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How the DORA metrics can help DevOps team performance

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Accelerated adoption of the cloud requires tools that aid in faster software delivery and performance measurements. Delivering visibility across the value chain, the DORA metrics streamline alignment with business objectives, drive software velocity, and promote a collaborative culture. Software delivery, operational efficiency, quality – there is no shortage of challenges around digital transformation for business leaders. Customer satisfaction, a prominent business KPI, has paved the way for experimentation and faster analysis resulting in an increased volume of change in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Leaders worldwide are helping drive this culture of innovation aligned with organization goals and objectives. However, it is not always about driving the culture alone; it is also about collaboration, visibility, velocity, and quality. Cloud computing and microservices are driving the cloud-first approach for software delivery, helping to scale them independently, and allowing teams to move faster. But, without DevOps, the team doesn’t have the underlying core to move fast efficiently. DevOps has the power to enable the smallest changes that can have great effects. This brings us to the question – how do you measure velocity and impact? Or how do you assess quality, and ensure that it is not hampered by velocity? The latter would be what is commonly referred to as technical debt. A continuous journey needs continuous improvement Any improvement starts with measurement. Measuring and optimizing DevOps practices improves developer efficiency, overall team performance, and business outcomes. DevOps metrics demonstrate effectiveness, shaping a culture of innovation and ultimately overall digital transformation. In the Accelerate State of DevOps 2021 report by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team at Google Cloud, which draws insights from 7 years of data collection and research, four metrics are the key to measure software delivery performance. What are these metrics? Deployment Frequency Lead time for changes Time to restore service Change failure rate Deployment Frequency Let’s start with the velocity of development. Deployment frequency measures how often the organization deploys code to production or releases it to end users. This metric borrows from lean manufacturing concepts, wherein small multiple batch sizes are the preferred approach for higher efficiency and more rapid adjustments. Lead time for changes Now comes the extent of automation in your processes. Lead time for changes measures the time needed to take a committed code to successfully run in production. This is one of the two metrics with significant variance in the data. Time to restore service This represents a business’ capacity. Time to restore service measures the time needed to restore services to the level they were previously, in case of an incident. Here too we see significant variance in the data. Change failure rate And finally, we take a look at quality. Changes which cause a failure in the system – a deployment failure, an incident, a rollback or a remedy – all contribute to measuring the change failure rate. Driving visibility into the DevOps lifecycle Recently, Zoopla used DORA metrics to boost deployments and increase automation. Understanding the root cause of their problems helped them make informed adjustments in their process workflows, automation, tools, and more. They recognized the value of using a single platform to overcome roadblocks in velocity and innovation. This brought added visibility into their system which helped improve measurement and analytics. Our 2021 Global DevSecOps Survey shows […]

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GitLab’s DevOps platform enables Tangram Vision’s engineering team to succeed at remote work

