Categories
Program Management

4 tips to be more productive

Amidst the current pandemic environment, you can see a flurry of posts and online seminars about productivity. That comes as a legit help for people who may be facing challenges to be or to feel productive while working from home. I’d like to share a few tips that have worked for me while working in the office and that turned out to be applicable also when working from home.

Knock off 1-2 tasks first thing in the morning

I like starting my days selecting 1 or 2 tasks that I can knock off within 30 to 45 minutes. It sets my mind on a path of accomplishments for the whole day. It’s my way to start my day off right. While it can be an easy-to-implement and effective tip, it’s worthwhile to bring up a few points:

  • You need to be conscious not to spend the rest of your days picking up only easy tasks just to cross several items from your to-do list;
  • Reading e-mails or catching up with IM (Teams, Slack, …) should not be one of those tasks;
  • Prioritize tasks that can unblock work for other people who are waiting for you;
  • Allocate time in your calendar so that people don’t try to schedule meetings and to help you to build a habit;
  • For a habit to be built, you need to have a reward after completing those tasks. Choose something meaningful to you (drinking a cup of coffee, checking your Instagram, reading your emails – if that gives you peace of mind, and so).

‘No’ is my default answer for most asks

You’re only as productive as your ability to say ‘No’ to new tasks. By definition, there is no focus if you’re focusing on several things at the same time. Multi-tasking is a fallacy and insisting on that will kill your performance!

You can benefit in a few different ways by saying No for most requests:

  1. People will re-think if they actually need you to do that. ‘Why’ would also do the work;
  2. People may try to convince you once you push back. That will probably lead you to better understand their motivation and will help to confirm if the work is as ‘urgent’ as they may claim;
  3. No gives you more time to think if 1) you should actually do it, 2) you should confirm you won’t do it, or 3) you should delegate it. Delegating tasks appropriately can generate wonderful results for you and your team.

Eat healthy food and work out frequently

Your body needs to be fully functional so that you can perform your duties well. Eating well is known to be related to productivity boost and the World Health Organization has stated that “adequate nutrition can raise your productivity levels by 20 percent on average

For me, reducing my overall carbs intake (mainly at lunch) has helped me to stay productive during the afternoon with no need for extra doses of caffeine. Intermittent fasting a couple of days a week has also made me feel better overall. I’ve learned with nutritionists that if you cook your own food, you have a much better chance to eat healthier by simply doing that. Important: by no means, I’m qualified to suggest which diet approaches you should follow and should seek a nutritionist to find something that works for you.

Working out on a daily basis is my stress-relief valve. When it comes to stress management, it’s important to understand its physiological relation with our sympathetic nervous system (SNS). SNS is our fight-or-flight system and it helps us to get focused when it’s time to execute or when we’re in danger. Switching between the activation of SNS and the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) is naturally done throughout the day. However, if you don’t have a way to manage your stress, your SNS may be overactivated and that will, for instance, impact your ability to innovate. Being creative to execute your routine tasks can save you several hours in the long run.

Combine eating healthy with regular exercises and you’ll be less likely to miss a day of work. Each day represents 5% of your potential productive time during a month. Get sick and you’ll lose a couple or a few days, which is more time than the performance “gains” you think you’re getting by skipping lunches or by deprioritizing that morning workout.

Sleep time is non-negotiable

The effects of sleep deprivation on our body and the number of people in the United State who suffer from some sort of sleep disorder are mind-blowing. I’ve always strived to sleep around 7 hours a day but reading the “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker made me take sleeping time more seriously.

