LDSTech

Updating the Worldwide Application

cassie.mcdaniel@ldschurch.org (Devon Gibson) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:28:27 +0000

It has been my experience that homegrown applications can present a number of challenges as they expand and evolve. One of these challenges is the absence of a defined build and release schedule. A homegrown application that I currently manage has evolved over the years into a massive system that is accessed around the clock by users worldwide. Because it has evolved so much over the years, there has been a great deal of interpretation left to different teams as to how builds and releases should be handled.

To add a little more flavor to the situation, this application is not written in Java, the long-standing development platform of choice at the Church. It is written in a mixture of classic ASP and ASP.NET, something that has only recently been adopted as an acceptable platform here. Due to the efforts of strong development and QA teams, we’ve seen an increase in application stability and improvements in overall functionality as we’ve worked to get this homegrown behemoth under control. We have now come to another fork in the improvement road: an acceptable release process.

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An Introduction to the Clerk Wiki

cassie.mcdaniel@ldschurch.org (Robert Lindsay) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:51:21 +0000

How does the Church train 50,000 clerks in 40 or more languages? That’s a challenge that is getting easier to solve, thanks to the recently launched LDSTech Clerk wiki.

The Clerk wiki offers new training and support resources for ward and stake clerks, including membership clerks, finance clerks, stake technology specialists, stake auditors, and other record keepers, helping them to better understand how to magnify their callings. The Clerk wiki offers more than 250 searchable pages of content. There’s even information to help bishops and stake presidents understand their record-keeping responsibilities.

The wiki is built in MediaWiki, the same application that powers Wikipedia. For now, the LDS Tech Projects wiki is sharing space with the Clerk wiki, but at some point the Clerk wiki will get its own home.

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Setting the System Requirements Bar Too High

cassie.mcdaniel@ldschurch.org (Mark Nelson) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:33:46 +0000

I used to enjoy attending professional conferences: the inside scoop, the buzz of product announcements, tips and tricks, and the general enthusiasm of the crowd. It was hard not to get caught up in the excitement of it all. I couldn’t wait to get back home and try out all the new things I’d picked up.

But back in the office, I began to wonder how much of the conference really applied to my work. While I found great benefit in hearing somebody’s experience (positive or negative) in tackling a problem or learning the best techniques for doing something, the other information was more of a distraction.

Technology enthusiasts by nature tend to gravitate toward the cutting edge. We get excited about the latest product, language, platform, or standard that is going to make life oh-so-much better. There are many times, however, when the “tried and true” approach is a better path for our customers.

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Community-Driven Maintenance

cassie.mcdaniel@ldschurch.org (Neal Midgley) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:45:25 +0000

In June 2009, Nathan Dickamore wrote an article on this site entitled “Participate in Community Development”. He wrote about open-source advocate Michael Tiemann's theories concerning "exonovation" and how community-driven (and supported) projects yield better products. Similarly, by using the community's time and talents, the Church can better tackle the monumental task of maintaining its legacy data systems, free up developer resources, and utilize the broad range of technical skills available in the larger community.

As an open-source advocate, Tiemann posits that more project contributors lead to fewer outstanding issues. As a software engineer for the LDS Church, I lead the maintenance efforts for a large number of applications within the Supply Chain portfolio. These applications use a diverse set of technologies and require a relatively broad skill set in order to maintain them. Resources are sometimes limited, and we find ourselves supporting and maintaining more products than a few developers can handle. Indeed, often a project’s needs are put on hold as other issues take priority. In addition, it seems that for every issue we resolve, the customer uncovers one or two bugs or makes enhancement requests. As maintenance developers, we sometimes find ourselves sinking as we do our best to keep maintenance applications happy while at the same time developing new software to meet additional needs.

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Real-time Collaboration: Building a Collaborative Community Within an Organization

cassie.mcdaniel@ldschurch.org (Jeromy Hall) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:13:45 +0000

I work on a fairly large portfolio team within the Information and Communications Systems department—approximately ninety people who are organized into five or six project teams, each focused on delivering products for the Missionary and Public Affairs departments of the Church.

But we have a problem: the project teams have become siloed. This is because we do not have an effective means of cross-portfolio collaboration in real-time.

This problem manifests itself in a number of ways, including the following:

When a technical problem is discovered by a team, a cultural boundary causes the team to feel that they’re on their own to solve it.
We have no discoverable history of successes and failures, and consequently project teams either re-invent the wheel or repeat the mistakes of other teams.
The perception of bureaucracy causes us to be inefficient while we wait for meetings and use the organizational hierarchy to disseminate lessons learned and best practices discovered by project teams.
We think and behave in ways that prevent synergy and cause miscommunication, both of which lead us to false thinking. For example, we tend to promote false assumptions such as the following:
- “My problems are unique.”
- “Everyone sees my problems.”
- “Everyone would see the same solutions as I do.”
- “If I can’t solve it, nobody can.”

