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I'm trying to work in a more organised way and started adopting user stories.
I think I have misunderstanding of how should I use user stories for technical stuff.
Let's say I'm coding an app that gives me the ranking of my site for a certain Keyword in Google.
The user story goes like that:
As an Internet Marketer
I want to find out where my website ranks for a keyword
So I'll know whether my SEO efforts work
Now this is pretty straight forward and user centric... However, what happens if I need to introduce Proxies into the loop.
On one hand, Proxies are technical implementation detail on the other hand, proxies is part of the Internet Marketer's domain.
How should I craft such story?
As an Internet Marketer
I want to use Proxies when searching in Google
So we'll be able to check a lot of keywords without Google blocking us
The above scenario doesn't sound right for me... Maybe I can rewrite it to be something like:
As an Internet Marketer
I want to be able to check a lot of Keywords at a time
So it'll save me time
This sounds more right, however what acceptance criteria can I give it? try scraping google 100 times in a min? Isn't it waste of time?
Here's another scenario. How should I craft a user story when the feature I want to implement is that a proxy can be used once in 30 seconds? I don't have any idea of how to approach this problem from a user centric perspective...
Another thing I thought of doing is to present another Role. Instead of being centered around Internet Marketer, I can say we have a role called Google Scraper. I can say that Internet Marketer is in relation with Google Scraper.
Now I can write a user story like:
As Google Scraper
I want to change proxies every Search
So Google won't ban me
What would you say about approaching technical implementation details like above? It can also help breaking the system down into modules...
You don't write technical stories. User stories should meet the INVEST criteria.
Proxies do sound like an implementation detail and should be avoided. You should not be mentioning proxy servers in your story. Even if they are part of the domain, there are potentially other ways to achieve the same effect.
Instead of writing "I want to use a Proxy, so that I don't get blocked", you should write, "I want to disguise my identity, so that I don't get blocked". If I was your customer, I wouldn't know why you wanted a proxy? Is it a forward, open or reverse proxy? There are loads of uses for a proxy server. You should pick the feature that you want to exploit.
However, you shouldn't get too hung up on perfect stories. The agile manifesto says, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
When writing a user story, you should also consider the 3 C's: Card, Conversation, Confirmation. Do both the customer and you understand the meaning of the story?
Does the card meet INVEST criteria? If you answered yes to both those questions then the story is fine.
User Stories should not include technical details. During Sprint Planing technical details should be added as Delivery Team tasks nested below the User Story. These tasks should be created through discussion by the delivery team. You should not attempt to document every implementation detail under the sun as you will reach a point of diminishing return. Aim for 60-75 percent coverage on implementation details (tasks) for each user story as the details may change as coding begins. Any additional details developer discover during coding can be shared and documented briefly during the daily stand-up. should The User Story can be simple and non-technical while the Delivery / Development Team will flesh out story details as nested Tasks.
These Task should be visible to Developers through their Integrated Development Environment (IDE). As Developers complete tasks they can associate their checked in code with the task in your work item tracking tool (Jira, Team Foundation Server, On-Time)
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I am working on a small web-app as a hobby, and I would like to avoid any functionality that would trigger GDPR requirements. As such, the web-app neither collects nor processes personal data, does not set cookies (or otherwise track individual users), and also does not integrate any services that do these things.
My question is, if I deploy this app on Heroku, does Heroku do anything behind the scenes (e.g., collecting IP addresses) that would then impose GDPR requirements on my web-app?
Another way to put this would be, is it possible to use Heroku and have GDPR not apply to your website? (without preventing traffic from EU countries)
The first thing to check is hosting location. When you create an app, Heroku allows you to select whether it's hosted in the US or Europe (though no more specifically than that – you just have to hope it doesn't include the UK!).
Next, because Heroku is a managed app service, it means that they get more access than a typical VM would have. You then need to read their privacy policy, which presents a problem: Heroku is owned by Salesforce.com, who have taken a belligerent Facebook-style head-in-sand denial approach to recent court verdicts in this doc. They say in there that the ECJ did not invalidate standards contractual clauses (SCCs), which is true, but not the end of the story. The ECJ said that while SCCs are valid as legal instruments, they can only be used to manage transfer between jurisdictions that uphold EU data protection and privacy standards (which, as far as the US is concerned, has been shot down with the collapse of Privacy Shield), and this is deemed to be the responsibility of the service in question to substantiate. So, what you then want to know is where is the detailed analysis of the US legal position and the audit of the US security services that Salesforce is required to conduct if the SCCs they are using are to be considered valid?