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On March 14, 2020, Tangram Vision CEO Brandon Minor flew from Colorado into the Bay Area to meet with COO Adam Rodnitzky. The two had just launched Tangram Vision, the company they co-founded to make sensors simpler for robotics, drones, and autonomous vehicles. Their plan was to, each month, alternate working at each other’s location. However, that week, the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown began, forcing them to scrap that plan and figure out how to successfully collaborate from afar. “We didn’t see each other in person again for a very long time. That kicked off our remote work experience,” Minor says. The Tangram Vision engineering team started using GitLab’s DevOps platform, which enabled them to work together without missing a beat. “GitLab was a key tool that allowed us to work really fluidly in a remote context,” says Minor. “Our engineering team has placed GitLab at the core of our remote workflow because it reinforces our values and perspectives around working well remotely.” The Tangram Vision Platform takes care of complex perception tasks like sensor fusion, calibration, and diagnostics built on a scalable data backend that allows engineers to track, optimize, and analyze every sensor in their fleet. Tangram Vision’s SDK includes tools for rapid sensor integration, multi-sensor calibration, and sensor stability, saving robotics engineers months of engineering time. Supporting complex collaboration Perception systems are notoriously hard to get up and running and then maintain over time because of important lower-level activities like sensor integration and calibration. “We make sure all the sensors’ data is running smoothly, everything’s working together perfectly to basically a plug-and-play level. And then we enable the developers working on top of that to monitor and correct their system over time,” Minor says. Tangram Vision has just launched a user hub that functions as a centralized sensor data center. The user hub joins their multi-sensor calibration module, as well as a multiplexing module that maintains stream reliability for all connected sensors. Developers can access a starter set of perception development tools (Tangram Vision Platform – Basic), which will be available on an open-source hub. Much of the initial user feedback will come through and be managed within repositories hosted on GitLab, both public and private, Minor says. GitLab as a core for code The engineering team has evaluated other platforms, according to Greg Schafer, senior web architect. “We’ve looked around but we’ve been very turned off by them for one reason or another. We really haven’t swayed in wanting to use GitLab as our core for code,” Schafer says. The team uses GitLab to manage branches and merge requests (MRs), boosting efficiency and control. “We were having a bit of a struggle early on managing the short-term flow. It was hard to put down tasks to paper. So, I dove deep into GitLab to see how it could help us there. And now that’s what we use. GitLab is my product management tool,” Minor says. The alternative, siphoning MRs into tools like Notion and Slack, would have been too cumbersome. “Having code-focused discussions in those places would’ve been very awkward vs. our current orientation of having those discussions in GitLab. Having that history of MRs and threads has been very useful,” Schafer says. Doing all of the code reviews in the MR itself builds a paper trail […]

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Everything You Need To Know About Spring4D Delphi Development Framework

Delphi, Noutați

In this webinar from DelphiCon, Stefan Glienke introduces us to the Spring4D framework and how it can take your Delphi and Windows application development to the next level. This Delphi-based framework is packed with a number of useful modules which will be explained in this video along with their actual implementations in Delphi. Spring4D is described as a great open-source library for Delphi XE and higher. This library is freely accessible and can be used for both commercial and non-commercial projects. How can Spring4D leverage and enhance the power of Delphi? The Spring 4D framework extends the Delphi RTL and is known for its advanced use of Generics and enhanced RTTI. The framework is also under active development and is practicing the so-called “Dogfooding” which means the author of the software and the team behind it is actively using the framework for their own commercial software. Spring4D also follows the principle of “Pick and Choose” so it doesn’t dictate how you have to write your own application. You simply take the useful things for your code without being forced to do things in a certain way. Spring4D contains a number of different modules including the common types like Nullable and Event, Smart Pointers like Shared and Weak, Interface-base collection types, and reflection extensions. Aside from explaining the purpose of each module, Stefan will also demonstrate how each of these can be implemented in Delphi. To know more about Spring4D and how this framework can possibly take your Delphi development to the next level, feel free to watch the video below.

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UI Components: They Are Not As Difficult As You Think

