How to estimate Story Points in Agile and How to choose a reference task

 

A reference task is a certain task, which has a fixed amount of story points assigned, and which is used as a reference point to estimate other tasks. But how do you choose such a reference task? This post should give you a method and some ideas, how you can find a good reference task.

As a side node – I use the word task here for every type of work item in a sprint. So user stories, backlog items or whatever you call it – here I always use the word task.

Startup’s Secrets: How to Run Remote Sprint Planning

I’ve found that every small win or small difference, often makes the biggest difference in terms of impact. Imagine sprints as small battles, where your startup is fighting in an open arena. Every small victory accumulates, leading to the larger victory of the greater war - which involves outrunning your competition and owning the market. 

Before every battle (or sprint), planning is key to achieve small wins and an overall greater victory.
In this article, we’ll teach you everything you need to know about Sprint planning and the steps to follow to run remote sprints. Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. What is Sprint Planning?
2. Sprint Planning Roles
3. How to run an effective Sprint planning meeting?
4. Why is Sprint planning important?

My goal is to give you the knowledge we gained through our experience practicing scrum (while building a Jira alternative for software teams- meta!), so you can apply it and gain weekly, bi-weekly and monthly progress.

Read more: 
https://www.hackernoon.com/startups-secrets-how-to-run-remote-sprint-planning-pb593vg7

The difference between stream processing, real-time processing (Rear real-time) and complex event processing (CEP)

There is a subtle difference between stream processing, real-time processing (Rear real-time) and complex event processing (CEP). Let’s quickly look at the examples to understand the difference.

• Stream Processing: Stream processing is useful for tasks like fraud detection and cybersecurity. If transaction data is stream-processed, fraudulent transactions can be identified and stopped before they are even complete.
• Real-time Processing: If event time is very relevant and latencies in the second's range are completely unacceptable then it’s called Real-time (Rear real-time) processing. For ex. flight control system for space programs
• Complex Event Processing (CEP): CEP utilizes event-by-event processing and aggregation (for example, on potentially out-of-order events from a variety of sources, often with large numbers of rules or business logic).

Reference: https://www.knowledgehut.com/blog/big-data/kafka-vs-spark

Difference Between Coder, Programmer, Developer ,and Software Developer?

We all have heard about these job titles in our life, but do you know what is the exact difference between a coder, programmer, developer or a software engineer? Many of people claim that the difference is dependent on their education and what they have achieved in their carrier. This may be true but some people claim that companies you are working with decide either you are a programmer or a coder. But this makes it merely a job title difference, while each term has the huge environment set in them.

Let's find out what is the exact difference between a coder, a programmer, a developer, and a software engineer?

The 2020 React.js Developer RoadMap

In today’s world, you will rarely build an isolated GUI, instead, there is more chance that you will build something which communicates with other application using APIs like REST and GraphQL.

Thankfully, there are many API clients available for React developers, here is a list of them:

REST

• Fetch
• SuperAgent
• axios

GraphQL

• Apollo
• Relay
• urql

Apollo Client is my favorite and provides an easy way to use GraphQL to build client applications. The client is designed to help you quickly build a UI that fetches data with GraphQL and can be used with any JavaScript front-end

Btw, if you don’t know GraphQL and REST, I suggest you to spend some time learning them. If you need courses, the following are my recommendations:

GraphQL with React: The Complete Developers Guide
REST API Design, Development & Management

11. Utility Libraries

These are the libraries which make your work easier. There are many utility libraries available for React developers as shown below:

• Lodash
• Moment
• classnames
• Numeral
• RxJ
• SRamda

I don’t suggest you learn all these and so does RoadMap. If you look closely only Lodash, Moment, and Classnames are drawn in yellow, stating that you should start with them.

12. Testing

Now, this is one of the important skill for React Developers which is often overlooked, but if you want to stay ahead from your competition then you should focus on learning libraries which will help you in testing. Here also, you have libraries for Unit testing, Integration testing, and end-to-end testing.

Here is a list of libraries mentioned in the roadmap:

Unit Testing

• Jest
• Enzyme
• Sinon
• Mocha
• Chai
• AVA
• Tape

End to End Testing

• Selenium
• Webdriver
• Cypress
• Puppeteer
• Cucumber.js
• Nightwatch.js

Integration Testing

• Karma

You can learn the library you want but Jest and Enzyme are recommended. The Complete React Web Developer Course (with Redux) also covers Testing React application covering both Jest and Enzyme.