Sleeping at least 7 or 8 hours every day has become a non-negotiable requirement for me. I had to implement a few challenging changes in my routine though:

  • Stop using my phone or laptop (blue-LED devices in general) at least 30-45 min before my sleep time. That helps the natural release of melatonin hormone, which is needed for us to fall asleep;
  • Replace regular coffee after lunch with decaf or caffeine-free tea. Decaf coffee contains only 5-10% of the amount of caffeine found in a regular one;
  • Change my workout hours to later on the next day if I happen to have late-night calls. I’m a 6AMer usually. As a matter of fact, working out without enough sleep will burn lean mass (muscle) instead of fat and it may make you feel miserable during the day. Finally, exercises should be done at least 2 or 3 hours before your bedtime to not impact your sleep quality.

Categories
Program Management Software Development

Do not overthink your project dates

“For yesterday”, “ASAP”, “we need it now”, “by EOD today”, “urgent matter”, “we can’t miss it at any cost”, “it’s committed so we can’t change it”, … 😒

Being under pressure to release something soon(er) or on the planned release date is how many teams operate. One may think that pressure is a temporary state. Another may see that as the rule instead of the exception and inherent in the company culture.

An aspect sometimes taken for granted is what success means for a given project. A more purist project manager may claim that if a project is released on time, with the planned scope and within the budget then it was a success. While valid and common, that approach is focused primarily on short-term results.

Shenhar et al. (1997) proposed a multi-dimensional model to define project success that aims to encompass both short and long-term benefits from projects, which includes 4 dimensions: project efficiency, impact on the customer, business and direct success, and preparing for the future. The first dimension is what most organizations primarily focus on and schedule is a major, if not the most important, component of it.

Even though there are truly time-sensitive projects (like an update to comply with new regulations not to incur in fines), there are also projects that are forcefully said to be required by a certain date for reasons that may be questionable. Whenever an unnecessary constraint is imposed, it may lead to wrong trade-offs that come at the cost of impacting long-term goals which could be more significant than the constraint.

The following picture shows that the relative importance of project efficiency gradually declines over time after project completion, i.e., the fact that a project was released on time may have little influence on what happens with it in the field. Still, we spend most of our energy to make that date happen and sometimes forget about the other dimensions. Although success in that dimension may represent a well-managed project, that alone may not guarantee actual benefits for the organization in the long term.

Relative Importance of Success Dimensions is Time-Dependent – Adapted from Shenhar et al. (1997)

As project managers, we should be challenging project requirements and asking why certain constraints are put in place to validate the actual boundaries of a project. That knowledge enables us to drive for efficient execution while keeping an eye on long-term goals to enlighten the customers, grow the business and sow the seeds for future opportunities.

Time-to-market is important but you should not live to make a date at any cost or for the sake of following a plan. Challenge your team to 1) think more about what comes after a release and to 2) value more the product quality and its usefulness to the end customer.

Keep in mind that releasing a product is just the start, not the end.

References:

Shenhar, A. J., Levy, O., & Dvir, D., 1997. Mapping the dimensions of project success. Proj. Manage. J. , 28 (2), 5-13

Categories
Program Management

5 traps that technical managers can fall into

Nothing in life is always a bed of roses and even seasoned technical managers make basic mistakes that impact their teams’ performance. In my previous articles (If you’re a manager, invest more time in your tech skills and For Managers: How to develop your tech skills) I covered the importance of that set of skills and how managers can develop them to help on their day-to-day work. Let’s now talk about the common pitfalls that I’ve seen experienced managers face mostly because they have (or believe they have) a solid technical background. I have to be honest and confess that I’ve caught myself making these mistakes on several occasions.

#1: Fire-fighter mode is ON

Quite often team members reach out to managers to discuss a problem, but they are not actually looking for a solution. All they want is to vent, bring awareness or have a fresh pair of eyes looking into it.

However, it’s tempting for managers – whose common traits include assertiveness and decisiveness – to think they are expected to provide solutions. If the problem is related to an area where the manager has worked in the past, it’s almost certain that a ‘suggestion’ will come up, either due to an unconscious need to show that he/she is still sharp or due to a genuine willingness to help.

The problem with this fire-fighter approach of jumping in and trying to fix the problem is that it can easily kill team ownership and empowerment if not applied in small doses. Coaching techniques [1] could be helpful to suppress that impulse to always address the problem.

