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
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#… 
and they all rolled over and one fell out… 27 June 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: office, pair programming, v-base, youthnet
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a group of youthnetters recently spent a saturday moving desks & equipment around in a complete reorganisation of our side of the office. this was partly to fit in some extra desks (with volunteers/interns involved in most areas of our work the organisation is once again almost bursting at the seams) but also to make it easier for some people/teams to work together. most of the v-base 3 team is now located in one double row of desks. it’s great for me as i no longer have an obstacle course of people and technology between me and the client application developers. but until we get some straight desks (i.e. without curved returns on the sides), pair-programming will continue to be very cosy
YARI (Yet another refactoring interation) 4 June 2008
Posted by martin in Uncategorized.Tags: Add new tag, DDD, gui, nHibernate, Presentation Model, refactoring, v-base
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We have just started yet another refactoring iteration. The last one for a wee while, I’ve been told. It’s nice to have had the chance to take a step back and change some of the things that can come back and bite you later. In the previous refactoring iteration we concentrated on changing the way the database was structured and started with a schema that barely fit on an A3 page even with the smallest possible font and ended the iteration with a schema that shows quite clearly on an A4 sheet. The same functionality with less complexity. Success!
So this iteration we are aiming at the domain and the gui code for one of the main areas of the application. We will be shifting the gui components from autonomous views (gasp) to a version of the presentation model called Model/View/ViewModel . This is a pattern that is fairly simple to implement with WPF’s excellent data binding model. The main reason for implementing this model is the fact that it makes it easier to test gui components in code but as it’s similar to the MVC model it also has other benefits. We have all successfully used this pattern to implement and test the latest gui components that we have written in recent iterations and this iteration we will be going back and converting the older code over to this model so that we can properly test them. Rise ohh rise almighty coverage value…
At the same time we will be adding an entity translation service in to convert from the nHibernate data classes to a true domain level entity for volunteers. This will allow us to get around a few problems we have with our usage of nHibernate. We have always generated the data classes from the the mapping files. This is setup as part of the build process and works very well. We have a modified version of the nHibernate hbm2cs tool that generates partial classes so that we can extend the generated classes without having to worry about custom code being overwritten the next time you run a build. This unfortunately only goes so far. We still needed a way of adding in business rules and validation rules to the properties of these classes in the generated code. We could have beaten the code generator with a stick until it allowed us to implement these features in the nHibernate classes but I just didn’t like that idea. It seemed to me that an entity translation service and a new domain level class would be a more effective solution for our rules problem and also for better separation of the application layer from the data layer. It also means all those strange things you have to do to get your data stored in a database can be hidden in the entity translation service which in turn can be hidden behind the volunteer service layer. Then you can have an application layer class that works the way you would like it to work and don’t have to let the database schema and nHibernate dictate the way your application is coded. Maybe I’m just a control freak but that sounds good to me.
refactoring iteration 28 May 2008
Posted by Baz in Uncategorized.Tags: refactoring, v-base
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Yesterday, as I was about to start coding, a blue screen appeared with an error message. I restarted the machine, believing a simple restart would solve it, how wrong I was!!!
My Windows XP was corrupted and after it was examined by a Technical Support member, it was necessary to install a clean copy of XP. Which meant I spent most of the day installing and configuring software on my machine.
In the process I created an image of the machine so that should a similar scenario arise, we would not need to spend as much time installing and configuring all the required software.
We are currently doing a refactoring iteration, changing the way which we store the lookup tables in our database. We are currently doing regression testing to make sure changes we made have not affected the way the application works.
iteration 10 21 May 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: Accessibility, refactoring, skills, v-base
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yep, we’ve broken 2 figures on the iteration count, woo hoo! another refactoring iteration.
on monday we drove iteration 9 into the corral. this was sofia’s first proper iteration and martin was tasked with introducing her to the intricacies of the v-base codebase. despite the overhead of induction, the 2 of them delivered some functionality that takes us into some new territory for v-base, skills management, which seems to be the current hot topic. martin’s also been making progress on accessibility and if all goes to his plan, v-base 3 will be a truly accessible product. outside of the client development, ben’s been working on user account administration, which contains functionality to make lots of our users extremely happy. it did me, because it will deliver the kind of control that some of our users have been hankering after for ages. what about the rest of the team? well, our intern sheetal is, with olivier’s help, skilling herself up in spring and subversion; olivier has been immersed in system administration tasks… orchestrating virtual servers, installing databases, upgrading our various tools (this may not be his ideal way of spending his days but at least he’s not having to deal with recruitment agencies ); paul and camille have mainly been tied up with other youthnet projects and i’ve been wrestling with the product backlog in jira and starting to get to grips with expression blend, so that i can input more into the actual development. and baazi? he’s been on annual leave for a couple of weeks, writing his final university exams. busy us.
