DEV Community: Daniel Coturel

Generating a static dashboard

Daniel Coturel — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 21:52:23 +0000

Hi everyone,

I'm thinking about improving the way I present results to my customers, but not software results; management results. Every month, I issue a Word file to each customer with:

Detail of the hours consumed from our contract
Detail of the tickets and their status, etc.

This is all part of my CRM software, so now I generate this Word automatically, and send it via email.

What I want to do is to publish a static web page, that can have the same or more information, and being able to present a dashboard, a filter-able table, etc.

Do you people know any simple CSS library intended to make this kind of stuff?

Saludos,

My approach to requirements tracking

Daniel Coturel — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 14:19:56 +0000

Hi everyone,

I want to share my approach to track customer's needs, in order to:

Organize our work
Help the customer to prioritize
Provide to every stakeholder a clear view of the status of any project

So, I mapped what we call "Necesidades" (Needs in english) in a database:

Every need has a header with an Id, the client (Cliente), the working contract (Contrato) and the person who is accountable for that need (Contacto). Also, there is a current state (Necesidad Estado) and an estimate of the hours needed to fullfil that need (Horas estimadas).

In the terms of software requirements, the need has the following information:

Descripcion: here we or the customer writes what does he want to achieve
Objetivos: this is the place where we write what bussines goals this need pretends to satisfy
Procedimiento actual: in this field we write how this need is being worked now
Reglas: here we write the bussines rules, constraints and politics that have impact on the need.
Requirente: here goes the main stakeholder, in organizational terms. For instance, Marketing, or Plant
Enfoque de implementacion: here goes the implementation approach, or how are we going to satisfy the need
Adaptaciones: here we write the impact on software. In our projects, we work with an ERP and several other softwares, and many of our costumers have an array of solutions. Some provided by us, some developed in-house and some provided by other vendors. Here we track the impact on the whole array.

As you can see, every field has a comment button. That comment generates a Change Request, where every user has to indicate if he/she wants to change something in the text of the field:

Then, the owner of the need can approve or reject every change request:

Only the owner of the need has permission to accept or reject change requests. This gives our workflow change control.

One as an user can interact with the list of needs of the firs image, or the Kanban board:

This last view gives a good sense of the status of a project. We have 4 columns:

Backlog, for everything that the customer has told us but it's not currently prioritized
En evaluacion, stands for the work being evaluated. The evaluation stage includes activities such as requirement writing, communication, discussion and approval (or not)
En progreso is the WIP stage.
Completadas is the column with the implemented needs

In order to have integration, this web app has a REST API that provides the following current capabilities:

The customers, contracts and contacts are created in our ERP backoffice and then replicated in the web app
Several steps of the workflow are reinforced with a mail to some interested user. That mail is sent by an email marketing tool linked with this app
Every time we have got to send a status report to a customer, we have a tool that gathers needs and presents them in the Kanban board and a full list. That tool also gathers the time tracking records from the ERP and generates a Markdown file with all the info. Then we complete some descriptive fields and convert that MD to a standard DOCX with template.

In the close future, I want to decorate this model with:

Giving structured detail to the components of each field.
Storing descriptive dimensions to the need. For instance, perceived risk and perceived value. This would be useful to create a risk-value matrix and give some tools to prioritize
Adding to-do detail to the need entity, so we can specify the workflow

So, do you people think this could be a good approach? I thought it could be a good fit for an open source project.

Saludos,

Charts library in JavaScript

Daniel Coturel — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 12:13:37 +0000

Hi everyone,

I wanted to ask here, if you have any JavaScript charting library that you recommend. This is for an internal website I use to manage my team's workflow.
The primary intent is to add a Gantt for each project. I have the data structure solved.
The website is not under any JS framework, it's just "vanilla" JavaScript, so it is not a constraint now.
Saludos,

My approach to testing documentation

Daniel Coturel — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 13:35:55 +0000

Hi everyone,

I was thinking, in the last couple of weeks, about a good testing workflow for non automated tests. Mainly, acceptance tests, since a big part of my team's workflow consists in testing with users after the development is ended.
So, I have a little software in-house software that I use to keep track of activities with customers. Requirements, living contracts, tickets, etc..
So some months ago, I developed a place to record tests. There you record the customer, the contract, the customer's accountable for that test, the bussiness transaction under test, and then you log:

Test cases under test
Issues detected related to each case

Then, the issues have a follow up workflow.