#2: Directions instead of suggestions

As a manager, you need to recognize that no matter how flat, small or open your organization/team is, you’ll have power over your subordinates and they will not see you as a peer. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a fruitful and open relationship with your team members.

Once you provide technical suggestions – even in areas where you are the most experienced in the room – the team will receive them differently if they were hearing them from a peer. Some teams may be more vocal and push back if they disagree with the proposals. Other ones may feel compelled to accept them since they came from their manager.

In those cases, the best way to avoid problems is to assess and build a safe environment where people can share their thoughts. Do a quick test: measure the team participation in Sprint Retros with and without their managers in the room. If the team doesn’t feel comfortable to share certain problems because the manager is present, that’s usually a sign that there is some work to be done to make that environment more psychologically safe.

#3: Tech skills to be able to speak up

Managers can leverage their technical skills to better understand what the team is trying to communicate. Active listening [2][3] is one of the major virtues of an outstanding leader and should be practiced during technical sessions too. However, one may think that the main benefit of having those skills is to able to speak up and contribute to solutions.

As a manager, you should try to hold your natural instinct of speaking more than listening and allow the team to brainstorm before you interject them with your thoughts.

#4: Misinterpreting the level of engagement

If a manager is lucky, he/she will spend 4hs/week developing their technical capabilities. During the same period, a developer will spend at least 10x more time (40+ hours). How can a manager keep up with the technical changes in a project? He/she just can’t and, for everybody’s sanity, that’s intentional and expected.

Therefore, a manager needs to be mindful that his/her solution knowledge is at the same time outdated and at a high level. That should dictate how much technical engagement he/she could have and how his/her comments should be positioned to the team.

#5: Tech skills take precedence to interpersonal skills

Nobody will hire a manager because he/she is an outstanding Java developer or an experienced Senior Architect. One is promoted to a management position due to his/her abilities (or potential) to lead other people to get work done through them.

Technical skills can be your competitive advantage, but you should never lose sight that your job requires developing mainly other areas such as leadership, coaching, people development, and project management. Avoid spending too much time developing technical expertise, even if that seems to be more enjoyable.

Categories
Program Management

For Managers: How to develop your tech skills

In a previous post, I’ve covered the importance of investing time to keep your tech skills up-to-date. In this post, I’d like to share a few ways to achieve that. I’ve tried a few of them in the past and they’ve worked for me. A few other ones seem interesting and worthwhile to give them a chance. I’ve taken into account the time constraints for managers when curating the following list.

Hackathons

More and more companies have been using hackathons as tools to drive innovation, build teamwork, and improve internal processes. Even though the target audience is usually the Software development team, managers should leverage those opportunities to get their hands dirty and brush up those coding skills. Since those events usually last only a few days, managers have a better chance to be able to put aside some of their day-to-day tasks to focus on those hackathons.

Lunch & Learn

Knowledge sharing is continuously happening among the team members, but managers quite often are not involved in those discussions. Lunch & Learn sessions are effective methods to share knowledge across different functional areas. If you’re a manager and that’s not a common practice in your company, that’s an opportunity for you to develop your team and, as a side-effect, to get to know what the team has been working on from a technical perspective.

Meetups

Meetup.com provides an amazing and free platform to know what’s going on in your area. Since I moved to the US in 2014, I’ve been a big fan of Meetups, but I have been participating only in project management or Agile groups. Recently I’ve given a chance to DevOps meetups and they turned out to be quite handy. In addition, those Meetups can be a useful channel to share open positions, if you’re hiring people.

Local Conferences

As a manager, you may be challenged to justify why you should attend a development/DevOps/… conference that can easily costs $2-3k when including registration, flights, and hotel. In addition, if you need to travel, the amount of out-of-office time can impact your other management tasks.

