TCS (Topcoder software) experience

To those of you who have very little or no idea of topcoder : It is one of the fastest and powerful crowdsourcing communities which aims at delivering software through competitions , a strategy that has been working successfully so far. My involvement in topcoder dates back to college life (2 or 3 years ago) when algorithm competitions gave us the same kind of adrenalin rush you get from a F1 racing. After over an year in a web-based startup company i have come to realize the importance of writing code that should be read and appreciated by others and what better way to start than with topcoder software component development competitions. After a few unsuccessful attempts and valuable learning i decided to give a best shot at an export file writer development competition at topcoder

The technology expertise required to build the component was somewhat familiar to me. The configuration based, bean to xls,ods,xml,csv,html formats didn’t require much of learning or research for me. The important thing was to get familiarized with the component development process of the TCS. A flash demo, sample review scorecard, a list of tools used gave me a rough idea of how to go about the whole process. Some of the things  like ant targets along with testing tools used became clear before hand but i missed the most important tool called cobertura which i figured out just before making my first auto screen submission. After dropping in the required libraries and executing ant coveragereport cobertura gives a complete report of the lines of the code that were not executed after executing test cases. This gave a  guiding light towards writing efficient test cases. Next thing was checkstyle tool which was available as a plugin in Jetbrain’s IDEA and i found it useful. Only problem was it reported nearly 100 warnings in my code which i was more than happy to ignore given that it was only my first competition in TCS.

The libraries used by the components required some running around to get them. A little bit of maven integration would have been useful but there is always a next time rite! I plan to plug-in maven with ant integeration and don’t have to worry about these dependencies any more. TCS advices developers not to spend too much time configuring ant but i feel having it setup in the first place (irrespective of support by your IDE) can save a lot of last minute falls. Its good to have “ant test” , “ant compile_targets” execute successfully right from the beginning and hey .. don’t forget about the good friend “ant coveragereport“.

Ok. I got my project setup and ready to write some useful code.! what? where are the skeleton codes ? thats right. TCS provides you the tcuml file of the project which you can open with Topcoder UML tool, generate the code in the right package and you have all the java doced code in you package. Then it was time to fill up the code. I was surprised to notice most of the code already written in java doc and most of the time a copy paste would work. Life can’t be simpler. But topcoder’s software process is always one step ahead . Designer is expected to think about development and developer is expected to write lots of test cases. Of the 4 days to complete the component i spent about 1 day understanding the component spec, requirement spec, design diagrams, 1 day on development and 2 days on writing test cases. The component had some rough edges when it came to testing. In the forums (where you are expected to raise questions and designer answers them)  people raised questions mostly oriented towards the types of exceptions that needs to thrown/caught which was ironic but i enjoyed it. In all my components i developed i never worried about exceptions and logging them . But when you are developing in a crowdsource/open source environment logging / exceptions and documents are of paramount importance however annoying they are.

TCS expects 4 kinds of test cases for the component you are developing.

1. Unit tests – which tests the component’s functionality – this is mandatory.
2. Failure tests – which tests whether the methods are throwing the right kind of exception for the appropriate input
3. Stress tests – which tests the component on very large inputs and logs the time taken
4. Accuracy tests – which tests the accuracy . For example if the decimal digits in the exported xls file are accurate to some degree.

At the end of the fourth day of component development i had around 200 test cases including unit,failure,stress and i din’t have much time for accuracy tests.

You can make several submissions in the online review tool of the topcoder and each submission is auto-screened using cobertura and  it passes only if the line and branch coverages are above 85%.  Hurray !!! i made my first submission which passed auto screening. Then i ran checkstyle and cleaned up the annotations a little bit but i din’t have much experience / knowledge on what was expected in them which i came to regret later!

Each submission gets assigned a reviewer who takes the auto screened submission and evaluates the submission based on a TCS score card for development. Unfortunately my submission din’t make it through the manual screening but gave me a good understanding of the entire process and I thoroughly enjoyed. It might be too early to discuss about my score card as i am not yet rated but one of them was the use of wrong version of the third party library which resulted in reviewer test cases failing with flare   .

I will write about the list of mistakes i made and how i could have caught them earlier in my future posts. No charges for bookmarking and checking back later

Scrum – The basics

What is Scrum?

Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. It produces a potentially shippable set of functionality at the end of every iteration. It’s attributes are:

• Scrum is an agile process to manage and control development work.
• Scrum is a wrapper for existing engineering practices.
• Scrum is a team-based approach to iteratively, incrementally develop systems and products when requirements are rapidly changing
• Scrum is a process that controls the chaos of conflicting interests and needs.
• Scrum is a way to improve communications and maximize co-operation.
• Scrum is a way to detect and cause the removal of anything that gets in the way of developing and delivering products.
• Scrum is a way to maximize productivity.
• Scrum is scalable from single projects to entire organizations. Scrum has controlled and organized development and implementation for multiple interrelated products and projects with over a thousand developers and implementers.
• Scrum is a way for everyone to feel good about their job, their contributions, and that they have done the very best they possibly could.

How does it work?

People
1. Product Owner
person who will be responsible for prioritising work on the product. person who knows what is required of the product.person that is a good communicator and able to convey requirements.person who is committed to the success of the product, such that they are willing and able to dedicated a reasonable amount of time to its development.
2. Scrum Master:
responsible for supporting the Scrum Team, coaching and guiding them through this process, and removing any impediments blocking their progress.
The Scrum Master is responsible for facilitating the Scrum meeting. Keeping it focused. Keeping it timely. Keeping it ‘on topic’. The Scrum Master is also responsible for removing impediments. Impediments raised during the Scrum can be noted on the whiteboard for the Scrum Master to deal with.
The Scrum Master does not have to solve all impediments personally. They can delegate. But they are responsible for ensuring the impediments are addressed. And addressed quickly. A key part of the Scrum Masters role is to protect the team and keep them focused on the tasks in hand.
3. Scrum Team:
Team that is "committed" to delivering

Process

Step 1:
Get the Product backlog:
Items on the Product Backlog should ideally be expressed in business terms that are of some value to the user (or customer, or business). Not as technical tasks.
It also contains technical issue or risk like "security.. etc.." . All the things that can cause sleepless nights.

Step 2:
Prioritize
Only the Product Owner can prioritise the Product Backlog
Order of product items determines the priority.

Step 3:
Estimating Product backlog:
Estimate your product backlog in points. Not in units of time . [ Its just a guestimate ]
Gives measure of "how big the item is" not "how long it will take"
Relative estimates using fibo numbers. Choose the easiest task and give it a 2 point. Then increasing work through items and assign points.
This should be done by scrum team (exclude product owner)

Step 4:
Reshuffle
Based on the points (difficulty of the task) product owner can reshuffle the product backlog
At this point team has list of product items (product backlog)

Step 5:
Sprint Planning
Developers, Testers, Product Owner, Scrum team, Scrum master
Choose Sprint duration (max 1 month) ( this should be consistent across all future sprints)
Target backlog : subset of product backlog items that needs to be delivered.
Have stretch tasks that are not expected by the product owner to be completed.
Product Owner presents each item and a discussion develops. Everyone comes to term with what is required.

Step 6:
Sprint planning meeting 2
Optional for  QA and Product owner  to attend
Scrum team discusses on how its going to deliver each product item
Arrive at available time : #members * #hours in sprint duration
for each feature break into tasks
Include all tasks necessary to make the Product Backlog item 100% complete – i.e. potentially shippable –
Estimate each task in hours. Each task should NOT be more that 1 day
Add up all the task estimates for the selected Product Backlog.
If its significantly over the team’s Sprint Budget, reduce the number of Product Backlog items .the Product Backlog was in priority order, so if possible it should be the lower item(s) on the backlog that are removed from the Sprint

Step 7:
Collaborate
Columns on White board:
Product Backlog, Tasks To Do, Work In Progress, Ready To Be Verified and Done!
The Scrum team makes its own decisions during the Sprint.
"Least" manager intevention !
Ideally, once a Scrum team has committed to a Sprint, they should be left to focus on delivering what they’ve committed to. Constant changes to priorities prevent a development team from being fully productive and in the worst case can prevent a development team from delivering at all.
Priorities can be changed during the sprint but cost of completing it should be double the actual cost because it disrupts the teams flow !!

Step 8:
Daily Scrum meeting:
1. What have they achieved since the last meeting? (yesterday)
2. What will they achieve before the next meeting? (tomorrow)
3. Is anything holding up their progress? (‘impediments’)
Keep to 15 minutes
ONLY the scrum team + scrum master meets.
Scrum master should help in removing impediments be it technical or business.