This is of course a rhetorical question: Salesforce has conducted no such audit, nor could they do so in sufficient detail, which then means of course that SCCs are not a valid mechanism for transfers between the EU and US for any service that Salesforce runs.
That said, their privacy policy is pretty large, and I recommend you read it, though they still make reference to the now-defunct Privacy Shield, and make some assertions that would concern me. I'd suggest finding out exactly what they do with data held in EU data centres, what they do with logging, and look harder at their third-party sharing, as that's often the biggest problem area.
This isn't really the place to go further into this, so I'd recommend you read their policies, and also read the GDPR (that's not the official source, but I find it's much more usable), or find a lawyer if you want a more precise analysis. The primary focus of GDPR is on the broad principles, not implementation details, so if something seems dodgy, creepy, or overreaching, it probably is.
I apologise if this has raised more questions than it's answered!
My company (which does Tutoring services) recently transitioned to Square for their Appointments and POS and I am trying to automate certain tasks. I wanted to know if there was a way to create "Open Tickets" for transactions through the Connect API.
I went through the documentation and couldn't find anything that refers to "tickets". I checked the seller community but wasn't satisfied with the answer from Square since they seemed to not understand what "Tickets" meant. I have provided more details at the end of this post in case someone wasn't sure about "Tickets" here as well.
I believe currently Tickets are only available through the Square POS app (Android/iOS) and not on the Web Dashboard. I would like to be pointed in the right direction in terms of what I might need to look at in order to get access to automatic ticket creation.
For more details, please read on.
In order to clarify what I mean by "tickets", here is Square's page regarding "Open Tickets". They are basically a way to create and save transaction info ahead of time so customers can be charged quicker. The way we use "Open Tickets" is we create tickets for Tutoring sessions every day in the morning and when a customer shows up, all they have to do is look up their ticket and pay. We do this since we expect a lot of traffic every day and we want to streamline the process as much as possible.
Therefore, our admin staff ends up creating 80-100 tickets manually every day! I wanted to know if there was a way to automate this. I already have a running Google Sheets with all appointments data that would be needed in order to create a ticket. I just need to find a way to communicate with ticket creation.
I apologize if this is a long post. I tried to be concise but thorough. Please let me know if there is any detail that I missed. I appreciate any help!
Unfortunately, Open Tickets isn’t currently available for Square’s API. Square's API is only able to track completed transactions at this time.
We are constantly improving the product based on feedback like this, so I’ll be sure to share your thoughts with the API team.
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I have been doing webdesign for a small business in Denmark, which alrady have a deal with a larger company to create the final site.
Among this companys proposal, I see that they charge a rather large fee for installing Magento on my clients server, and an additional fee to integrate the design.
Same company forbids my client from having FTP or similar access to the server, and they are therefornot able to install this themselves.
My question is : is resale of the Magento really allowed by the licence? This company wants to charge a rather steep amout for even installing a blank version of it, no Magento-licencing included.
Ihave looked larger company up, and this company does NOT have a standing licence for Magento. And even if they got one, I have a sneeky feeling that something is legal/licence wrong here.
The reason I share this with you is that I have a guts feeling that I should raise some critical questions and suggest that My client uses another company for their webaite, but I need to be certain that Im on the right side.
The IT company has no partnership with Magento/Varien, and have a somewhat tarnished reputation already...
I have mailed Magento about this, but have not had any response yet.
Your question is not entirely clear. But a company can certainly charge for installing a licensed product on behalf of the licencee, this is just a consulting or service fee (unless the licence specifically prohibits a third party from doing this, which is possible (although unlikely) if a) source code is being exposed, or b) there are other commercial sensitivities such as NDAs. But then that is not your risk, it's the licensee's)
As for Ubuntu, a company can again charge for installing or maintaining an Ubuntu install, again this is consulting/service. In fact you can SELL a copy of Ubuntu too, if someone is willing to pay for it that is their perogative (and they in turn can sell it themselves). You just have to provide the source and the licence, not just a compiled binary in order to comply with the GPL.
