Excellence

November 30th, 2017 | Posted by Vidya Vrat in Career Advice - (1 Comments)

“A person once visited a temple under construction where he saw a sculptor making an idol of God…Suddenly he noticed a similar idol lying nearby…Surprised, he asked the sculptor, “Do you need two statues of the same idol?” “No,” said the sculptor without looking up, “We need only one, but the first one got damaged at the last stage…”.

The gentleman examined the idol and found no apparent damage… “Where is the damage?” he asked. “There is a scratch on the nose of the idol.” said the sculptor, still busy with his work…. “Where are you going to install the idol?” The sculptor replied that it would be installed on a pillar twenty feet high… “If the idol is that far who is going to know that there is a scratch on the nose?” the gentleman asked. The sculptor stopped work, looked up at the gentleman, smiled and said, “I know it and God knows it!”

” The desire to excel is exclusive of the fact whether someone else appreciates it or not…. “Excellence” is a drive from inside, not outside…. Excellence is not for someone else to notice but for your own satisfaction and efficiency. Don’t Climb a Mountain with an Intention that the World Should See You, Climb the Mountain with the Intention to See the World.

I have done an official Technical Review of a packtpub video course “Learning Object Oriented Programming with C# 7”.
https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/learning-object-oriented-programming-c-7-video

This video has total 7 modules and available for purchase via www.packypub.com.

Learning Object Oriented Programming with C# 7 [Video] Book Cover

 

I spoke at Silicon Valley Code Camp 2017 in San Jose, CA on Oct 7th 2017 and my topic was Need of DevOps in the Enterprise.

• Need of DevOps in the Enterprise https://lnkd.in/eQf3dFm

It was nice experience to speak in Silicon Valley and meet college students to very well experienced professionals. I was really honored to have Ron Lichty attend my session and at the end mentioning that it was a great session.

Microsoft MVP team was also there to sponsor and socialize about all the MVP Speakers at Silicon Valley Code Camp (SVCC) 2017.

Slide of my session can be found at my Github

Overall it was nice experience, I also met some Microsoft Evangelists and fellow C# Corner and Microsoft MVPs.

I want to THANK all my readers in the .NET community. Today I have reached 5 million read count at www.C-Sharpcorner.com

My C-Sharpcorner profile – http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/members/vidya-vrat-agarwal

 

 

Seattle Code Camp 2017

I spoke at Seattle Code Camp 2017 on 09/09/2017 and covered two topics.

• AntiPatterns Every Software Development Team Must Know https://lnkd.in/ebEMDBb
• DevOps: What, why and how?
https://lnkd.in/eQf3dFm

Seattle Code Camp started with a Keynote from Microsoft’s Jeremy Foster and he shared a slide with all Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professionals) and FTE (Full Time Employee) who were speaking at 09/09/2017 Seattle Code Camp.

Microsoft got separate printed agenda for MVP and FTE Sessions

Session Details

My 1st Session on AntiPattern was in Room#103 at 11 am -12 pm. I had a brief introduction and begin with the presentation. As already set the expectation with the audience, I kept it very interactive and many participated well to share knowledge and experiences with others.

Some of the attendees even spoke to their friends in the lunch break and recommended them to attend my next session. Some of the attendees returned for the 2nd session for DevOps at 1-2pm and some mentioned that it was the best talk they attended. Well, I thank them for their kind words and patience to provide me an opportunity to share my thoughts with them.

What people said after my sessions

Presentation Slides

Slides are available at https://github.com/vidyavrat/SeattleCodeCamp2017

Contact Me

Please connect with my via
LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/vidyavrat/
Twiter : https://twitter.com/dotnetauthor

Send me a message using Contact Me tab on the blog.

I have done an official Technical Review of a packtpub title “Mastering ASP.NET Web API”.
https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/mastering-aspnet-web-api

This book has total 13chapters and available for purchase in all leading bookstores and online. You can also purchase this directly through the packtpub link provided above.

Mastering ASP.NET Web API Book Cover

 

Speaking at Seattle Code Camp 2017

September 6th, 2017 | Posted by Vidya Vrat in Community - (0 Comments)

Seattle Code Camp 2017 is here 09/09/2017 and I will be speaking  on two hot topics which will benefit software developers who really care about their craft.

• AntiPatterns Every Software Development Team Must Know https://lnkd.in/ebEMDBb
• DevOps : What, why and how?
https://lnkd.in/eQf3dFm

Register at https://lnkd.in/gZt65s6 #SeattleCodeCamp

Seattle Code Camp

Introduction 

DevOps is a new buzzword and it promotes continuous value delivery to the end users. To know more about DevOps read my article DevOps: What, why and how? 

DevOps is a “culture”, where development, test, and operations work together in a collaborative manner to automate delivery of quality software.  DevOps culture develops “production-first mindset”. I.e. applying DevOps ensures that your code is always ready to be deployed to production. 

Agile Manifesto 

Agile manifesto and principles have an influence on DevOps. Let’s review agile manifesto: 

Manifesto for agile software development  

“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:  

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation 
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 
  • Responding to change over following a plan 

Agile Principles 

Overall Agile Manifesto has twelve principles and four of those really gels well with DevOps. 

  • Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through an early and continuous delivery of valuable software. 
  • Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. 
  • Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. 
  • Working software is the primary measure of progress. 

How Agile principles apply on DevOps  

  • Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through an early and continuous delivery of valuable software. 

  When a team adapts the DevOps culture then team works   together to deliver a high-quality software to the end users consistently over and over.  

  • Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.DevOps promotes short delivery cycles over long delivery cycles. Short delivery cycles have small amount of change which is far easier to deploy and test and detect impact of changes.
     
  • Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.DevOps enable the business people to have look at the product early and provide candid feedback. DevOps also provides an easy and effective way of adding approval step in the CI/CD pipeline where business / product owner can approve changes for deployment to other environments.
     
  • Working software is the primary measure of progress.At the end business values working software having reliable feature delivered on time to end users. DevOps practices enable the software development teams to deliver working software on time and provided proper channel for feedback between various stages of the DevOps workflow.
     

I have done an official Technical Review of a packtpub title “Building Microservices with .NET Core”

https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/building-microservices-net-core

This book has total 10 chapters and available for purchase in all leading bookstores and online. You can also purchase this directly through the packtpub link provided above.

DevOps, What , Why & How

June 7th, 2017 | Posted by Vidya Vrat in ALM / DevOps - (1 Comments)

What DevOps is not?

DevOps is not a “Packaged Solution”. I.e.  You cannot buy and install it.

What is DevOps?

“DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.” – Donovan Brown, MSFT

DevOps is a “culture”, where development, test, and operations work together in a collaborative manner to automate delivery of quality software.  DevOps culture develops “production-first mindset”. I.e. applying DevOps ensures that your code is always ready to be deployed to production.

Why DevOps?

First thing DevOps offers is that, it breaks the “Wall of Confusion” between development and operations team. These two teams have different agenda and expectations when it comes to software delivery and deployment.

DevOps breaks the wall of confusion between teams and fosters better communication and collaboration throughout the application development lifecycle and results into better visibility and small frequent deployments together.

DevOps Benefits and ROI – Source, Forrester Research Inc.

  • Improved IT operations efficiency. Saving 50% of allocated IT operations support.
  • Improved developer productivity with faster, automated release processes. Developers saw a 15% improvement in productivity.
  • Improved tester productivity with faster, automated release processes. 20% productivity gain with their deployment of the Microsoft DevOps solution.
  • Faster recovery from failures and reduction in release risk. Reduce time-to-resolution per incident by 2 hours.
  • Reduced cycle time by as much as 99% and more frequent deployments. Increased customer satisfaction and also gained new business.
  • Faster speed-to-market for new features, products, and services for customers. 20x more, leading to increased sales.
  • Improved release quality. Successful releases with a reduction in errors increase in release reliability, and less time on remediation of release errors.

How to apply DevOps?

Prime objective of DevOps is to “quickly ship the highest quality software to the end customers”. To make this happen DevOps needs to be implemented across all the phases of software development and delivery.

DevOps workflow from planning to release

The workflow model below shows how teams go through four phases and contribute towards DevOps adoption.

Plan Backlog represents well-defined and prioritized user stories with proper acceptance criteria etc.

Develop & Test Development will include good quality code written, debugged, code reviewed, checked-in including unit test coverage as appropriate. Testing will include verifying the user story’s acceptance criteria, possibly followed by performance and integration tests etc.

Release – Whenever a new version is ready and a sprint end, an automated process is used for deployment.

Monitor and Learn After release team can gather information related to how customers use the application /services and continue to monitor health of application.

Collaboration – Building code and running unit tests on each check-in small or big ensures that code is ready to be deployed. Then, deploying it to at-least production like environment and successfully performing tests there ensures that Dev and Production are in collaboration.

DevOps Automation

One major key aspect of DevOps is automation of software build, test, and deploy. DevOps automation enables continuous value delivery.  Let’s see the DevOps Automation process workflow.

Development – This is where a developer writes code in their local development environment.

Version Control – This is version control team uses to check-in code to the repository. E.g. Git, TFS, SVN etc.

Build and Unit Testing – This is where DevOps Continuous Integration (CI) takes place. At this step, code will build with latest checked-in code and latest packages and dependencies as applicable. If there are unit tests then all unit tests will be executed to ensure that there are no collateral damages caused within the code base.

If Build fails then a notification will be sent to the developer who submitted the build. Many teams have various policies and channels set up for this. For example, a bug is created with details when a build fails and team’s slack channel will receive notification when a build fails.

Automated Acceptance Testing – If build succeeds then a set of acceptance tests can be executed automatically to verify that code is working fine.

Any failure in an acceptance test will trigger a feedback initiated to the team and process will again start from beginning.

User Acceptance Test – Passed automated acceptance tests ensures and triggers the code to be promoted to UAT.

Release – Upon passing UAT, code can be released to any environment or production or production like environment. Manual push of code to production is known as Continuous Delivery (CD).

DevOps Toolchain

DevOps is technology agnostic and any development environment on any platform can fully adopt DevOps culture and can continuously deliver quality software to their customers. Here some SDLC phases and tools which will fit in and can help to setup end-to-end DevOps pipeline for your technology and platform of choice.

Planning and Analysis

  • Capturing and tracking (TFS, VSTS, JIRA, ServiceNow.
  • Documentation or Wiki page (Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Confluence.
  • Collaboration (Slack, HipChat, Microsoft Teams).

Design and Development

  • SCM (TFS, VSTS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial.
  • IDE (Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio).

Build and Release (CI/CD)

  • Repository management (Artifactory, Nuget, Nexus).
  • Build tools (MSBuild, Jenkins, Bamboo).
  • Configuration management (Chef, Puppet, Ansible).
  • Cloud (AWS, Azure,OpenStack).
  • Containers (Docker).

Integration and Testing

  • Source code verification (SonarQube).
  • Security testing (HP Fortify).
  • Functional testing (MSTest, NUnit, JUnit, Cucumber, Selenium).
  • Performance testing (SOASTA, Apache Test Bench, Microsoft Load and Performance Test).