Short talk at Engineers Ireland covering process, tools and technology for speedy software development

1. BUILDING SOFTWARE FAST AND WELL
Sean O Sullivan twitter @sos100

2. Why am I here?
 Rococo
 www.rococosoft.com
 Mobile / Wireless (short range)
 Shipped JSR82 on 200M+ mobile phones
 LocalSocial: Proximity Platform (www.mylocalsocial.com)
 3 software engineers
 Dial2Do
 www.dial2do.com
 Value add voice platform
 Speak to get things done (email, twitter, text, 40+ actions)
 Live in 26 countries, partners Plantronics, Jabra, Jawbone,…
 4 software engineers

3. FAST WELL
Process
Development tools / technology
Deployment tools / technology

4. Process

5. Process: Agile and Scrum
 Iterations have been 3-4 weeks on average
 Lots of feedback along the way
 Try, change, review, re-plan
 A la carte take on Agile
 Testsfirst – mostly
 Pair programming – sometimes
 Continuous deploy – yes
 User stories – yes
 Refactoring – yes

6. Process: Roadmap
Deals Share Social
MobDeal
User
Proximity
Social Redeem
Simple Power
Merchant
Register Loyalty
Deals Deals
Social
Locations Analytics Campaigns MobDeal
Proximity
Wireless
Bluetooth "private" QR NFC
Public WiFi
Support WiFi Support Support
Iteration1 Iteration2 Iteration3

7. Process: Minimum Viable Product
 Eric Ries @ startuplessonslearn.com

8. FAST WELL
Process
Development tools / technology
Deployment tools / technology

9. Development Tools
 Frameworks  API
 Rails  Gson (Java, Android)
 Android  acts_as_api (Ruby)
 Java  Test
 IDEs  RSPec
 Eclipse (Java / Android)  Cucumber
 IntelliJ / RubyMine (Rails/Ruby)  Junit
 Continuous Integration  Database
 TeamCity  ORMlite (Android)
 Version Control  mySQL on Amazon RDS
 Git, GitFlow  Charting
 Highcharts
 AgilePM
 TinyPM
And more besides….see the blog post

10. Git and gitflow

11. Testing
 Cucumber
 BehaviourDriven
Development
framework
 Domain Specific
Language to describe
code behaviour
 RSpec
 BDD for Ruby

12. Making / sharing APIs
 Rails : acts_as_api
 Java (Android) : Gson

13. highcharts

14. FAST WELL
Process
Development tools / technology
Deployment tools / technology

15. Deployment
 Started out with Amazon EC2
 A little too early – very Beta back then
 Then S3
 Much better – very stable
 Back to EC2 when it stabilised
 Been very solid for some time now…

16. LocalSocial / Dial2Do

17. Motivations
 Ease of use / Speed of use
 Experimentation
 AMIs
 Flexibility
 Pricing

18. LocalSocial
 S3
 Stores AMIs
 Fedora 8 from AWS
 Plus all our own stuff (RoR, Scripts, …)
 EC2
 One “small instance” Server
 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of
instance storage, 32-bit platform
 Runs our AMI fulltime
 Two domains right now
 gigmonkey.com
 mylocalsocial.com
 And our VPN
 EBS
 Connected to running EC2 Instance
 Persistent Store for all mySQL DBs

19. LocalSocial

20. Heroku

22. Open Source
 A few words on it
 Incredible in terms of potential for re-use, time
saving, cost saving, quality
 Must have eyes fully open
 License, support, TCOO
 Need a house style / approach
 Awareness of license types / styles
 BlackDuck

23. Observations
 Great time (imho) for software development
 Development and Deployment Tools
 Costs
 Re-use
 Help
 Routes to Markets
 Speed / gratification (or failure)
 Ability to test features, product quickly

24. BUILDING SOFTWARE FAST AND WELL
Sean O Sullivan twitter @sos100

25. References / Material - process
 Joe Drumgoole
 Introduction to Agile and Scrum
 Lean Startup / MVP
 Guide to MVP from Eric Ries here

26. References / Material - tools
 TinyPM
 Agile PM tool
 Git
 Branching model
 Tools for branching model
 Open Source management, control, checking
 Black Duck here
 Acts_as_api
 XML/JSON responses in Rails 3
 Tutorial here
 Highcharts
 Charts here