Step 9:
Burn-down chart
Take all the tasks to be delivered in a particular Sprint in Scrum, i.e. your Sprint Backlog . On your Sprint Backlog, enter the estimated time to complete, which of course at the beginning of the Sprint is the same as the original estimate.
Each team member can be responsible for updating their own ETC’s on a daily basis before the Scrum.
Be honest!
Plot progress visually on a graph
You get to see where the project really is, every day, in all its techni-colour glory!

Step 10:
Review and correct mistakes at the end of scrum

Powershell – Getting the heck of it

Linux! Shell ! these are probably the most uttered words in any tech discussion. I admit that i like linux a bit and a frequent visitor of the desktop screen of ubuntu in my dual boot setting. Its true that you can pretty much “operate” linux from its shell and Microsoft’s equivalent to it (or atleast thats what it seem like)  is the Powershell utility. I wouldn’t consider it as omnipotent as Linux’s shell but it managed to kindle my curiosity

This was my first useful powershell command:

gci -r | where {$_.name -eq "target" } | rm -recurse

looks similar?? This script searches from current working directory recursively and removes all the “target” directory. In case you haven’t guessed it the above command is ps substitute for `mvn clean`. Unlike linux shell commands the output of each powershell command is not restricted to a text stream but rather a object stream that can be processed by subsequently piped commands.

Some commands you might find useful,

1. ‘gm’ that lets you reflect on the properties of the passed powershell object

2. ‘Sort’ – sorts the powershell objects based on property. For example if you want to view the processes in decreasing order of the PagedMemorySize, you need to key in,

ps | sort –des PagedMemorySize

3. saps / Start-Process – starts a new process.

Note: Each elaborate powershell command has a nifty alias that is easier to type .  Command that lists the alias – command pairs,

Get-Alias | select Name,ResolvedCommandName | more

Groovy – Operator overloading

Yeah. this is one of the things that promotes a language from “ah ! I use it”  into “ah ! Look what I can do!” Among other cool things to groovy up your work, operator overloading is an absolute must know if you plan to fascinate yourself (and of course your PM) . Cutting to the chase here is the sample code

class Money{
    int amount;
    String currency;
    Money plus(Money m){
        return new Money(amount:(m.amount+amount),currency:currency)
    }
}
Money m= (new Money(amount:1)+new Money(amount:2))
println m.amount

 

Ok. unfortunately groovy doesn’t support specifying operator character in method signature and this stems from the limitation from java [ groovy has its roots at the jvm ]. The example above may not provoke more than mere “thats cool” but implications of this can be seen in GDK (groovy dev kit) with includes some extensions for java libraries. So when you say,

list=new ArrayList()
list<<1  // adds the element to the list

here the operator << corresponds to the leftShift method being overloaded in the arrayList . This is groovy’s style of saying   “ list.add(1) where List should have Integer generics” as you say in java. Yes you guessed right :  “autoboxing” is something groovy provides out of the box.

Not yet groovy? Combine the operator overloading with the use construct.

class FakeAdder{
    static Object plus(Integer a,Integer b){
        return a*b   //this is not a bug!!
    }
}
use(FakeAdder){
    println 2+5
}

Output: 10

The operator + has been overloaded in the specific context to multiply numbers rather that standard add. Very powerful indeed. Try it yourself and share your comments.

Terminator salvation

If you are listening to this then you are the resistance

This is John corner’s words as he addresses the resistance groups over the air. The human race fights the mighty “skynet” which is relentless in wiping out resistance. John corner leads the resistance army against skynet . Both sides are equally mighty but there is one difference that brings victory to humans even though skynet tried to exploit it ..only to fail.

I am not going to spoil the fun you get from watching in the theatre. I have no words to describe the action sequences. In the second scene of the movie the camera is literally placed in the helicopter that is shot down as soon as it takes off with John Corner driving it. This was the best action sequence i have ever seen and i am sure you will enjoy every meticulously planned and executed stunt sequence. So what are you waiting for!?

Get in the Groove.. Groovy Style

Groovy . besides the funky name is a really cool dynamic scripting language to learn. Let me ask you a question: Do you key in all your code in java ? if you answer ‘yes’ then you are 50% groovy expert already. otherwise, well its never too late to be productive. If you are like me coding  in java and following the ancient write –> compile –> execute cycle over and over again until you see what you want / your PM wanted . Then you walk proudly across the office corridor to the PM’s room and say : “This is what i was working on this week/month/year and there you go”.  This is a usual routine in software development. The sooner you can bring the smile on your manager’s face the sooner you will be appreciated. With groovy you can bring it on in hours/ days.