As an alternative, if you find a local conference that costs only a few hundred dollars, you have a better chance to convince your organization that a couple of days per year are worthwhile and will not impact much your other duties.

Online courses

E-learning platforms like Coursera or Udemy are the go-to options for many people since they can pace their courses as they prefer. However, online course incompletion rates can be as high as 85+%. I’d recommend not to enroll in more than one course at a time to improve your chance to actually complete them.

Certifications

My opinion about certifications may seem a bit contradictory. Even though I have several certifications, I really don’t care about the actual certifications. The most important outcome of any certification is learning during the process. A certification is just a clear finish line that helps me to get organized and commit to studying. Even better if the certification exam voucher has an expiration date. 🙂

If you take major cloud providers as examples, they provide entry-level certifications (foundational or associate) that cover enough technical fundaments for a manager. Google Cloud Associate certifications are recommended for people with 6+ months of experience, while AWS certifications have foundational (~6 months of experience) and associate (~1 year of experience) paths.

Personal projects

Another approach that requires more discipline but that’s very effective is to define a personal project and implement it. It could be as simple as a to-do mobile app for you and your spouse to share chores. Addressing a personal problem can be the extra motivation you need to get that going.

As a piece of advice based on previous failed attempts to do this, keep that as simple as possible and work on incremental releases. If you can’t complete that within a week, reduce the scope until it fits in that timespan.

Contribute to existing projects

You can easily find an open-source project that’s interesting, but the most interesting ones are also likely to require a massive ramp-up time even for small contributions (bug fixes, test automation, …). If that’s a path you want to take, shoot for tiny GitHub projects (less than 2k lines of code), look at their backlogs of known issues, fork it and try to get a few bugs fixed. Here’s another neat idea to get started.

Another way is to find new projects looking for collaborators. A convenient platform for that purpose is FindCollabs. You could even bring that platform to your company as the official way to engage people interested in working on side projects.

Final tips

With such a breadth of options to develop your tech skills, the most important thing to keep in mind is that you need to be laser-focused on what you want and avoid biting off more than you can chew. Enjoy your journey and, most importantly, have fun while learning.

Categories
Program Management

If you’re a manager, invest more time in your tech skills

It’s quite common to find people who used to have technical positions earlier in their careers and then moved to management positions. There is nothing wrong with that career path but in some cases, those professionals forget to keep up with the technology evolution and end up missing great opportunities in their careers.

Consider, for instance, a Java developer who started her career 10 years ago. After 4 years she was promoted to manager and hasn’t been involved with Java coding for the last 6 years. You can (safely) assume her Java skills are so outdated that she’s not able to do a code review or design a microservice with Sprint Boot anymore. Fair enough, but when will a manager have to do that?

In a fast-paced industry with new frameworks popping up pretty much every month, the amount of content been produced is at the same time astonishing and impossible to keep up. So, if a manager can’t keep up with the speed technologies evolve, why should she even bother to try? Shouldn’t she just rely on her technical colleagues?

Inefficient communication is one of the main causes of project failures

Credibility is key and a solid background can enable that

Communication issues are usually among the top 5 reasons for project failure or challenging execution. Different elements contribute to inefficient communication, but establishing a common language is crucial for both the sender and the receiver to be on the same page about the topic being discussed.

A manager with technical skills can leverage the appropriate terms when talking to her development team to reduce miscommunication issues. Moreover, people usually get more engaged and receptive when they recognize the other ones have a similar level of understanding about the topic. Have you seen developers rolling their eyes when somebody tries to show off his technical skills and end up stumbling over?

Besides, having technical knowledge helps managers when elicitating requirements, troubleshooting issues, handling critical incidents, bridging the communication between developers and executives, and managing project dependencies. Finally, credibility is key and a solid background can enable that.

Projects are getting more and more complex and specialized

Try to think about Software Development projects you were involved about 10-15 years ago. If you were not a kid at that time, you might have remembered some sort of distributed application consuming a data source (most likely a relational database) and providing results to the user in a somewhat simplistic interface. Now let’s get back to today’s reality.