Role and Responsibilities of a software Project Manager

A software project manager is the most important person inside a team who takes the overall responsibilities to manage the software projects and play an important role in the successful completion of the projects. A project manager has to face many difficult situations to accomplish these works. In fact, the job responsibilities of a project manager range from invisible activities like building up team morale to highly visible customer presentations. Most of the managers take responsibility for writing the project proposal, project cost estimation, scheduling, project staffing, software process tailoring, project monitoring and control, software configuration management, risk management, managerial report writing and presentation and interfacing with clients. 

The task of a project manager are classified into two major types:

Quantum Computing Explained Simply And How Actually Quantum Computers Work

“If quantum computing hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet”

Today’s smartphone have same ability as of military computer from 50 years with the size of an entire room. However, even after making exceptional steps in classical computers and technology since the arrival of quantum computers there are many problems that the classical computers are not been able to solev. Many geeks accept that quantum computers are the answer.


Reference:
https://medium.com/@techindustan/quantum-computing-explained-simply-and-how-actually-quantum-computers-work-c6e0667f3468

Why Leaders Should Make Love The Top Priority

I recently watched an excellent TED talk, which I think you’ll love, too. It’s about why the best leaders make loving employees a higher priority than profit.

Since the talk is only 9 minutes long, and the topic is an important, yet nuanced one, I have interviewed the speaker, Matt Tenney, to give you a deeper exploration of the topic. After you watch the video of Matt’s talk, I think you’ll enjoy my interview with him, which is below.

Estimating Software Tasks

Let developers estimate their own work
Any system where management writes a schedule and hands it off to programmers is doomed to fail. Only the programmer who is going to do the work can figure out what steps they will need to take to implement that feature. And only the programmer can estimate how long each one will take.

Design first, and in detail
Attempting to estimate a feature before you’ve figured out how the feature is going to work, in detail, can’t possibly work, even if you “multiply your best guess by three,” because your “best guess” is based on very little in the way of facts. The nature of software development is that things which seem simple are often surprisingly complicated when you think about all the details. For example, when you think about creating a registration and logon system, you might forget that you’re going to need a way to prevent passwords that are the same as the user name, and a way to deal with forgotten passwords, and a way for people to unregister, and so on. Until you try to figure out the design of all these things, you have no basis for an estimate at all.

How to Get Better at Estimating Software Development Time

Being able to accurately estimate the time required to develop a given product or feature is a crucial skill for every developer and one that must be honed over time through deliberation and effort. As an industry, we are constantly plagued with software overruns. One study estimates that as many as 66% of all enterprise software projects have cost and effort overruns.

Here are 9 signs it's time to quit your job

Here are 9 signs it's time to quit your job
Moving on. Read more: http://wef.ch/2eVBVsw
Posted by Video - World Economic Forum on Tuesday, 5 September 2017

Never too old to code: Meet Japan's 82-year-old app-maker

When 82-year-old Masako Wakamiya first began working she still used an abacus for maths -- today she is one of the world's oldest iPhone app developers, a trailblazer in making smartphones accessible for the elderly.



Reference: AFP news agency

Premature scaling will kill your Start-up

Premature scaling means scaling your team, customer acquisition strategies or over building the product without getting to product/market fit first.

Startup Genome in a report published in 2011 identified premature scaling as the number one cause of startup failure.

The report states that most start-ups scale by keeping the 5 core dimensions of a start-up Customer, Product, Team, Business Model and Financials in balance and they need to master the chaos of getting each of these 5 dimensions to move in time and in tune with others. Based on StartupGenome’s analysis of about 3200 high growth internet startups approximately 70% of the startups in their data set scaled prematurely along some dimension and died as a result.

The startups in their data set were divided into 2 categories: Consistent and Inconsistent. Consistent startups were those who kept the customer dimension, the primary indicator of progress in a startup, in tune with product, team, financials and business model while inconsistent startups had one or more of these dimensions far ahead or far behind the customer dimension. Here are examples of inconsistency across all dimensions:

(Source: Startup Genome Report Extra on Premature Scaling)

With the ideas of Premature Scaling, Consistent and Inconsistent Start-ups clear in our mind let us proceed to understand why start-ups prematurely scale and how as a start-up founder you can avoid falling into this trap.