Sencha

  As a web application developer, you must have a deep understanding of UI components. You need to have a clear idea about how users interact with them. It will help you to develop user-friendly web applications. There are various JavaScript libraries and frameworks that can help you build an attractive user interface. However, which is the best one? Does it enable you to create a beautiful interface for your app easily? In this post, you will find all the details. What are UI components? UI components are the most integral parts of a web application. They consist of all the app’s styles and components, such as buttons, input fields, icons, text, etc. They are the core building blocks for all applications. UI components are responsible for interactions between the user and the application. They facilitate an effective user experience, and they allow the users to navigate through the application easily. Also, the UI components help them to efficiently perform various functions, like adding/editing information, filtering data, selecting a date on the calendar, etc. Why should you use UI components? Quickly create the user interface of your web application Reduce code duplication by using reusable components Save development time and money Easily update the UI when required How can I easily create UI components for my JavaScript application? You can easily create UI components for your JavaScript web application using Sencha Ext JS. It is the most comprehensive framework for building data-intensive apps for all modern devices. The UI of Ext JS applications is made up of widgets. They are known as components, and they are subclasses of the Ext.Component class. You can easily extend them to create a customized component for your web application. How can Sencha Ext JS help me in quickly creating UI components? Sencha Ext JS allows you to use reusable code. As a result, you can easily create UI components. Also, it doesn’t require you to get involved with a lot of coding. You can create UI components with just a few lines of code. Let’s take a look at some practical examples. How can I quickly create a calendar for scheduling events? The Ext JS calendar is a powerful UI component for creating custom calendars. It allows you to use the date and event data, just like Google Calendar. Here is an example: The calendar allows you to schedule your work and personal events easily. It comes with a minimalistic design. To create it, you have to follow these steps: 1. First, you need to define a new custom class, called KitchenSink.view.calendar.Month. Then you have to extend Ext.panel.Panel. Also, you need to define the type of UI component, which is calendar-month-view. Ext.define(‘KitchenSink.view.calendar.Month’, {    extend: ‘Ext.panel.Panel’,     xtype: ‘calendar-month-view’, 2. Then you have to add this code:    requires: [        ‘KitchenSink.data.calendar.Month’,        ‘Ext.calendar.panel.Month’,        ‘Ext.calendar.List’    ],    width: 1000,     height: 600, 3. Next, you have to create the viewModel.    viewModel: {        data: {            value: Ext.Date.getFirstDateOfMonth(new Date())        },        stores: {            calStore: {                type: ‘calendar-calendars’,                autoLoad: true,                proxy: {                    type: ‘ajax’,                    url: ‘/KitchenSink/CalendarMonth’                }            }        }     }, 4. Now, you have to specify the layout, bind, and titleAlign fields.    layout: ‘border’,    bind: {        title: ‘{value:date(“M Y”)}’    […]

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How To Make Powerful Data Visualizations With Matplotlib

Delphi

Did you know it’s easy to make use of some truly excellent Python libraries to super-charge your Delphi app development on Windows? Adding Python to your toolbox of Delphi code can enhance your app development, bringing in new capabilities which help you provide innovative and powerful solutions to your app’s users, which combine the best of Python with the supreme low-code and unparalleled power of native Windows development you get with Delphi. Are you looking for how to build a GUI for powerful and visually stunning data visualizations? You can build publication-quality figures with Matplotlib on Delphi. Matplotlib can be used in Python scripts, the Python and IPython shell, web application servers, and various graphical user interface toolkits (including Delphi!). This post will show you how to build a Delphi GUI app, dedicated to the Matplotlib library. Watch this video by Jim McKeeth, as a comprehensive introduction about why you can love both Delphi and Python at the same time: What is the Matplotlib Library? Matplotlib is a comprehensive Python library for creating static, animated, and interactive visualizations. Matplotlib produces publication-quality figures in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive environments across platforms. Matplotlib makes easy things easy and hard things possible. Create publication-quality plots. Make interactive figures that can zoom, pan, update. Customize visual style and layout. Export to many file formats. Embedded in JupyterLab and Graphical User Interfaces. Use a rich array of third-party packages built on Matplotlib. How do I get the Matplotlib library? You can easily install Matplotlib with pip: Or, you can choose conda install, to avoid complexities, as Anaconda is known as the most trusted distribution for Data Science related tasks: conda install -c conda-forge matplotlib conda install –c conda–forge matplotlib How do I build a Delphi GUI for the Matplotlib library? The following is the user interface structure for our project: User Interface Structure for our Matplotlib4D Project. Here is the list of Components used in the Matplotlib4D demo app: TPythonEngine TPythonModule TPythonType TPythonVersions TPythonGUIInputOutput TForm TMemo TOpenDialog TSaveDialog TSplitter TImage TPanel TLabel TComboBox TButton Navigate to the UnitMatplotlib4D.pas, and add the following line to the FormCreate, to load our basic matplotlibApp.py: Memo1.Lines.LoadFromFile(ExtractFilePath(ParamStr(0)) + ‘matplotlibApp.py’); Memo1.Lines.LoadFromFile(ExtractFilePath(ParamStr(0)) + ‘matplotlibApp.py’); You can Seamlessly Load the Matplotlib App Python File Inside the UnitMatplotlib4D.pas File. And make sure that the matplotlibApp.py is in the same directory as our Matplotlib4D.exe or inside your Delphi project folder. How to visualize data using Matplotlib on the Delphi app? Highly recommended practice:  1. This GUI was created by modifying Python4Delphi Demo34, which makes us possibly change the Python version in the runtime (this will save you from the seemingly complicated dll issues). 2. Add “Jpeg” to the Uses-list at the top of our UnitMatplotlib4D.pas code. We have to do that, because otherwise, Delphi can not understand the JPG format. With this correction, it should work. After that, the above change should look similar to this: Import Jpeg to Your Uses-list. And we can load JPG images into our TImage. 3. Set up these paths to your Environment Variable: C:/Users/ASUS/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python38 C:/Users/ASUS/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python38/DLLs C:/Users/ASUS/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python38/Lib/bin C:/Users/ASUS/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python38/Lib/site-packages/bin C:/Users/ASUS/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python38/Scripts C:/Users/ASUS/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python38 C:/Users/ASUS/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python38/DLLs C:/Users/ASUS/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python38/Lib/bin C:/Users/ASUS/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python38/Lib/site–packages/bin C:/Users/ASUS/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python38/Scripts 4. Creating a GUI for Matplotlib means that you will use Matplotlib outside the “normal” command-line process. You need to add these lines to all your Python code: import matplotlib import matplotlib.pyplot as […]