As much as i like java and appreciate its realization of OO concepts deep down there are things I hate in java. If you are thinking & coding in java 24×7 chances are, you will stumble upon those annoying things soon. One such annoyance: clashing of class names imported from different packages say java.util.List and java.awt.List . You may end up prefixing one of the class usage with package path. Welcome to groovy world. Here you will find that you can do something like,

import java.util.List as UtilList
import java.awt.List as AwtList
UtilList list=new ArrayList ()                                                                             
list<<1

Surprise,surprise this code actually runs if you run groovyc or groovy on the file (although it might output empty []). I am going to miss my late friend : “ public static void main“ .

If you are a python  programmer you may not be impressed by the above but guess what : your language doesn’t run on a JVM and embed with java code without compromising  performance greatly and don’t even get me started on Jython.

Surprisingly you will notice that your code can be compiled to a corresponding java class file [ jad classFile   - to see the generated file ]. from that point on jvm sees everything as class. This gives enormous edge for groovy over other dynamic languages because undeniably a significant number of organizations use java for developing their products. You may not regret spending weekend learning groovy. I am sure most of the things you learn in groovy ( be it currying, meta programming ) will make you cry “ duh!! wish i had known this before” . Have fun groovying around

Copying is Not an art

When was the last time you got caught copying..? Once in our lives knowingly or unknowingly we tend to copy others. Copying is a creativity killer in places like music industry . Copy cat music directors have to be put to shame before law and people. Recently i heard a copy cat song – “unakena naan..”  by vijay antony in kadhalil vizhundhen tamil movie that made my blood boil like lava. These are exactly the kind of things that keep me away from listening to tamil music. Lack of orginality and greed to get famous drives such artists to fame. Should we allow them.? is in our hands!

Imagine a lazy student and a brilliant one appearing at an exam. The brilliant guy just thinks creatively to answer the questions but the dumb guy peaks at the brilliant guy’s answer and writes down all the answers when the inviligilator comes back after a coffee he looks at the dumb guy’s paper first and gets impressed. If the tamil music lovers want to “see” music and shell themselves from the rest of the world.. well… thats all that can be done. Anyone can play existing music and plugin their own lyrics but it takes creativity and innovation that makes a music director . If vijay antony can’t deliver that.. he is probably not fit to be one..

This blog may sound outragious but the last thing i want is one crack MD copying a song i love and make it sound even worse… Someone should put him out of his misery please.!!

Big Bazaar in chennai

I know what you are wondering. I have some obsession with “Bazaar”. Well, i agree! My parents had already been to big bazaar and were kindling my curiosity by talking about it all the time. Cheap and best they said.. Well, i decided to put that to the test. On a national holiday one would typically expect chennai to be awake at 6 pm. To my  surprise traffic was flowing smooth , speaking of luck !! We were worried about parking frency in TNagar and decided to park in a place away from our target shopping mall – BigBazaar. After commuting for precisely 8 mins we hit the spot. Crowded?? I wouldn’t exagerrate but to be frank it was not the worst as expected. As soon as we stepped into the mall we found an empty food place not by the measure of people but the measure of food itself. I was hungry and starving for an evening snack and was disappointed to see empty plates Time to move on .. I consolidated myself.

The first floor was mostly for men with an entire collection of items like shoes, jeans, t-shirts. When I stepped in i noticed the poor organization of things. I could find shoes unpaired and messed up by a constantly moving cloud of people. There were very few people to care about selling stuff and they would constantly make shunts across the way to ask people what they wanted. I wanted to purchase a pair of shoes myself : approached a guy and told him my size. He made a quick jolt to the “stock place” and brought a new pair of them. Man!! that was fast. But next hurdle was to try them on. I looked around and to my surprise noticed that there was no bench to sit on and try my new shoes. Just put my feet on some shoe boxes that lay in the corner and tried it. It fit me perfectly and made my choice to go for it. There were 60%.. 50%.. 40% Discount boards jingling all over the place and my deal was pretty cheap… a class 1 reebok shoe with 40% reduction. I was never “happier”.