Reasons why start-ups scale prematurely and how it can be avoided:

1. One of the first reactions for most start-ups after raising a funding or closing a big customer (in case of B2B) is hiring more people. Founders also try to justify raising a round by hiring more specialists in their start-ups. This leads to hiring of too many people too early. The solution is to hire only if there is a serious need and making sure each new hire raises the bar for future hires.
2. Most VCs look down upon so called ‘lifestyle businesses’. The easiest way to signal your intent to conquer the world is by splashing your newly raised money. Resist the urge to raise money till you reach product market fit.
3. Most start-ups raise a new round and agree on a bunch of metrics to be hit in the next 18 months. Growth is the only thing which matters in today’s hyper competitive funding environment and one needs to grow fast or face the prospect of the much dreaded down round (few months down the line). To drive this growth founders try to throw more MBA folks at it. More people (especially having one more level of hierarchy) does not mean more output.
4. It is easy to fake growth as well as traction nowadays. I had written earlier about how most start-ups today are chasing vanity metrics. For them growth means pumping money on acquisition channels. In case you are not focusing on retention and reducing churn you will lost 80% of your users in the first few weeks.
5. Founders equate start-up culture with fancy offices and employee perks. Culture is much more than that. Bhavin Turakhia wrote a post on how one can think beyond TT tables to create a culture of mutual respect and a place where employees can give their 100% every day.
6. PR stories do not equate success. It is hard not to think of yourself as the next big thing when you have the attention of the press (and paid PR posts never hurt). Losing focus will lead you to chase the next shiny product feature, hire (which will get you more press) and you will stop caring about the only dimension which matters the most — your own customers.
7. Too many product features do not breed customer loyalty. But that is what most start-ups seem to be doing — mindlessly adding new shiny features. Coupons/discounts will help you increase your GMV (another vanity metric) but do nothing to improve retention. Ruthless prioritisation is the key here. Focus on the problem you were trying to solve with your product. Talk to your customers. Figure out the main causes for churn and fix them.

Reference: https://hackernoon.com/premature-scaling-will-kill-your-start-up-82587dabc47e 

When You Embrace The Change, You Have A Chance

(Picture of HAN, founder & GM, stepped down and resigned from the company)

Han resigned from the Founder & General Manager of the Company. 
Below is his full letter to staffs:

Dear Team, 

For the last eight years my life has always been thinking about businesses which i managed and sacrificed all the dreams for the vision that company wants to get reached. Recent events have brought home for me that honesty is more important than money, and that I need to make such decision in another way to create new chapter in my life.

The ultimate responsibility, for what we’ve gotten here I have trained, documented and guided to new leadership team smoothly. There is of course much to be proud of however there are so many things to improve. For online e-commerce business and earlier new established services & products to succeed there is nothing more greater than dedicating your time build out the strongest leadership management and trust the mission, vision that you agreed with shareholders together.  

During my absent from the company, I do believe that new leadership team will be running the businesses successfully. I will be available as needed for at anytime you’ve got the questions in order to move operation forward swiftly. 

I feel tragically losing my loved children that we all have taken care of them for almost 10 years so far. Due to the tough situation for me right now and I have to properly say my “GOODBYES” to all of you.

Have a good luck,
Han
(31 July 2017)

Dream Never Come

It's time to make a dream come true! 

That dream is to make people can obtain benefits equally in the open marketplace.

I have had a very diverse experiences in Innovation of Technology Industry I have shared my knowledge, ideas to thousand of students, friends and companies so far. It's now over 10 years already I've still been in such working environment and It's the age of changing I'm older enough to deeply think of how to invent something new by using own yearlong entrepreneurship.

I do believe that in order to make a dream come true is very hard and impossible as long as we have affordable investment (much money). When we think of money it makes us so headache and suck anyway.

If we start up from small thing, we have a proper brainstorming together and we have a strong teamwork then we might not think of money too much, but think about ideas, new innovation of technology about what society really needs in the present and future.