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Customize your memory use with Unity 2021 LTS

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In summer 2020, Unity provided support for Moon Studios when they were working to port Ori and the Will of the Wisp to Nintendo Switch. You can learn more about how we worked together to scale the project for this target platform in this case study. Moon Studios and Unity Accelerate Solutions (formerly Unity Professional Services) analyzed sections of code together, finding ways to tweak the particle systems and reduce memory usage. “When you’re targeting 60 fps on Nintendo Switch, you have to make sure every single aspect is optimized, including simulation, streaming, rendering, and graphics,” says studio founder Gennadiy Korol. Ori and the Will of the Wisps pushes the Nintendo Switch very hard in terms of memory use. The Accelerate Solutions team helped Moon make sure they were getting the best from these layers, focusing on native memory allocation.  Working with the team from Moon Studios, the Unity team measured the number of allocations from the different allocators. They also looked at the amount of memory allocated from each, which showed that the game was filling up some of the bucket allocators before even reaching the start of gameplay.   Increasing the size of the bucket allocator allowed extra room for small allocations that happen when playing the game. Allocating these small blocks from the bucket allocator gives the game a performance boost, helping it to hit the 60 fps target. The small allocations no longer come from the dynamic heap allocator, so this allocator contains just large blocks of memory. The allocator is less fragmented, which keeps the game running smoothly for longer.   Following the collaboration with Moon, the Accelerate Solutions team worked with the Optimization team, who developed the memory allocator customization feature that is now available in 2021 LTS.

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Embarcadero InterBase 2020 Update 3 Released!

Delphi

I’m delighted to announce that today Embarcadero has released a new version of its InterBase flagship database engine, InterBase 2020 Update 3. With this release, the company continues to improve the product’s quality and usability. UX Enhancements The most visible improvements are the user interface enhancements in the InterBase Manager utility for the Windows platform. In this release the InterBase Manager offers high-DPI support, and additional information like the version number and the current port in use, in an improved overall layout. As part of the UX improvement we have changed the fonts, colors, and overall look and feel, making these forms more modern. Noticeably, InterBase Manager now uses the PerMonitor V2 Windows UI model, and that has been migrated to and compiled with the latest version of Delphi.           The InterBase Manager window in InterBase 2020 Update 3 (on the right) compared to previous versions (on the left) In addition, the InterBase Server and Guardian property sheets have an improved UI (for example, the interface includes the entire path of the referenced folders rather than a trimmed version) and they are also made available when the database runs as a Windows Service.                           General Improvements Besides the UX enhancements, InterBase 2020 release 3 includes some additional features:  Expression Index can now be used to optimize query filters using STARTING WITH and LIKE predicates matching input expressions In IBConsole, the Object window and WISQL window now execute SELECT statements in precommitted reads mode, so they don’t stick to the transaction in the database. With this change, normal GC and sweep of obsolete versions will not be held back. InterBase 2020 Update 3 is also certified for use on more recent versions of the Windows operating system, Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022. Quality Work The release also addresses customer support cases and internally found quality issues, listed in the Doc Wiki product documentation. ADO.NET Support for Change Views As part of the improvements to InterBase, the team has also added Change Views support to the ADO.NET driver. For more information on ADO.NET and Change Views, refer to the ADO.NET documentation, or read the announcement blog post at https://blogs.embarcadero.com/interbase-ado-net-driver-update-enhances-visual-studio-support/.  The new ADO.NET driver is available on GitHub and NuGet, as it is not part of the regular product installation. More Information You can find more information on InterBase and the 2020 Update 3 at the following links: If you are an existing customer, the new version of the product is available on https://my.embarcadero.com, otherwise you can download the trial version at https://www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase/developer/free-download 