I juggled my way through the crowd only to find things getting messier. The people in charge of billing were either too slow or couldn’t take on a crowd. There were around 4 counters and things moved veeeeeery slowly. After waiting patiently for over 10 mins eventhough i was the second guy I was relieved to see my new shoes getting packed and presented. That was a nice but mixed experience.  We hit the second floor which had girl stuff – chudidhar, jeans and “stuff” . time to move on Third floor was packed with travel bags, bed spreads, gift articles ,kitchen items etc. We spent some considerable amount of item just glancing over the price tags just to find thing a bit above our normal budgetting standards. Despite that we made some quick picks like bed spread and pillow covers.

In the fourth floor everything was wonderfully showcased. We found dinner furnitures neatly arranged in row by row fashion. They looked cool. There was a separate section for electronic items like TV / Washing machines and owens. We didn’t spent much time there except in small section were there were some interesting books of syndney shelton and ripley’s believe it or not.. made some purchases there and made the four floor descent but i must say that we restrained our self from all the distracting offers and focused on climbing down the stairs The exit had a surprise…. We had to produce all the bills to a security guy. We frantically pulled out all our purses and put together 5 to 6 separate bills and gave it to the guy who then neatly stappled it and returned back! that was it. Out of BigBazaar.

It was nice to make a quick visit and write about big bazaar. Overall I was satisfied with the rates. Things were affordable but they desparately needed a time off to clean things up. If you are a quality freak i would say you have no business here. Do not expect people to care too much about the customers. Big Bazaar is better in terms of pricing and thats all it is. Quick purchases were not possible because of big queues. You can’t be fussy about choosing things because you will not be asked twice. If you plan to visit this place any time in the future.. good luck and happy shopping

Life at Bankbazaar

College life is over but never too late to say… “hurrrah!!”. Thought i will update you all on my life status after a long time at BankBazaar.com ( 3 months to be precise). I joined this startup company after some pretty serious thought, though i don’t do that often  Anyway, my life took a sudden diversion into the “road not taken” and here I am, enjoying my ride. There are a couple of things about this company that impress me most: A diligent and smart development team that comprises of people from top notch companies. Believe me they know how to work through problems.

A startup culture is certainly different and unique in its own way. I believe not all startups are the same but there a few basic things that i find common to all startups. The team is usually small and close knit. You can always walk up to your colleague and talk freely. But, don’t expect extravagent facilities and comforts. The developers usually work in small workspace and use available comforts to the fullest. It is in a startup that people will learn to manage time, space and money in the most efficient way. There is almost always no time to fool around.

Till college i have been thought to follow a narrow path that is tightly bound by theory that some nut has written in his boredom. Life is lot different than following some text. One thing that has struck me most in bankbazaar is that there is plenty of work around and there is always more than one way of doing it. Smarter you think better and faster your work will be. This is what i call positive stress. Whatever be it I am simply enjoying it.

thanks for glancing by.

Nishant

ICPC experience

Dated:November 2007 

Recently, I made a one week visit to IIT kanpur to participate in the south asian regionals ACM ICPC(International Collegiate Programming Contest) . Land of diversity,  well, I never knew what it meant until I made this epic 3 days journey to kanpur, by train ofcourse. Did I expect to win or be the champion or bow to the grand accolade? No.. Not at all. It was simply not for me I was there to enjoy the change and I was never disappointed.  Just thinking about the fact that I was there amongst the greatest and the brightest of programmers in India gives me goose-flesh.  
If you aren’t already familiar with ICPC: its a contest where greatest of the programming community are challenged with tricky algorithmically-solvable problems. We can spend five hours to solve them all and guess what- we cracked 5 out of 7 and placed 13th , I know – its prime  Check out the results in the ACM site. My coding practise in topcoder and mipt was definitely helpful in getting through some of the tricky problems . But we were hopeless struck in a maximum bipartite matching problem. The most painful part is that I could easily code the algo in a few minutes but it was the resolution into a standard algo problem that took the life out of us. Well, its the story with most of the problems. You never know what clues lay buried and what trap the problem setter has in store for you. Its all part of the fun and I have no trouble enjoying it! 

Some day I plan to write a post about my brief but busy days with “contest-programming” during my college days. To me it was like riding a ferrari on a bumpless road: Exciting and mind-blowing at the same time. Coming back to my experience at IITK, the campus atmosphere was simply fantastic and students were like party animals: It was enjoyable eventhough its an understatement. The train journey was a little painful but we managed to survive long enough, to reach our homes. Now, I can easily spend 15 mins just thinking about the experience and smiling it to myself. Hope you enjoyed reading this blog.  Check back for more on my sweetest experiences in life…. Thanks for glancing by.