day -24: pick a stick
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
You come to a point in every project where the existing material is so overwhelming, heavy & difficult to work with you just start to remove parts until it falls apart. Like the pick-a-stick game, where you have a bunch of sticks on a flat surface and you pick one by without disturbing the remaining ones.
Today we played that game with the back-end. There are so much functionality that’s not used anymore and it’s all nested, looking pretty much like a pile of sticks, making it hard to understand where to start work & change. So far the status is: ‘it should work’ and the good thing is we can always do a rollback if we realize we picked the wrong stick.
ETS
We also had our first Exploratory Testing Session today with the new iPhone app. The exercise was quite simple. Log in. But even the simplest of tasks does fail and the mission of ET sessions is to make it fail, and find out why. I think in many processes that step of development is missing. We made it fail, and fixed the bugs that caused it.
Since I’ve started to work agile, scrum and all that this means I just realize how many other areas that could be applied, not just software developments. Having sprints, daily stand-ups, follow-ups etc. is making you progress fun & fast. When you run in to problems, you solve them fast, then move on.
Facebook Connect & OAuth
Since we changed the authentication model we had to change the clients too, both the iPhone app and the web app. There’s been some difficulties on the web app with setting the cookie, but they seem to have found the problem. If so, the web app should be up running any time.
What we found out in this process however is that the new authentication model is not very streamlined for an Open API and third party developers. It’s clumsy in the way the application developer has to authorize themselves.
For now it’s ok since the API is not yet open and it’s only ourselves who develop on it, but we’ll change when the opening day comes. OAuth seems to be the answer. Twitter just took the step to discontinue basic authentication to only use OAuth, which is a safer, easier & in many ways better authentication model.