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Extend TMS WEB Core with JS Libraries with Andrew: FontAwesome

TMS Software

This time out, we are exploring FontAwesome, another wildly popular JS library. Like Bootstrap last week, FontAwesome requires no JavaScript coding knowledge and very little in the way of HTML or CSS knowledge either.  And while it does have a lot to do with fonts, and is indeed truly awesome, the main benefit we’re going to get from FontAwesome in terms of our TMS WEB Core projects is its enormous icon library. Great. More Icons. Last week, we touched briefly on the topic of Bootstrap Icons. 1,600 or so freely usable icons that you can directly use in your projects. There are also Google Material Icons. Several thousand more icons that also come in five different styles. The Google Material Icons library is even included in the JavaScript Library Manager in the Delphi IDE, so getting started is easy enough. If you’ve used one of these sets of icons previously in your projects, you might be reluctant to switch to something else.  The look of the Google icons will be familiar to many and might be somewhat of a safe choice.  Long-time developers might feel a bit of a chill when reflecting back on icons of ages past. There was a time when you could pretty accurately guess what tools were used to create an app based entirely on how audacious the icons were.  Like acid-wash jeans and tie-dye shirts, these are thankfully well behind us and we now have mostly sane choices to pick from.  Also long gone are less-than-fun topics like multi-res bitmaps, bmp-vs-ico, transparency issues, and anything to do with scaling.  I suspect our children will never care what a pixel is because they won’t actually be able to see any individual pixels anywhere without a microscope.  Back to the topic at hand.  Like Google Material Icons, FontAwesome has a handful of different styles to choose from.  And I personally much prefer FontAwesome styles to the Google equivalents, but there’s more to the story than just the look of the icons.  Much more. Making Your Project FontAwesome The FontAwesome library was recently added to the “Manage JavaScript Libraries” list, sometime around TMS WEB Core 1.9.8 or so.  It lists both FontAwesome 4 and FontAwesome 5. FontAwesome 6 also came out a couple of months ago.  We’ll run into some of the differences closer to the end of this article.  But I think everything we’re going to cover today will work the same in any version unless otherwise noted.  One thing that is different between versions is the icons themselves – new icons are added and occasionally icons are changed or removed or, more likely, renamed or redesigned.  This can even happen mid-version, so something to keep an eye out for, particularly if you want to use the very latest icons.  If your project doesn’t already use FontAwesome, just pick the highest version available from the “Manage JavaScript Libraries” list and you’re done! If you’d like to use a  particular version of the FontAwesome library, or a particular CDN, or even host the libraries yourself, then the usual approach of adding files to your Project.html file works just fine as well.  Or you can use the JavaScript Library Manager to update the list to suit your particular needs.  Both FontAwesome themselves as well as any reputable CDN will […]

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Managing displays with the Multi-Screen Window Placement API

