Agile Project Management: Scrum

Many people have heard of it, but what exactly is Scrum? - Do twice the work in half the time!

Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products in which people can address complex, adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value. Scrum has been used to develop software, hardware, embedded software, networks of interacting function, autonomous vehicles, schools, government, marketing, managing the operation of organizations and almost everything we use in our daily lives, as individuals and societies. As technology, market, and environmental complexities and their interactions have rapidly increased, Scrum’s utility in dealing with complexity is proven daily. Agile is a philosophy or movement. An alternative to traditional waterfall projects management. A team that collaborates actively in small iterations to make specific updates to products and services.

It provides a mechanism for constant feedback on evolution. It grants added value to customers right from the 1st iteration.

The agile project management philosophy is based in 4 values:

• Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools
• Working Software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Agile project management is not carried out for the customer but rather WITH the customer.

React

There are lots of different frameworks for web frontends, so why and when should you choose React?

React was released in May 2013 by Facebook and since has been maintained very well and regularly. Compared to other frameworks like Angular, which has been developed by Google, and Vue.js, a powerful community driven web framework, React uses a virtual DOM, which allows partial renders to increase performance when it comes to a big bunch of data.

Overall React may be described as an unopinionated framework allowing developers to make use of their experience in various technologies and frameworks. On the one hand, developers may integrate technologies and frameworks (e.g. bootstrap) they are comfortable and experienced with, but on the other hand, this fact allows introduction of cutting-edge technology like GraphQL. – It’s your choice!

Furthermore, React Native offers a mature platform to develop cross-platform mobile apps for Android and iOS. Although there are lots of limitations in terms of hardware and platform specific commands, React Native is well suited to kick-start an idea quickly at low cost.

Summing all up, React is the perfect choice for:

• Rapid web frontend prototypes
• Responsive web applications
• Large enterprise scale web applications
• Mobile applications

Node-RED

Money doesn’t grow on trees, so why start with a full stack solution right away?

We’ve seen a quite some companies introducing enterprise software right away, before even attempting to perform a user acceptance evaluation. As a result, lots of expensive software is never being used at all or sometimes not as intended. In other cases, no available solution fits the environment to solve problems, but development of a classic application just does not pay off.

Node-RED, which has originally been developed by IBM and is now being maintained by the public domain, enables us to rapidly build, deploy and integrate prototypes and small-scale applications at low cost in no time. Thanks to its Node.js core, there are thousands of packages to interact with a big variety of systems:

• Databases
• Electronic hardware of any kind
• Dashboards
• Mail servers
• Files (documents, images, etc.)
• Many more...

We’ve already setup the following Node-RED systems:

• Mail crawler
• KPI Dashboard
• Enterprise resource planning prototype
• Microcontroller debugger
• Newsletter scheduler
• Operations monitor
• REST consumer and endpoints

In conclusion, if there’s a recurring task in someone’s daily business, Node-RED can most likely automate this task with less than no effort.

MongoDB

NoSQL, MongoDB, Big Data– What’s all that? Are classic SQL databases outdated?

MongoDB is on everyone’s lips and there are lots of success stories around the internet. But take a minute or two and analyse what most of them have in common: Big Data
The term big data is often related to storage and analysis of huge amounts of data, mostly related to user behaviour or sensor data.

Ok now, so what’s the story behind Big Data and MongoDB?
The very basic idea is simple: Transactions, Constraints, Joins, Stored Procedures? – No need, just give me more freedom and performance!

MongoDB as a NoSQL (“non-SQL” or “not only SQL”) is based on a few simple concepts:

1. by default no schema is enforced – you may store any JSON object in a collection (equivalent to a table)
2. use of JSON structures to query the database
3. emphasizes on CAP theorem (Consistency, Availablity and Partition tolerance) – no ACID theorem!
4. best suitable for storage of hierarchical data
5. horizontal scaling – just add another server, if you need more performance

In simple words, MongoDB offers a rudimental, but highly performant database, which seamlessly integrates into Javascript.

Predictive and Prescriptive Maintenance

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. The Goal is to turn data into information, and information into knowledge.”