I can understand the position of the 'large company' providing the managed hosting for the Magento build. However, I also understand your concerns.
Assuming that you are only working on the design, there is no reason why you cannot implement your design on localhost with the Magento 'demo store' products. You can then take your design along to the 'small company', get your designs signed off, archive the /skin/frontend/default/macguffin and /app/design/frontend/default/macguffin folders, hand them over to the company providing the 'managed hosting' and then collect your pay-cheque.
By not allowing you access via FTP the 'managed hosting' provider are ensuring that their clients have no third-parties able to access any-of-their-stuff. Furthermore, design is not that big a deal in a Magento build, there is also the payment gateway, the shipping setup, analytics and everything else that happens on go-live. They are also taking the responsibility of providing uptime, availability and the aforementioned security.
You and I know that you can do all of that on a virtual-private-server and get it done in a matter of days, with lots of testing but no client liaison meetings, office overheads to pay for, an expensive project manager to explain everything to, excessive time-sheeting to keep up to date and so on.
However, the 'small company' will have reservations on allowing someone other than the 'large company' doing all of that. Given that their web presence is pivotal to the success of their business, given that they may not have management resources, given the fear of the unknown, given a lack of in-house expertise, politically the solution they have arrived at can be considered as making business sense to them.
There is nothing wrong with the business arrangement from a legal/licensing point of view. From your point of view of getting the job done, you can do your design offline, i.e. on localhost, deliver the deliverables and collect your cheque.
If the deal with the 'large company' does not work out then, if your work is good, you will be well placed to take on the project, to charge 'freelancer' rather than 'agency' rates and build a long term relationship with the 'small company'. However, you are not there yet, your best bet is to forge a close working relationship with the 'small company' and the 'large company'. For all you know, the 'large company' may have other clients, and, if you work well with them (i.e. drop the suspicions and animosity-from-the-outset), then you will possibly get other design work from their other clients.
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I was brainstorming interesting usages of Twitter and came up with the following:
An application can use it as a call home mechanism
An application that has an invalid license could broadcast its location
A software company could use it as a remote shell like interface and issue commands to shutdown, restart and to publish patches
An application can use it for heartbeat purposes
Has anyone else came up with other non-standard usages of Twitter?
I fail to see the advantage of using a proprietary, third-party chat site in place of an appropriate networking protocol.
Matthew nailed the point that all these "applications" just represent a communications protocol between twitterer and remote host, and there are lots of mature protocols you could use instead right out of the box, rather than rolling your own on twitter.
But depending on your situation, of course there could be scenarios in which twitter is the easy way. I have written similar hacks that use e-mail as transport mechanism for automated tasks, simply because corporate red tape doesn't permit us other more conventional means. They can reboot machines, restart processes, post public messages, etc.
One of it is already available for Windows - "TweetMyPC v2.0 lets you shutdown/restart/LogOff and lots more in your windows PC.remotely."
I'm not sure this counts as a very practical use (a bit of fun mainly), but it certainly attracted my interest:
Twitter image encoding challenge
The idea of this challenge is to try to encode a picture into a 140 (Unicode) character Tweet. It's quite astounding how much information some of the algorithms posted there can fit into a message.
Scott Hanselman used Twitter to create an app for ordering a sandwich.
Check out his post
I think the main advantage of using twitter in instances like this is its SMS capabilities (and the fact they're free - whereas you can buy services that charge a monthly fee to allow you to receive SMS messages to a HTTP page or something like that).
I'd considered using it to make a little budget app for myself where I could SMS twitter things I'd bought to a private twitter account, similar for tracking petrol usage I was planning on smsing the odometer reading,cost etc in a certain format and capturing it at home to run statistics and stuff on it. There are limitations to it though - like you can only hook up an SMS number to 1 twitter account...
It's good to think outside the box, but don't be too focused on using just twitter because it's cool.
If you were comfortable setting up sensors and such, you could get a microcontroller, hook it up to a twitter feed, and then give it remote commands.
For instance, remote controlled house lights. You could then just tweet "Home lights on GXSDFXV" (The garbage at the end is to prevent real tweets from turning on and off your lights).