Changing life from working at private company to create own small business surely requires encouragement, motivation from people around especially family and friends. I have been supported by my wife she want to have small business which initiate by my experience & leadership because she do believes in mine. Small business is no need big money but a confident stakeholders.

To get bigger, we must start from small thing!

Build confident first before selling the service!

Build value first before recovering the expenses!

However, Dream never come!!!

Problems with OWC11 interop publishing to development server

Solution:
Yes, you can do this by using start->run type c:\windows\assembly\gac  do not try to browse to it you cannot get there. hit Enter.
Next copy the folder called  Microsoft.Office.Interop.Owc11 to a location that you can reach from the server.  Log on to the server and then use the start->Run type c:\windows\assembly\gac once there copy the folder into it.  This should fix the problem.

Link: https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/21691122/Problems-with-OWC11-interop-publishing-to-development-server.html

If you still have a problem with Oledb connection please download "AccessDatabaseEngine_X64 .EXE" and install one more then it will be solved.

Human Mindset Really Different

I believe that each people absolutely  have different mindset from one to another.

One thing, they need the same is reputation. Reputation is reflected to people's value.

People live around the world have their personal value, of course. So we need to respect the value as a human, share respectful behavior to each other rather than using bad words, or blame them without a reason.

When we respect, defend them or give them a warm while they are our employees then we will become a good leader as always.

Thank everyone for having a confident on me, I will stand by you in all circumstance.

Changes to Improve A Lot of Works

Life is so short,  we don't know when the world lose us!
So please keep doing the best thing you're wanna to do now!

Every of kind, morality and honesty people mostly get more pressure at workplace environment while that company is less of policy & rules' respect.

Those kind people, they like to help whom around them all the time as needed. Sometime they tell about the technique how to do, and sometime they help to implement tasks directly instead.

When we have got a such kind mind in our heart and we often pity people around us every time like this, we will return back the most pressure in life such as no time enough for community meetup, family, friends and personal relax at all.

For me, as experiences I like to help a lot of friends, employees or other people who ask for helps from me. I love to teach them, I love to help them and frequently those people always get motivation from me, of course.

I've worked for several organization, local & international companies over 10 years until now, I manage many companies in the same time, but let's keep the difficult works at apart of my heart and keep slowly resolving it. Customers & Investors are the most challenge for me because they want the easier & the best thing done smoothly to regenerate as much as money as they want.

My challenge is when going to have a meeting with customers & investors and listen to their comments and feedback. I'm so shy of them when I cannot complete projects on time as scheduled.

There are some projects are very sensitive which we cannot assign the team to handle directly, so only us alone to groom it and fix accordingly.

I always tell myself that "We're a human, we were born to help to resolve the problems, so please don't get bored with those.". This sentence is keeping motivation for me all the time and thank to whom that got experience as me.

Thank you,

Effective of Good Leadership

Across several years long of leadership experiences, I have been recognized to be a good brother, good leader and respectful manager of everybody, in subordinates' eyes.

I always give a warm support, a special assistant while they've got serious problems. I provide the honesty love, the true motivation which all these make them very confident on mine.

Thank you so much everyone for all the time appreciation and treat me as your brother. I do love you guys.

Below is  a message from staff:

Regards,

Drupal 7: Forbidden error for files in the files directory

[RESOLVED]
"Access forbidden!
You don't have permission to access the requested object. It is either read-protected or not readable by the server.
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster. "


[SOLUTION]
The problems, however, start when the browser is trying to access these files.
Problem #1. The FollowSymLinks option causes me an Internal Server Error because my hosting provider has disabled use of this directive. In my environment I know I can safely comment this line out just like I did in the main .htaccess file in the Drupal installation directory. This is because the FollowSymLinksIfOwnerMatch is enabled instead. One down, one to go.

Problem #2. The content of the .htaccess file is now effectively as follows:

SetHandler Drupal_Security_Do_Not_Remove_See_SA_2006_006
Options None

 

With this configuration I get rid of the Internal Server error. But instead, I now get a HTTP 403 forbidden error when the browser is requesting files that are in the files directory.
If I comment out Options None, I can access the files as intended. This configuration change is, however, something that I am not going to do unless I know for sure that Apache is configured safely - I don't want to open my site for remote arbitrary code execution.

Reference: https://www.drupal.org/node/813196