Interpretations of technorealism

Entrepreneurship Moments

2012-01-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

Who is an entrepreneur?

In the mid 1980’s, Harvard Business School professor Howard Stevenson defined Entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled”. Theoretically anybody who demonstrates the aforesaid behavior can be an Entrepreneur.

What it takes to be an entrepreneur?

Unfortunately for many, being an entrepreneur is an end state and it requires harsh trade-offs. Some leave stable jobs to chase that one Big idea. Others start by putting together a business plan backed by a detailed market research. Even some start by searching for the right angel investor. Often times, the very entrepreneurial spirit perishes in the complexities it entails.

Is it really that arduous to be an entrepreneur?

Not if we treat entrepreneurship as a journey, a collection of contiguous decision points and apply our entrepreneurial spirit at each of those. John Burgstone in his book, ‘Breakthrough Entrepreneurship” writes “Every time you want to make any important decision, there are two possible courses of action. You can look at the array of choices that present themselves, pick the best available option and try to make it fit. Or, you can do what the true entrepreneur does: Figure out the best conceivable option and then make it available.”

So the right question would be “did I act like an entrepreneur” today? Yesterday? Everyday? If answer is consistently yes, you are an habitual entrepreneur.

Analytics using R: Most active in my Twitter list

2011-11-26T22:51:00.001-08:00

I follow some 80 odd people/ news sources on my twitter account. For a while I wondered which of these sources are most active on twitter. I picked a simple metric '# of status messages posted to twitter' as the measure of activity. Using R I quickly wrote a program to generate my top 10 most active twitter sources.

Here is the bar plot of the result

As expected news sources dominate the list. Among individuals "Michael Hyatt" and "Jurgen Appelo" are most active.

If you are interested in 'R', here is the code to extract this report:

## Prerequisite: Install twitteR package 'install.packages(twitteR)
## load twitteR package
library(twitteR)

##get handle to a twitteR user object (in this case for user d_lalit
tuser <- getUser('d_lalit')

##get list of friends of d_lalit
tfriends <- userFriends(tuser)

##create an array to store the name and number of status messages for each friend
friendsCount <- length(tfriends)
friendsName <- character(friendsCount)
friendsMsgCount <- numeric(friendsCount)

for (i in 1:friendsCount) {
  friendsName[i] <- tfriends[[i]]$screenName
  friendsMsgCount[i] <- as.numeric(tfriends[[i]]$statusesCount)
}

## prepare a sortedlist and extract top 10 values from the list
sortedlist <- sort(friendsMsgCount, index.return = TRUE, decreasing=TRUE)
top10friendsName <- character(10)
top10friendsMsgCount <- numeric(10)

for (i in 1:10) {
  top10friendsName[i] <- friendsName[sortedlist$ix[[i]]] ## index is stored under ix
  top10friendsMsgCount[i] <- as.numeric(sortedlist$x[[i]])
}

## plot the chart
barplot(top10friendsMsgCount, width = 0.25, names.arg = top10friendsName, horiz=FALSE, main="Twitter friends by activity count", ylab="Number of status messages", xlab="twitter friends", space=0.2, density=50, angle=45, cex.names=0.7)

I realize the code is not optimally written. Any suggestions refine the code will be appreciated.

Update: 11/29/2011
In the latest version of twitteR package, the method userFriends() has been deprecated. You may replace line#9 in the above code as with the code given below:

tfriends <- tuser$getFriends()

Cheapest Tablet in the World - Made in India

2011-10-27T21:14:00.000-07:00

Check out "Akash" - World's cheapest tablet. It is unabashedly optimized for cost. To be priced at $35 a piece (subsidized by Govt of India) for educational institutes and $60 a piece for retail sale.

Aakash Tablet from Venturebeat on Vimeo.

Specifications

Screen: 7-inches; 800-by-400 pixels; Resistive touchscreen
Operating system: Android 2.2, Froyo
Processor: 366 MHz Connexant; HD Video co-processor (both with graphics accelerators)
Memory: 256MB RAM (internal); 2GB Flash (external)
Storage: 2GB card included, expandable up to 32GB
Ports: Two USB 2.0; 3.5mm audio out jack; 3.5mm audio in jack (No built-in speakers)
Connectivity: GPRS; Wi-Fi 802.11 a,b,g
Power: Up to 180 minutes on battery; AC adapter, 200-240 volt
Weight: 350 grams

How great leaders inspire action

2011-10-16T21:37:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite talks from TED by Simon Sinek.