I wouldn't use Twitter in particular for transferring any private information (think about security if someone hacks the account and can shutdown your corporate servers or transfer fake licenses). For that I would setup a private server which implements the open microblogging protocol (like identi.ca) as long as - like others already said - there is another more suitable protocol.
For publishing PUBLIC information (heartbeat messages can be considered that, too) I like the idea pretty much. We recently had a very successfull (but unfortunately effectless) E-Petition in Germany where a Twitter account posted the number of signatures every couple of minutes.
Carsonified are using this to allow people to discover other people sitting in the same room at their conferences.
They label each chair with a tag and then you tweet that tag to an account they have and it registers you on a floorplan on the venue. Users are coloured in on the plan by their interests.
Clever but a bit overcomplicated for my tastes...
http://hello.carsonified.com/Home/Faq
The company where I work for (1800+ Employees) is looking to enhance the personal relationships between its employees, allow a better collaboration and communication between departments and make it easier for the HR department to identify skills, experience and interests among the personnel (ex: we have some colleagues with deep knowledge of SAP modules and products, but during concrete projects it results very difficult to identify them and integrate them). Therefore, they want to implement a social network for our intranet.
We are just looking for the basic features such as profiles, discussion boards and so on, so nothing fancy. I proposed Community Server but my boss said .Net and java are no-gos. He wants LAMP and is not interested in a web solution like Ning, because of privacy and security concerns. It does not matter if it is Open-Source or commercial software. But it should allow a complete layout customization and must also have access from the outside world.
So my question would be, is there something like Community Server running on a LAMP stack?
Thank you very much!
UPDATE: We already have a Facebook page and a group. But my boss wants some features not included in Facebook such as a tag cloud in each profile page displaying skills and relevant proyects; and a feature like the "neighborhoods" from Last.FM, where you can group people with similar skills and interests and there is also the confidentialy issue (discussions about projects, clients, etc). So, any ideas?
You should check out StatusNet. http://status.net/
It doesn't directly answer your question, but aren't you rather trying to reinvent the wheel?
Facebook has got Social Networking down and the likely hood is 95% of your 1800 employees already use it.
Why would you go to the effort of writing and supporting a product as well as asking your employees to update information about themselves in multiple places when you could just set up a Facebook Network.
The other point I would make is, why are you limiting yourself to one way of doing things right from the off. Perhaps a detailed analysis of which technologies best serve your purpose would be more appropriate.
I appreciate this doesn't answer you question, I just feel this is a good example of Corporations unwilling to embrace tools already out there, I suspect because they are scared of them.
I'm probably right in guess that you're company heavily monitors Facebook usage, which is why this also might be hard.
Try Open Atrium, a Drupal-based team server.
Some sort of facebook application would allow you to keep the data on a server that you manage, but still use facebook's existing features. Pretty certain that facebook uses PHP for its application framework.
I agree with MrEdmundo and would upvote him if I were registered. Dont fall victim to "It wasnt invented here" syndrome. I bet your boss is like "we need something like facebook".
If it makes you feel better... here is a little story:
I was trying to implement some sort of group chat so fellow employees could ask quick questions to eachother online without having to get up or if someone was on the phone, etc. However, the service I installed (some sort of jabber daemon, i forget which one) never really got used. The solution? Just install the facebook chat client because all the co-workers are already on facebook most the day anyways!
plus, the "screen name" is appropriate because it is our real names, not stuff like "Out Into Space", "theman", or "fly-mystikal-dj-69"
You might want to consider something like Drupal. It's technically a CMS, but it's extremely customizable, and there are a lot of modules available that provide social-networking-style features.
Use Office Messenger for communication. It's basically like MSN Messenger but run on the company's servers so they can monitor all traffic. To know who has expertise in what area, it can't be too hard to build your own simple CRUD application to record profiles of employees and have each profile tagged with key skills, that the employee has and build a search function to find the people with the skills you need at any given time.
You can create an application using the Facebook SDK (PHP, java or any other language) and moderate it so that only employees can use it. That way you can use the existing Facebook features and add the tag clouds and other stuff your boss wants.
I've not used it, but Dolphin might be worth downloading to try out.
elgg.org
LAMP easy to install and setup, looks like your requirements would all be easily satisfied by the official plugins that are available.
Another option: http://buddypress.org/