Data Analytics – Knowledge for Decision-Making

Company - Problems identified from practice

• An ideal maintenance operation which consider the optimal point in time, as well as the attrition is not possible, due to missing linkage of product, process and machine data.
• Missing knowledge about influencing factors that lead to malfunctions of components.
• Incomplete and redundant data acquisition leads to limited and not significant data stocks.
• The potential of data recording and analysis through condition monitoring is unexhausted due to the lack of operation and selection systematics.
• An inaccurate prediction of moments when components fail leads to:
• Premature change of components or tools and hence underutilization.
• Delayed maintenance operations and thus to a variety of unscheduled downtimes.
• Consequences are a decreased ability to react, increasing maintenance costs and a reduced availability of facilities.

Knowledge – Based Maintenance

The way from raw data to knowledge can be very laborious, therefore the requirements of quality, quantity and availability should be given. Different analytical processes are executed to get significant solutions/information and create knowledge out of that for future predictions and usage.

Predictive Maintenance – Knowledge Discovery and Prediction Capability

What will happen?

• Prediction of future events, based on historical and real-time collected maintenance data
• Equipment or system failure is predicted and preventative actions can be taken

Predictive Maintenance – Adaption Capability and Optimization Capability

How can we make it happen?

• Providing recommendations for improving/optimizing forthcoming maintenance processes
• Completely automated maintenance workflow, machines “self-diagnose” and schedule maintenance

Vue

“Simplify web development - check out Vue.js, the open source progressive JavaScript framework used to develop interactive web interfaces.”

A short overview - What is Vue.js?

• A library for building interactive web interfaces.
• Benefits are the reactive data binding and composable view componenets.
• The framework is not full blown, focused on the view layer (frontend) only.
• Perfectly capable of powering sophisticated Single-Page Applications.
• Easy to pick up and integrate with other libraries or existing projects.

Vue.js is very popular today, the first version was released in Feb 2014 created by an ex-employee from Google Evan You. The idea of Evan You behind this framework is to build the best framework by combining the best features from already existing Angular and react Frameworks. So, he came up with the idea of building his own framework. He picked the best parts of Angular, like template syntax, easy to use, and picked the best parts of React as well, like two-way data binding, the concept of props, component-based approach, and combined them to make a new framework Vue.js better than both of them. The framework is designed to learn and understand it fast, make progress and build interactive web interfaces in matter of time. The Vue. js component system allows us to build large-scale applications composed of small, self-contained, and reusable components.

Important Vue-Features

Vue provides to work with reusable components, templates and reactivity which detects changes on components and therefore rerenders the affected elements.

The important features of this framework stated briefly:

• Virtual DOM - DOM stands for Document Object Model. It is the hierarchical representation of the web page(UI).
• Data Binding - Two way binding, helps manipulate or assign values to HTML attributes, change the style and assign classes.
• Components - create custom elements, which can be reused in HTML.
• Event Handling - attributes added to the DOM elements to listen to the events
• Animation/Transition - built-in transition component that needs to be wrapped around the element for transition effect. It is easy to add third party animation libraries and also add more interactivity to the interface.
• Computed Properties - helps to listen to the changes made to the UI elements and performs the necessary calculations. There is no need of additional coding for this.
• Templates - HTML-based templates that bind the DOM with the Vue instance data. Vue compiles the templates into virtual DOM Render functions.
• Directives - built-in directives such as v-if, v-else, v-show, v-on, v-bind, and v-model, which are used to perform various actions on the frontend.
• Watchers - applied to data that changes, For example form input elements.
• Routing - The Navigation between pages is performed with the help of vue-router.
• Lightweight - VueJS script is very lightweight and the performance is also very fast.

Why VUE.js? In a nutshell...

Vue.js is user- and developer-friendly, has tons of useful libraries, a solid community and a great toolset. It’s also easy to learn, and it’s flexible by nature. It takes care of performance issues and scales well. One of the best choices for large scale applications. Most important advantages are felxibility, handy conventions, future-proof, developer-friendly, learns from others’ mistakes, Performant and size-efficient, progressive, popular - and chosen by the best.

We use contents based on vuejs.org, vuejs.de, tutorialspoint.com/vuejs/, programmerwiki.com/article/69022032943/ to advertise vue.js and make it popular. Thanks to that incredible sources.