How to improve coding skills and code security?
Use Ruby on Rails as the development framework. It follows strict conventions to make sure that the quality of code produced is of high quality. Its easier to follow the best practice than not to do it. For example its easier to write unit tests than not to. Most reusable code in rails is available as plugins and and security is taken care of by the community. Its always better to use maintained code from the community, than not to. Rails and subversion make this easier by allowing code in a project to be tied to code developed by the community automatically.
How to write effitient program documentation?
If spec documentation created automatically, that would be the best scenario, right? The project starts of by coming up with initial screens iteratively. Only the most necessary features go in there. The application is deployed to a staging server daily. Once the initial application is built, no more screens. Tasks are raised in Basecamp/Trac and are integrated into the application. Development documentation is written inside the code itself and RDoc is used to create the documentation and diagrams from the code automatically. In all, only work that absolutely adds value to the application is performed. Also, its always better to make the application usable than to create user documentation.
How overcome communication issues in outsourcing?
The project manager in the US should take care of the communication and cultural issues between the developers in India and the users in the US.
How to scale your code?
Use a framework that deploys code on amazons EC2 and takes care of the scalability issue. EC2 is an affordable service that amazon provides, which can deploy servers in minutes when the load on the server increases. The share nothing architecture of Rails makes scaling a lot easier.
How do you maintain quality?
Most companies have it all wrong. They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop de-motivating them. Everyone inherently wants to be motivated. Just remove all the barriers on the steps to achievement and keep great work flowing.
The book, “Maverick : The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace“, has a neat statement we believe is at the core to getting doing great work.
3 stone cutters were asked about their jobs. The first said he was paid to cut stones. The second replied that he used special techniques in a special way, and proceeded to demonstrate his skills. The third stone cutter just smiled and said, “I build cathedrals”.
We wholeheartedly believe in this statement. A great idea has the power to bring out the best in all of us.
Keeping this principle in mind, there are three imp things we ingrained in our process. Motivation, Responsibility, Celebration.
Motivation: Team members are motivated if the problem being solved is a tough problem and we have a great idea that can solve it. Any problem is tough if we try to find new ways to solve it and be the best in the world. Great design and implementation ideas keep the team motivated and wanting to do more. Freedom to input any great idea in to the project always keeps the team members invigorated.
Responsibility with accountability: A team member has responsibility if they pick their own tasks and are evaluated on it. Freedom to design the application in his/her areas of expertise is what fuels motivation. All technical questions are replied by the product manager with a “You tell me!” In our process, the team members are free to choose any task daily from a list of pending tasks and setup their own time to do it. For example we use Basecamp, a project management web application to write the spec on a writeboard, archive daily messages in the messages tab and set broad deadlines for demos and releases in the milestones tab. Team members use the to-do tool in it to list the tasks that they promise for that day. The team member has the freedom set the granularity of the task, but the rule is to complete the tasks that day only. If the team member fails to complete the tasks he promised the team, his name will go up in a list along with the day as a defaulter. Quality of the tasks performed is maintained by raising bug reports which inturn are connected to the tasks. If a certain team member has low quality output, it is shown by the number of bugs a ticket has. In all, freedom to select our work with proper accountability does wonders to motivation and creativity.
Celebration: An internal smile always lights up when the team hears about how their decisions and execution made somebody’s day or work more pleasurable. This information is frequently gathered and shared. The celebration messages are archived with the task list and coming across a previous message is always pleasurable. Celebration provides encouragement to novice team member to crossover to the expert category.
Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments about our process. We continuously strive to improve on it.
What is Ruby on Rails?
We develop web applications, using agile development techniques with Ruby on Rails. Other tools like Basecamp, Trac, Subversion, Blogs and Aggregators enhance the joy in development.
Rails is a full-stack framework for developing powerful database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern, accessible using any internet browser.
Rails is built on the:
- Interpreted
- Dynamically typed
- Pure object-oriented
- Scripting language, from Japan named Ruby.
It’s Simple, straightforward and extensible.
Scalable, reliable, maintainable and easy to use applications can be developed in weeks instead of months using Ruby on Rails. Some cutting edge Rails features:
- Ajax using RJS
- Object-relational mapping (ORM)
- Convention over configuration promoting simplicity
- Generators to automate repeating tasks
- Integrated test framework
- Automated application deployment promoting frequent releases to production
- Web services integration
- Migrations with the ability to deploy/rollback database schema changes.