Tech For Non Techies

Are you a non-techie who wants to understand more about the world of technology? Meet Ahmad El-Alfy, the CTO of Robusta with over 15 years of experience in software development. Ahmad specializes in frontend development with a focus on accessibility (a11y) and has a unique talent for breaking down technical jargon into easy-to-understand language for non-technical stakeholders. Join his upcoming session to learn more about how technology works and how it can benefit you and your business, regardless of your technical background.

Transcript

1. Ahmad El-Alfy / 26 August 2023 Tech for Non-Techies Exploring the Software Development Life Cycle, Methodologies, and Deliverables for Non-Technical Audiences
2. Hi • I work as the CTO of Robusta Technology Group. • Have around 8 years of experience in managing software development teams. • A signi fi cant part of my daily work involves communicating technical concepts to non-technical individuals (customers, designers, account managers … etc). • Started my software career as a self taught freelancer beside practicing medicine and surgery, then I decided to quit medicine permanently in 2011. • I am self proclaimed accessibility fanatic and I share considerable amount of bad puns and memes every day.
3. @ahmadalfy in/ahmadalfy
4. Why are we here? Almost all of us deal with technology on a daily basis. This world is driven by technology, and software lies at the heart of every digital product you encounter. A lot of business are built on top of that. They provide services that is delivered through software they own. You could be working in a company that does that or maybe you have an idea and you are interested in building your own company. In this session, we aim to demystify this world together. We will talk about how software is built, what type of functions or teams that can do it, the terminologies they use to communicate; so you can have meaningful conversations with those people without feeling that you’re left out.
5. Software Development Life Cycle
6. We want you to build as a skyscraper
8. The steps you need to build anything • Conceptualize and verify Idea • Requirements Gathering • Design and Planning • Construction • Testing and Quality assurance • Opening and Celebration 🎉 • Maintenance and Update • Conceptualize and verify Idea • Requirements Gathering • Design and Planning • Development • Testing and Quality assurance • Deployment and Release 😭 • Maintenance and Update
9. Requirements Gathering This is usually carried out by the di ff erent stakeholders involved. A stakeholder is anyone invested in the project. We could have external like the client or internal like project manager, designer, testers developers … etc.
10. Project Manager The project manager is responsible for overseeing the entire software development process. They coordinate and communicate with the team, stakeholders, and clients. Their role involves planning, organizing, setting deadlines, managing resources, and ensuring that the project is delivered successfully within budget and on time. Any Updates
11. Product Owner The Product Owner represents the interests of the stakeholders and acts as the bridge between the development team and the clients or end-users. They are responsible for defining and prioritizing the product backlog, making decisions on features and functionalities, and ensuring that the software aligns with the overall product vision.
12. Designer Designers are responsible for creating the visual and experiential aspects of the software. They work on user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design, focusing on making the software intuitive, visually appealing, and user-friendly. Designers collaborate with developers to translate design concepts into functional interfaces.
13. Developers Developers are responsible for writing the code that brings the software to life. They implement the functionality, features, and logic based on the requirements and design specifications. They collaborate with designers, testers, and other team members throughout the development process.
14. Testers Testers, also known as quality assurance (QA) or software testers, play a crucial role in ensuring the software's quality. They create and execute test cases to identify bugs, errors, and vulnerabilities in the software. Testers work closely with developers to resolve issues and ensure the software meets the desired standards.
15. Design and Planning
16. Designers: Mockups and Wireframes
19. Developers
25. Product Owners
26. User Story
29. Development
32. Manifesto for Agile Software Development We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools • Working software over comprehensive documentation • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation • Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
33. SCRUM Roles 
 Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team Events 
 Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective Artifacts 
 Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Increment
34. Sprint planning
35. How does it go • Product owner starts by prioritizing the stories the team will be working on. • Developers verify the estimates added to the stories. • Developers align together and discuss any intersections and seek clarifications and answers to any ambiguous parts. • Sprint stories moved from the backlog to the sprint backlog and assigned to the corresponding developers. • Team commits to delivering these stories.
37. Fibonacci numbers Fibonacci numbers are often used to represent the relative difficulty or complexity of user stories or tasks during estimation. The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. It helps teams focus on relative sizing rather than absolute values, reducing the tendency to overestimate or underestimate tasks. It encourages discussions among team members during estimation, leading to a shared understanding of the work and fostering collaboration and alignment.
38. Daily Scrum
39. JIRA
41. Sprint Review
42. Sprint Retrospective
43. Next Sprint
45. Let’s take a closer look at the development team
46. Participate in Scrum Activities Write Code Review Code Fix bugs Ship features Create Artifact Specializations • Front-end Developer • Back-end Developer • Full-stack Developer • Mobile App Developer • DevOps Engineer • Architect • Data Scientist
55. How do all these people work together?
57. Is this the only way?
58. Low-code platforms Low-code systems are development platforms that enable the creation of software applications with minimal hand-coding, using visual interfaces and declarative approaches These platforms can help with rapid application development and increase developers productivity. They are characterized by being easy to use, having great integration capabilities and allowing collaboration between di ff erent team members. By leveraging low-code systems, organizations can accelerate application development, and drive innovation, ultimately delivering software solutions more e ffi ciently and e ff ectively.
60. How do we produce an artifact or share the results with the stakeholders?
68. Monitoring
69. User behavior monitoring
70. Analytics
71. Crashes
72. Performance Monitoring
73. Questions?