Geekify Session 2 : Research and Development
Sequel to the maiden edition of the Tech team’s Geekify session which held in May, another geekify session was held on the 30th of June, 2016 which was centered around Research and Development.
To this effect, two members of the Research & Development / Automation Unit made a brief presentation on what it is the team does and then cited some of their notable achievements
Niyi Adedotun made his presentation first but began by introducing the team and its activities. Some of the activities he highlighted includes researching and implementing new technologies and ientifying and solving company wide technological problems with the use of new and existing tools.
He went ahead to dwell more on Message Oriented Architecture using a new framework the team had been adopting called NServiceBus.He described NServiceBus as a lightweight messaging framework for designing distributed systems in .NET. Some of the advatages of adopting the framework which he emphasized is the fact that the framework is an enterprise service bus which helps to make distributed systems more reliable, scalable and extensible. He stated that the framework is open source but not free meaning that license has to be bought for the Enterprise version.
While rounding offf his presentation, he explained many of the features of the NServiceBus and also did a short demo of how one of our applications adopt the framework.
Afterwards, Segun Olulana went ahead to explain how the team had been able to achieve seamless automated Code Analysis and Automated Testing using Sonarqube and Robot Framework respectively. He explained that Sonarqube is an open source platform for continuous inspection of code quality which works for several programming languages and highly configurable and versatile. He revealed that Sonarqube could even provide a way to view Technical Debt of codes and also has an ElasticSearch back-end. Sonarqube can also be integrated with Jenkins and can be configured to give alerts as desired.
Segun also explained the Robot Framework as a tool for automating functional tests which automatically opens browsers and clicks elements on pages without human assistance. It works with Selenium at the Backend in a domain specific language that is easily used by non programmers. The Robot framework can also be integrated with Jenkins as well.
He concluded his presentation by displaying screenshots showing results of different codes that were analysed using Sonarqube.
All in all, the Geekify session was an insightful one as many developers had many questions and contributions to make. The DCTO, Mr Deji Kadiri was also available to answer many of the questions that were put forward.