This is currently in use, but I kept wondering if this is a good approach, since it is basically plain text stored in a structured fashion, in a relational database.

This is a little screen-capture of a test:

So, as I was saying, I was wondering if I could improve this record in order to give it some more structure, and specially, the ability to provide validations for the user working and for my bussiness. So, I linked this manual practice with automated testing, and figured it out.

I was not mapping anywhere my assertions. So, I think the right approach, or at least a better one, would be:

Each test still has information about the customer, the contract, the customer's accountable for that test, the bussiness transaction under test
In the following step of the test design, you declare the assertions that reflect the acceptance criteria of the test
Then you start logging each test case. For each test case and assertion combination, you declare if it passes or doesn't pass
If a test case and assertion doesn't pass, then you add one or several issues

I have this in mind:

	Test case 1	Test case 2	Test case 3
Assertion 1	✓	✓	✓
Assertion 2	✓	X	✓
Assertion 3	✓	✓	X
Assertion 4	✓	X	✓

And then the test document has the list of issues detected.

Have you ever seen something like this in action? To be honest, I developed this but for a boiler certification small bussines, several years ago. It runs in tablet. It is about now that I realize that pattern is useful for software implementation.

Saludos,

P.S.: I'm not an english speaker, so if the text is hard to read please let me know and I'll try to make it clearer.

Do you know if this exists?

Daniel Coturel — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 01:34:15 +0000

Hello everyone!
I was in a talk earlier today. It was like an event with people talking briefly about ideas and their execution.
There was one of the ideas that I found really interesting. Videogames for learning. I know, this is not even new. But, what got me thinking, is if there is anything like that for learning skills of our job.
I mean, is there anything that can present you information and interact with you, in order to help you identify what's relevant information and what isn't?
That would be a great ludic way to learn how to gather user stories.

Quality compromising conditions

Daniel Coturel — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 21:43:32 +0000

Hi everyone.
Due to a case with a customer, I was thinking about quality compromising work conditions. I deliver a service, and sometimes the quality of the service delivered might depend on actions that can be held accountable to my customer.
Let's say, unrealistic deadlines, no deadlines at all, not responding to emails, not being available for meetings and conversations, short notices for new tasks or not planning at all.
How do you people state those conditions in order to be clear with the customer?
Saludos,

Requirements workflow

Daniel Coturel — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 14:43:36 +0000

Hello everyone,
I'm always working to improve the requirements tools that me and my coworkers use to gather and track needs from users. I have freedom to choose one tool or another. So I was wondering what people here uses, if you chose a tool or not, and what would you use if you could choose a tool or several tools today.
Saludos,

Documentation automation II

Daniel Coturel — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 02:58:36 +0000

Hi devs,

A few weeks ago I created this post:

https://dev.to/elcotu/documentation-automation-p8m

After a few weeks, I thought it could be useful to share what I've been trying, exploring and building with the intent of automating some documentation workflow.

At first, I've been learning about markdown as it seemed to be a good language to create the documentation source.
Then discovered the Pandoc tool. It's an open source aimed to translate docs from markdown to several formats (*.docx, *.odt, *.pdf, *.html, *.epub and many more). This was practically all I needed, but, how to implement it?

The tool is suitable for Linux and Windows. I'm a newbie on Linux, I have to confess. But with testing in both OS I soon discovered that you can do a lot more in command line with Linux than with Windows (yes, many will think, "of course").
So I started creating git projects with markdown documents, and trying to automate document generation. Sooner or later, I got to a series of use cases for the automation:

A file for each subfolder: Create a docx file with table of contents from the contents of every file in every subdirectory of the current working directory. This is meant to handle the generation of a collection of how-to files, each with a subfolder of images
Filtered doc: Create a docx file with table of contents from the contents of every file in a directory that contains a given string, and then publishes it in a folder in Dropbox. This is meant to compile a single file with all approved or requesting for approval files
Change control: Traverse a directory. Create a file named cdc.md with each file's commit log. Then create a *.docx file with the contents of the original file and the cdc.md file appended at the end of it. This is meant to create doc files with revision history, for compliance with ISO procedures

And then all the cases could be used with other output formats.