When you look at the current scenario, it’s hard not to think about integrated solutions that demand data analysis/processing, artificial intelligence, consume different services, and provide multiple different UIs. Basic client-server DB applications have become commodities and no company can endure unless they embrace very specialized and deep knowledge from areas like machine learning, augmented/virtual reality, data processing, continuous delivery, and statistical analysis.

As a manager you’d be required to know at least at a high level:

  • What those technologies are used for;
  • How they can be incorporated in the business to generate more revenue;
  • How to get started with them;
  • Which alternative approaches exist and their pros/cons.

To get at that level you could 1) read the basics about the technologies, 2) join and actively listen to design sessions, and 3) have fun coding in your ‘spare’ time.

Influential people know their sources

Power is the ability to influence others and it can be identified in 5 forms:

  • Formal: when you’re empowered to take decisions;
  • Reward: when people realize that you’re responsible for rewarding them by deciding salaries, promotions, bonuses, and so on;
  • Penalty: when people perceive you can penalize them if they don’t follow your directions;
  • Expert: when people perceive you possess important functional knowledge;
  • Referent: when people enjoy working with you or in the project you manage.

Formal and Reward types have to be granted and do not depend solely on the manager. Penalty may be effective, but it usually activates the sympathetic system which brings more stress to the relationship. Referent demands time and development of soft-skills which are quite hard to change. Expert power can be your best ally to enhance your ability to influence and lead your team.

Major tech companies look for Technical Managers

Understanding the market demand and how high-performing companies (like FAANG) structure themselves can give you a few hints about the kind of professionals that companies are looking for. If you follow these companies’ news or know people who work for them, you know that they have different flavors of technical management positions:

/Technical(.*|\s) Manager/g.

  • Technical Program Manager
  • Technical Engineering Manager
  • Technical Project Manager

That model is already being used as a reference by other companies. So, career-wise, deepening your tech expertise can help better positioning yourself for high-demanding positions.

Wrapping up

Putting the hours to learn technologies, even when you won’t immediately apply them, will pay off in the short to medium-term. Your team is more likely to value your opinion and feel like you’re one of them. Tech skills can be your competitive advantage if you enjoy getting your hands dirty, but as Uncle Ben says ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ 😉 . There are a few pitfalls that you need to avoid not to backfire your plan, but that’s a subject for another post.

Categories
Program Management

How to improve your project estimates? – Part 1

Regardless of your position and company, you’re quite often requested to provide estimates for the work you need to do. Providing an accurate estimate is definitely a tough task but there are ways to improve your chances to get closer to the actual time spent to develop the work.

For time estimation, we can categorize the estimation techniques in two groups: absolute and relative. Absolute estimation is the more traditional way where you provide a quantified value according to a specific unit, for instance, 16 hours, 2 days, a week. Relative estimation turned out to be quite common too and focus on comparing the sizes of two or more tasks by abstracting the unit itself. Story points and T-shirt sizes are usual examples of relative estimation approaches. In this post, we’ll be focusing more on absolute estimates. Relative ones will be covered in a future post.

Regardless of the estimation approach you decide to follow, there are a few common mistakes you should try to avoid:

