since the beginning of November 2008. Now that I have settled in I am ready to write this short and sweet intro.
Working closely with Tracey, I am responsible for tracking the development progress of the VBase 3 project. As you probably all aware, we have adopted the Agile SCRUM development methodology which I love and welcome the high visibility of the project. I have worked with SCRUM for over 3 years and hopefully I will be able to use my past experience with VBase.
We are now in sprint/iteration 25, focusing on mail merge, user documentation, code coverage and Christmas!
Have a great Christmas, and look forward to meeting you all online in 2009!
Sau
Before we started with Agile 20 November 2008
Posted by Olivier in agile.Tags: agile, decline, goodpractice, jamesshore
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As a response on the (excellent) post of James Shore on the decline and fall of agile, where he discusses why agile often fails when implemented, I responded with what we did before we really started implementing agile; here is my response on his blog:
Very good post, although I would suggest also to focus on how to measure good engineering practices. In the project I currently work on (my job is to implement/streamline development processes) I’ve installed several tools which auto generates lots of reports for our scrum master so she has a lot of tools the measure to the quality of the development process.
And before I even try to implement ‘Agile’ in a software project a want these questions asked and answered:
* Does it compile?
Does it compile on a non developer machine? Do the latest changes compile?
A: Continuous Integration
* Does it run?
Can we execute a recent version of the application without having to wait for a developer to build it, also valid for non gui back end apps!
A: Daily builds
A: Release candidates
* Is it tested?
A: Unit tests
A: Integration tests
A: QA team
A: Hallway usability testing
A: Code coverage reports
* Who changed what and when?
A: Version control
A: Issue tracking
* Did we produce source code daily?
My main goal when I have to start a project: produce code on a daily basis, get the momentum/routine right
(instead of having meetings on a daily basis 
)
A: Version control reports
* Second opinion?
A: Code reviews
Not of everything, just the areas where unit tests fail regulary
* Can we track bugs?
* Is it documented?
Not in a word processor document, but one liners in the code do wonders
I call this my ‘extended sprint zero’, first good and disciplined engineering before we start implementing fancy development process theories
Olivier
V-Baby 1.0 17 September 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: team
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Exciting news from the V-Base team: Camille gave birth to a little boy, Arthur, yesterday! Mum and baby are both doing well and I’m lucky to be getting to visit them today. I wonder how soon we can just get Arthur started on learning C#…
Wabi-sabi, ongoing imperfections and struggling with hardware. 4 August 2008
Posted by Olivier in agile, stakeholder involvement, technical, v-base.Tags: agile sun, hardware, janet, oracle, storagetek, wabi-sabi
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Tracey sent me a nice link to read, probably to try to establish some inner rest in me after a week of struggling with hardware. It’s about wabi-sabi, a Japanese concept about imperfect beauty. What immediately caught my eye was the western use of this concept.
It’s employed in Agile programming to describe acceptance of the state of ongoing imperfection.
To deal with all the ongoing imperfections we have over time changed our requirements considerably. For example: because Oracle hasn’t released its product (11g) for Solaris OS on x86 platforms we decided to change the server OS to Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Edition) which does support 11g. This however has resulted in another ‘ongoing’ imperfection 
The drivers to make the Red Hat server talk to the Sun StorageTek data storage array, which we bought together with the server, are not what you would say ‘production ready’ – I got the source code for the unreleased drivers sent to me by Sun engineers. Compiled it, added it to the kernel, hmmm, this ‘not production ready I thought; it just doesn’t work.
The first result; we had to postpone the move of the hardware to our production environment at Imperial College here in London, were we would be connected to the JANET network.
Second result: Having a good think about how to deal with this…
This afternoon I’ll have to present this <understatement>small setback</understatement> to our project’s governance group, and see if we can come up with some alternatives or a solution.
I’ll keep you up to date.
Olivier
YARI2 (Yet another refactoring iteration) (Final) 25 July 2008
Posted by Baz in technical.Tags: do-it, gui, ncover, Presentation Model, refactoring, v-base, wpf, youthnet
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For the past few weeks we have been working on converting the remaining main section (organisation + opportunities) to Presentation Model. If you are not familiar with Presentation Model read Martin’s blog post on 4th June 2008 (below) which gives a brief summary of the pattern.
By moving to the Presentation Model we have been able to increase our Test coverage significantly resulting a greater chance of detecting any bugs which could be introduced as we add more functionality.We use NCover to generate code coverage reports which indicates the percentage of the test as well as highlighting line of codes which are not covered with the test we have.
We mainly focus our tests on the Controller of a user control as that is where all the important stuff happens.
From Tuesday, It will be all about adding more and more new functionality iteration after iteration.
Until next time, its goodbye, ciao, adios
V-Base Support, the future and beyond… 15 July 2008
Posted by Paul in do-it, stakeholder involvement, v-base.Tags: do-it, do-it.org.uk, dummies guide, help, help desk, how to, support, support website, technical support, v-base, v-base 3, youthnet
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Hi,
Some of you may know me in the past from contacting the V-Base technical support help desk where we answer your queries, technical support issues and give advice on how to get the most out of V-Base.
When V-Base 3 is released we expect over 400 + existing V-Base-using organisations to upgrade to it.
V-Base 3 is a complete rewrite of the existing system and we anticipate that on its release our users will require more support than usual to learn the new system and use it effectively. At the same time we will need to support organisations who are still using V-Base 2.5 alongside support of V-Base 3 whilst users are transitioning from version 2 to version 3.
One of the mechanisms we will be implementing (in addition to our email and telephone support service) to improve and maximise the support we can deliver is the production of a dedicated support website. This will hopefully create an environment of self-sufficiency as people will be able to find answers to their queries outside the helpdesk’s operating hours or when the support team are busy dealing with other calls.
As part of our research for the support website we have created a short survey that will help us prioritise the functionality we can deliver. If I can have 5 minutes of your time, I’d really appreciate you filling it in.
To complete the survey please follow the link below:
http://www.do-it.org.uk/survey/s?s=3005
Apologies for cross-posting as you may have already read about the survey in the latest edition of V-Base Support newsletter or the do-it.org.uk re@d-it newsletter, but we’re particularly interested in hearing what you think about our plans.
- The Support Website (aka V-Base for Dummies)
Hopefully when the support website goes live later this year you will find it helpful and help you get the most from our services.
If you have any questions please contact me at paul.watson (at) youthnet (dot) org I’d be pleased to hear from you.