TMS Software

With the release of Google Chrome 100 came the new Multi-Screen Window Placement API. This API allows you to enumerate the displays connected to your machine and to place windows on specific screens. We’ve wrapped this API with TMS WEB Core, so that you can use this inside your Web Applications with minimal effort.  Before we had this API, we could use the window.open() to control windows. This method however, is unaware of additional screens. We can specify the position by passing the coordinates as left and top and pass the size as width and height. To get the information about the current screen we could check the window.screen property.  How to use First of all we have to check if the API is supported. we can simply do this by calling the GetScreenAvailability function. this will return true if it is supported.  To get all necessary screen information you can call the following asynchronous function: GetScreensInfo. This will result in a TJSScreenInfo object containing a list of all the available displays as well as the current screen the window is rendered on.  screens := await(TJSScreeninfo, GetScreensInfo); screens.OnCurrentScreenChange := DoCurrentScreensChange; screens.OnScreensChange := DoScreensChanged; The Screens object also has 2 events: OnCurrentScreenChange: This event updates the screens object when the web application changes screen. OnScreenChange: This event updates the screens object when the browser detects that the displays have been changed.(i.e. adding/removing a display) The Screens object looks like this on my machine. As you can see I have to 2 Displays connected to my machine. And my CurrentScreen is “External Display 2” which is not my primary screen. Using the left and top properties of the TJSScreenDetails object, we can accurately position our window wherever we want on the display that you want. Before we can use the Multi-Screen Window Placement API we must ask the user for permission to use it. To do this, we can call the GetPermissions function. Be aware that this function is asynchronous. so you’ll have to await it. you can use it like this: allowed := await(boolean, GetPermissions); Weather around the world! Using this API we made a demo application that let’s you check the weather in several locations all around the world. If you have a multi display setup the weather popups will be shown on the screen the web application is not currently on.  The result will be something like this when clicking the button. Screen 1: Screen 2: And a screenshot from both screens together: To make this possible, we simply calculate how large the windows can be if we want to show a 5 x 2 table of windows. w := Math.floor((screens.screens[i].availableWidth – FColumns * 1) / FColumns); h := Math.floor((screens.screens[i].availableHeight – FRows * 51) / FRows); After that we loop over the columns and rows and calculate for each window the X and Y offset. we than add it to a WindowFeatures string and call the CreatePopup function.  for j := 0 to FColumns -1 do begin for k := 0 to FRows -1 do begin x := j * w + screens.screens[i].availableLeft + j * 1; y := k * h + screens.screens[i].availableTop + k * 51; Features := ” + ‘screenX=’ + IntToStr(x)+ ‘,’ + ‘screenY=’ + IntToStr(y)+ ‘,’ + ‘width=’ + IntToStr(w)+ ‘,’ + ‘height=’ + IntToStr(h)+ ‘,’ […]

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How To Build Python Applications For Android Using DelphiFMX

Delphi, Noutați

This video is a continuation of the development of applications in Python using the Delphi GUI frameworks. Delphi and Python are two powerful programming languages that are not just ideal for windows application development but also for other platforms. Previously, Jim McKeeth introduced us to Delphi VCL for Python Module which gives developers the ability to take the powerful and mature GUI frameworks of Delphi’s VCL and use them in a Python coding environment. This time, the webinar will focus on another module, the DelphiFMX4Python which supports building Python applications for Android using the FireMonkey GUI library. How to build an Android App in Python using the Delphi FMX library module This webinar almost shares the same agenda as the first video where we build a functioning application in Python using Delphi’s powerful GUI library. However, instead of Windows-native VCL, this session will focus on Delphi’s cross-platform Firemonkey framework using the Delphi FMX module. Firemonkey takes advantage of GPU libraries to provide a hardware-accelerated, rich, user interface that is fast and looks great across multiple platforms. This library is compatible with Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux. The main course of this webinar will focus primarily on Android where Jim Mckeeth will demonstrate the process from installation to Android deployment. Aside from basic samples, the video will also show how you can take your Android app further by combining the strengths of Delphi and Python. The webinar will demonstrate how surprisingly easy to customize the Android app using the pre-built android application where all the source code is already available. It will also tackle how the Python4Delphi library can serve as a bidirectional bridge that allows you to develop parts of your app in Delphi and other parts in Python, merging both languages into a single cohesive solution. To learn more about DelphiFMX for Python, feel free to watch the video below. 

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