  1. Provide estimate without knowing the scope: Usually, people are pushed to provide estimates without understanding what they are supposed to do. If you’re estimating stories or tasks, make sure you’re able, based on the acceptance criteria and/or description, start developing that piece of work right away. If you cannot do that, ask for more explanation, discuss more with the PO or with the team.
  2. Be the only person weighing in on an estimate: If the estimate process takes into account the opinion exclusively of the assignee, it’s likely that few factors will not be considered in the estimate. Challenging someone’s estimate is simple and effective to make sure that different variables were analyzed when providing the ‘magical’ number.
  3. Be restrict to the coding effort: Developers will probably take into account only the time to write the code and build it. If you ask a QA analyst for an estimate, they will probably consider only the time to start validating and provide test results. None of them are to be blamed. They are just reacting to the environment and the kind of activities they are expected to perform. Unless you have an explicit list of expected checks/activities to be performed, usually referred as Definition of Done (DoD), your team will not have a consistent and common understanding about what’s provided when something is marked as Done.
  4. Be afraid of saying ‘I don’t know’: Saying ‘no’ or ‘I don’t know’ is usually seen as a sign of weakness or lack of experience. If your team is saying that, you’re blessed! Don’t judge them! Realize that’s an indication that they are being honest and that additional work may need to be done before an estimate can be provided. In those scenarios, you could 1) have more discussion to try to clarify the work or 2) create spikes (or Proof of Concept – PoC) stories/tasks to build the knowledge and reduce the risks of unrealistic estimates.

Absolute estimating

Without taking sides (absolute vs. relative), there are ways to improve your chances to come up with a realistic (or at least kind of). See below two techniques used for absolute time estimates:

  1. PERT (stands for Program Evaluation and Review Technique): Instead of providing one single value and stick to it, PERT requires the estimator to provide three values considering three different scenarios: pessimistic, most likely and optimistic. Those three values are included in a weighted average assuming weight = 4 for the most likely estimate. Optimistic estimates can, for instance, consider that some dependencies will be provided right away, while pessimistic ones can assume some risks will become true and will inflate the work to be done. The PERT formula is as follows: P = (O + 4*M + P) / 6.  Adding one or two standard deviations can give you an extra cushion for unknowns. More details about how to calculate the standard deviation you can find here. By using PERT, you’re explicitly thinking about other scenarios and that exercise will help you to improve your estimates.
  2. Analogous estimation: This technique relies on estimates of past similar tasks to size a piece of work. Historical information is used and the differences between the past and current work are discussed with the team to come up with the estimate. Even though this can a useful technique, there are two aspects to keep in mind:
    1. Software development tasks are hard to be similar: While engineering activities (like building or painting a wall) can be quite similar from project to project, software tasks can look similar but may end up being quite different depending on the environment and the assignee.
    2. The time required to find a similar task: Depending on the amount of historical information, finding a similar task can lead to a waste of time. If using analogous estimation will slow down considerably your process, it’s an indication that it may not be a good fit. Remember that unconsciously everybody will end up using their previous experiences to estimate the work.

An elementary mistake is to consider effort = duration. If you estimate the effort in days and use that as the task duration, you’re unrealistically assuming 100% of allocation with no room for attending meetings, resting, reading e-mails and so on. A decent strategy (even though it requires more management work) is to consider a percentage (you could start with 75%, for instance) and tweak it for each team member depending on the average actual hours worked. That percentage will be tightly coupled with the environment and the internal processes of the company. The leaner and the more agile your company is, the higher that percentage will be.

In the next post, we’ll cover relative estimating and the different techniques to improve it.

 

Categories
Program Management

Is your Daily Scrum effective?

If you have adopted Scrum for some time, you have probably worked in a team that has pushed back to have Daily Scrums or that haven’t seen much value in doing so. There are few common reasons that could lead to that situation:

  1. The team sees the Daily Scrum as a daily report to the Scrum Master or another member who attends the meeting
  2. The level of details is not properly set (too many details or too superficial and generic comments)
  3. The team believes they already talk during the day and don’t see a reason to have a formal event for that
  4. and many other reasons…

Those issues can be managed individually by showing the actual value of that Scrum ceremony. However, even if they bought in the idea, how do you know if your meeting is being effective? How do you know that you’re getting practical value from that theory?