Simple, effective and insightful.

Agile tour pune - 2011

2011-10-15T21:37:00.000-07:00

I delivered a talk on "Scaling agility" in the enterprise at Agile Tour 2011 @Pune. It was a great experience addressing some 70 odd agile enthusiasts, including some renowned thought leaders in the industry.

The talk aimed to answer the following questions:

- What are the typical challenges faced by enterprises while scaling agility (slides 8 ~ 12)
- Why we can not leave it to self organizing teams to manage scaling of agility (slide 14)
- What values the agile leaders should espouse for successful scaling of agility, in the form of a manifesto (slides 15-28)

Scaling agility - Story of a chicken

View more presentations from Lalatendu Das

Any suggestion or feedback to further improve the content will be appreciated.

A Chicken's manifesto for scaling agility

2011-10-10T22:42:00.000-07:00

In agile Scrum parlance, the term 'Chicken' refers to those who are involved (but not committed) in the project and stand to benefit from it. Examples: Managers, Leaders, Coaches, Sponsors etc.

In a typical Scrum team, the role of Chicken is somewhat marginalized, at times to the extent of being derogatory. However as organizations Scale agility from doing individual pilot projects to enterprise wide Agile adoption, the role of Chickens assumes significant importance. A thoughtful organizational change management by the Chickens, can be the differentiating factor between success and failure.

Introducing 'A chickens manifesto for scaling agility':
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"As responsible agile practitioners, we are optimizing the value delivered through agile software development by adopting innovative practices. In addition to the manifesto for agile software development, we have come to value:

attitude over skill

adaptability over predictability

effectiveness over efficiency

optimizing the whole over improvement in parts

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I picked these values based on my own experience of scaling agility from a small team to be an enterprise wide phenomenon. Keeping your agile adoption journey in context, do you identify with the above mentioned? Do you have any other useful values to add?

Please leave a comment.

Offline Google Docs - Too little too late

2011-09-02T04:31:00.000-07:00

Google (re)announced offline feature on Google docs recently. For those who noticed, would also remember that Google Gears was decommissioned nearly an year ago, hence this new HTML 5 version took too long to get to beta status. Is the new offline version worth the wait?

I guess not..here are some important notes about new offline capability (source: Google Docs help)

You'll need to Set up Docs offline from your Documents List to start accessing your documents and spreadsheets without an Internet connection.
Offline access is available in Chrome only. (Oops!)
Offline access is available only for documents and spreadsheets. Presentations, drawings and other items from your Documents List are not available offline at this time.
(humm..okay..it's in Beta anyway)
Documents and spreadsheets are only available in view-only mode. You must restore your Internet connection to make any edits. (??!@#? - useless..I stopped reading next two points)
You can't create new documents and spreadsheets while you're offline.
You'll need to allow offline access separately on each computer where you want to view your Google Docs offline.

I wish Evernote comes up with a spreadsheet application. Till then, I will stick to the 'online' google docs..

Best Practices for Agile Managers

2011-08-30T03:53:00.000-07:00

Agile Managers! Sounds like an Oxymoron?

In reality, there are organizations which have functional or product manager roles which do not fit under the traditional roles defined by agile methods. Jurgen Appelo started a thread (on his blog) to capture the best practices for a newly minted agile manager.

Here is what I think (as interpreted from the Agile principles)..please add on if I missed anything important

An agile manager should:

Focus on optimizing the "business value" being delivered by the agile team. You may decide on your own metrics for business value (qualitative, quantitative or gut feel), but key is to have a sense ..at all times
Pursue delivery of a fully working software at end of each sprint
Periodically (pick your own frequency) Review and optimize the 'Done' list
Identify key stakeholders and ensure their participation (as required) during the entire project life cycle
Set expectations clearly (with all stakeholders), manage expectations to avoid last minute surprises
Make an genuine effort to understand all aspects of the project (example: if you are not technical, don't avoid the architecture all together, try to gather just enough understanding)
Set up information radiators (to convey real time information to all stakeholders)
Focus on attaining a sustainable velocity quickly and early in the project life-cycle (it helps in planning and avoids burn outs)
Watch out for 'Smells' (things which might be an impediment to agile practices

Last but not the least, an agile manager should demonstrate thought leadership and show genuine concern for professional growth of each member of the team. It's essential for the agile manager to win the respect of the team. You would always be better of by being a 'Leader' rather than a 'Manager'

Myths of agility

2011-08-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

In the context of Software development, the term “agility” is widely misunderstood. Even many seasoned software engineers associate agility with complex process changes to adopt ‘Agile’ methods such as XP, SCRUM, DSDM, FDD and Crystal etc. But in reality, this specious association can’t be any farther from the truth. Before you join the ‘Agile’ bandwagon and start reading a XP or SCRUM book, it is essential for you to understand the fine line between ‘Agile methods’ and being ‘agile’.