Then I thought and worked on the next step. Basically, publishing the file somewhere. Like a Dropbox, FTP or wherever one can share static content.

This is a repository where I'm compiling some Pandoc samples: Pandoc samples

Have anyone worked with such a tool or these requirements in any way?

Saludos,

My first open source project

Daniel Coturel — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 00:51:34 +0000

Hi everyone. As the description states, I just wanted to come here and tell you, fellow developers, about my first open source project. Why? Because even I've been developing software since at least 2005, it hasn't been until I joined this website that I got interested in open source projects.

Anyway, the motivation was simple. Me and my sisters need to execute, during this year, a series of financial movements in order to proceed with some stuff for wich my English is too poor to explain.
I pointed out that we needed to keep track to every income and outcome, from the main "cash resource" and when some of us makes an expense that has to be refunded.
Obviously, the main approach was to create a shared spreadsheet, but I wanted to make a software, for some reasons:

I wanted to make a new web app from scratch with my framework of choice, CakePHP, since this year I'm mainly mantaining apps and that's not that fun.
I also wanted to keep track to incomes and outcomes respecting accounting principles, and that's hard to achieve with a spreadsheet.
Then I had in mind to make this little software an open source project, in case anyone in the world can benefit from this effort

So I created "Easyaccounts", a software that requires the definition of accounts (in an accounting sense of the word), cash resources and income / outcome concepts. The software keeps track of:

Incomes: records an income that is linked to a cash resource and a concept in a way that money comes in that cash resource
Outcomes: records an outcome that is linked to a cash resource and a concept in a way that money comes out that cash resource
Transferences: records a movement that moves money from one cash resource to another

Everyone of the three generates an accounting entry, and the main motivation is to keep updated a balance of the fund we manage.

I leave some screen-captures of the running instance of the app:

This is the link to the GitHub repository, in case anyone wants to check the source code:

repo

Saludos,

Documentation automation

Daniel Coturel — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 22:54:12 +0000

Hi people,

Due to a past post where several users recommended books about programming or more general bibliography (this is the post: https://dev.to/lightalloy/learning-to-love-software-development-books-5e4) I've read past week the book The Pragmatic Programmer.

I have to say, the book is plenty of interesting stuff and thing I will try to implement during this year. The most inmediate and time-gaining measure, I think, is when the book suggests to automate project documentation.

How?

Use a markup language for the documentation
Put it on version control software
Based on the markup language, generate scripts to the required outputs: HTML, PDF, EPUB or whatever you need

I think this is a great concept, and I will work on this in my organization for the next months. And I would like to read from you if you had any experiences with this and recommend tools, etc.

Saludos,

Get list of WooCommerce products and variations

Daniel Coturel — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 21:50:09 +0000

Hi people. I just did something with JavaScript in a rush, and I would like to see how other people would solve it. Just to compare and because I'm not that good at JavaScipt, I think the answers would be enriching.

They gave me a WooCommerce website with products and variations loaded, and I needed to make a list to do other things on my ERP. The list should have:
1) Product ID
2) Variation ID
3) Variation SKU

I had to use 2 WooCommerce endpoints:

/wp-json/wc/v2/products

This lists all products. Every product has an id field

/wp-json/wc/v2/products//variations

This lists all variations of a given product id. Every variation has an id field and a sku field.

So, that's the challenge, get that list to save it as a CSV file. How would you do that?

Saludos,

What would you do?

Daniel Coturel — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 15:14:36 +0000

Hi everyone,

I open this post to gather some opinions and insights. The question is: ¿wich language, framework and IDE would you choose if you have to start now (October 2018) to develop desktop software running in Windows and connected to SQL Server?

Saludos,