Being effective is all about meeting its goals and IMHO the goals of a Daily Scrum should be:

  1. Setting (or adjusting) direction
  2. Understanding how the team is doing to meet the Sprint goals
  3. Understand where we want to be when we meet again

When attending the last TriAgile event, there were sessions and discussions about how to make Daily Scrums more effective. An interesting outcome from that day was the idea of slightly changing the 3 Daily Scrum questions to focus more on what can get done until the team meets again. According to the Scrum Guide, these are the 3 Daily Scrum questions:

  • What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
  • What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
  • Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?

Although these questions help on understanding what was done and what is planned to be done, it does not set short-term (1 day) commitments for each member to pursue and to get things done. You can easily say what you’ll do until tomorrow and have nothing actually done by tomorrow. What if instead of saying what you will work on you said what you’ll get done by tomorrow? It’s not about sharing what you’ll do. It’s about sharing which small increment of value you’ll be completing until the next meeting. With something simple like that you can change the perception of Daily Scrums from ‘reporting/planning’ to ‘achieving’. That will also force your team to have smaller tasks that can be done in a day or so.

Having said that, see below the suggested questions to make your Daily Scrum more effective:

  • What did I say yesterday I would get done to help Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
  • What will I get done today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
  • Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?

Give it a try and share your experience!

Categories
Software Development

Rails 5.0 is available!

It’s been 7 years since I had my first experience with Rails. Back in 2009 the version was 2.3.x (I’d guess 2.3.5, but not sure) and managing gems during that time was such a pain. Since then we got many different versions with features, bug fixes, security and performance improvements (yes, per-for-mance, if you’re still one of those skeptical haters that think Rails can’t perform/scale).

Last June 30 version 5.0 was released and it has few interesting features.

  1. Action Cable: A brand new framework for WebSockets. If you need to keep a connection open between a Web client and the server, that can be very handy. It’s definitely worth to take a look at.
  2. Puma: Instead of Webrick the development environment now comes with Puma.io server by default. Personally, I was never a big fan on Webrick. Making Puma the default server turns the development environment more professional and in case you need other devs accessing your env, it becomes less painful.
  3. Turbolinks 5: New version of Turbolinks. Great feature since developing mobile versions is a requirement for pretty much any app.
  4. API mode: This is the cherry on the cake, IMO. Creating a RESTful API skeleton has never been so straightforward. If you need only a backend app to respond some REST calls spitting JSON, that’s the way to go. By providing the –api parameter (rails new backend –api) you can create a basic backend app structure.

Give it a try and spend some time playing with it. Further sources can be found at the official page.

Categories
Tools

JIRA Cheat Sheet

Feel free to download this JIRA Cheat sheet with the list of shortcuts as well as many available operators of JIRA Query Language (JQL) for advanced searches.

JIRA Cheat Sheet – v1.0

Categories
Tools

Add labels when creating issue on JIRA

JIRA is definitely a flexible bug tracking tool and one of the most powerful features is workflow customization. This post describes how to add a label automatically when an issue is created. This can be useful when you want to flag an issue and later capture that in a filter or board. A practical example is to flag Bugs that are created so that they can be reviewed during Bug Scrub meetings. In order to add a label we need to add a custom script in a post-function.

  1. As admin, go to Administration >> Issues >> Workflows >> Click on Edit in the workflow you want to change
  2. Click on the ‘To Do’ step (assuming your workflow is the default one)
  3. Click on the ‘Create’ action >> Post Functions tab >> Add post function
  4. Select Script Post-Function >> Custom script post-function
  5. Paste the following code snippet replacing ‘BugScrub’ by the tag you want
  6. Publish the workflow => Important: If you don’t publish the draft workflow, no changes will be reflected.
import com.atlassian.jira.ComponentManager
import com.atlassian.jira.issue.label.LabelManager
import com.atlassian.jira.component.ComponentAccessor

def user = ComponentAccessor.jiraAuthenticationContext.getLoggedInUser()

LabelManager mgr = ComponentAccessor.getComponent(LabelManager.class)
mgr.addLabel(user, issue.id, 'BugScrub', false)

 

For additional information about the addLabel method, please refer to the official documentation.