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Mormons in Technology pt. 2

cassie.mcdaniel@ldschurch.org (Cassie McDaniel) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:19:47 +0000

University of Utah (Special Collections Department, J. Willard Marriott Library)

The hearing aid, audiometer, artificial larynx, and stereophonic recording: Harvey Fletcher

This installment of Mormons in Technology discusses some of the contributions of Harvey Fletcher to society and technology. Fletcher is known as the father of stereophonic sound and devoted much of his career to studying the production, transmission, and recording of sound.

Born in 1884 in Provo, Utah, Fletcher graduated from Brigham Young University in 1907. Fletcher then moved his young family to Chicago to pursue a doctoral degree at the University of Chicago. There, Fletcher worked with Dr. Robert Millikan on the famous oil-drop experiments as part of his dissertation work. Millikan won a Nobel Prize for being the first to accurately measure the charge of the electron in these experiments.

After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1911 with a PhD, Fletcher returned to BYU to teach for five years. In 1916, he accepted a job offer from the Western Electric Company, which became Bell Laboratories.

After retirement from Bell Laboratories, Fletcher taught at Columbia University and then returned to BYU to do research. In 1953, Fletcher established the Department of Engineering, which eventually became the College of Physical and Engineering Sciences. Fletcher continued to do research, especially in musical tones, and teach at BYU until his death.

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The Mormon Channel Project

cassie.mcdaniel@ldschurch.org (Tom Johnson) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:13:12 +0000

The Mormon Channel iPhone application is the first software release from the LDSTech community. Not only does it stream the Mormon Channel on the iPhone, it also plays recordings of general conference talks, Church magazine articles, and scriptures. The application was given a four-star rating in iTunes and has been downloaded more than 55,000 times in more than 53 countries.

Views of the Mormon Channel iPhone application while streaming the Mormon Channel, browsing magazine content, and listening to magazine articles

The Mormon Channel Project will create version 2.0 of the iPhone application and also create applications to stream the Mormon Channel on Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, Android, and BlackBerry devices.

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Master Monkey Management

cassie.mcdaniel@ldschurch.org (Mike Ellison) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:06:51 +0000

While serving a mission in South Africa, three missionaries in my district and I decided to go for a scenic bike ride on P-Day. The plan was to visit Cape Point—where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet—and enjoy the natural beauty of the countryside along the way. The isolated road we followed was carved into a steep mountainside that ascended from the ocean below. It was lush and full of trees, vines, and bushes.

While we were riding leisurely, the trees and bushes above the road started to shake and rustle. Loud noises and what sounded like screams came from the dark undergrowth. Almost immediately baboons were running onto the road beside us. Adrenalin kicked in and away we went.

Baboons have long fangs and do not have cute and cuddly dispositions. They can be very dangerous and cause serious injuries.

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Making it Easier

cassie.mcdaniel@ldschurch.org (Christopher Cieslinski) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:48:14 +0000

In the day-to-day life of a developer there are always new projects to finish, new deadlines to meet, and new challenges to overcome. Sometimes the problems we face are new to us, and sometimes they are similar to ones we’ve solved before. Perhaps someone else has already solved a particular problem, or has a well thought-out approach to solving the same type of problem. We may “spin our wheels” unnecessarily on a particular challenge for days because we didn’t have those already-existing solutions or processes at our fingertips.

An individual developer within an organization can solve many problems alone and learn a lot. A team of developers can work with each other and become even better. To become first-class, though, an organization must enable all developers and teams to take advantage of collective knowledge and solutions already in existence. To be most effective, organizations should spend time, money, and effort creating and collecting those solutions and then disseminating the information.

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Test Automation with Free Tools

cassie.mcdaniel@ldschurch.org (Ronald Jenkins) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:21:45 +0000

Since the mid ‘90s, test automation has grown from a handful of crude macro-recording tools and custom-built one-off applications to a suite of high-priced, high-powered frameworks. While the frameworks tend to perform as advertised, the pricing typically leaves small software shops out in the cold and mid-size test teams struggling to justify the budget. The framework itself can also have some limitations imposed by the limited flexibility of the scripting language behind it.

In the last few years, the open source movement has produced a series of tools that the enterprising tester can combine into a free framework with all the power and flexibility of full-fledged programming languages. One combination that I’ve used to test various Web-based applications consists of nUnit and WatiN.

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