Being ‘agile’ is a state where your organization is completely adaptive to changing environment. You are driven by business value. Your entire infrastructure, not just IT department but also other business functions such as sales, marketing, finance, production, procurement etc look to maximize the business value generated for the organizations. All it requires certain level of maturity in the way you work, nothing else matters. In the context of Software development, you can adopt any methodology you like (yes, even waterfall, RUP) as long as you focus on a) maximizing “Business value” instead of “through-put” b) being “Adaptive” instead of being “Predictive” c) and Continuous sustainable improvement. All that ‘Agile’ methods do, is to enable some of the aforesaid attributes a bit more than any other traditional methods (such as Waterfall, RUP etc).

Looking from a holistic perspective, being agile is the end goal of all organization and adopting an ‘Agile’ method (for that matter any other software development method) is just a mean to achieve the end goal. However it’s unfortunate to see many organizations blindly adopt XP or Scrum process without giving sufficient thoughts to the values required to make an organization truly agile. It is, therefore obvious that such changes fail over long run.

If you care for being agile, have a look at the Principles behind agile methods. Have a open discussion within your team to determine what each principle means to you as a group. Look at your existing processes and see if they adhere to these principles (fully or partially). Start working on those processes which needs refinement. Change if you must, but only after fully grasping what change means to the overall organization. Rest assured you will ensure a successful and sustainable process change towards being truly agile.

Where do good ideas come from?

2011-07-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

"Chance favors the connected minds" - Steven Johnson

Software G Forces: The effects of acceleration

2011-07-05T19:22:00.000-07:00

Kent Beck delivered this talk at USENIX 2011

Abstract:
- Effective software engineering is a relative term. As deployment cycles shrink, what constitutes effective software engineering changes radically. Developers must reflect on and choose the right set of software engineering practices based on their release cycle

Carson's Law

2011-06-04T18:07:00.000-07:00

Learnt something new about modern day innovation.

Carson's Law (by Curtis Carlson, the C.E.O. of SRI International, in Silicon Valley) states:

“In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.”

As a result, says Carlson, the sweet spot for innovation today is “moving down,” closer to the people, not up, because all the people together are smarter than anyone alone and all the people now have the tools to invent and collaborate.

My 2 cents:
Modern day leadership is all about creating a conducive environment where the bottoms up innovations are encouraged and validated real time.

thoughts?

My first 'R' plot

2011-05-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

Started learning 'R'.
My first attempt was to plot data from Forbes 1000 list (refer to the exercise posted by Prasoon sharma)

Here is a bubble chart showing Forbes top 25 companies by Market Capitalization

Source code:

## read the csv file
FORBES.DF <- read.csv("forbes2000list_for_2011.csv")

## assign titles
names(FORBES.DF)<- c("Rank", "Company", "Country", "Industry", "Sales", "Profits", "Assets", "MarketCap")

## create a smaller vector
Forbes100ByMC <- FORBES.DF[order(-FORBES.DF$MarketCap),][1:100,]
Forbes25 <- Forbes100ByMC[1:25, ]

## plot the bubble chart using 'symbols'
radius <- sqrt(Forbes25$MarketCap/pi)
sales <- as.numeric(as.character(Forbes25$Sales))
profits <- as.numeric(as.character(Forbes25$Profits))

symbols(sales, profits, circles=radius, inches=0.9, fg="white", bg="light blue", xlab="Sales($'Billions)", ylab="Profits($'Billions)", main="Forbes 25 By Market Capitalization", xlim=c(min(range(sales))-50, max(range(sales))+50), ylim=c(min(range(profits))-2, max(range(profits))+2))
## print the names of companies
text(sales, profits, Forbes25$Company, cex=0.6, col="dark red")

Any feedback toward writting better 'R' code is welcome.

Learning

2011-05-04T07:04:00.000-07:00

How do you approach the most critical objective of your organization?

Probably you would start by qualifying this objective and start a project to accomplish it. Break it down to smaller goals, milestones and put some planning around it? May be you would further break down the goals into small actionable items and schedule some activities. Some of you would setup a rhythm to periodically accomplish the smaller tasks in order to realize your grand objective.

No matter whatever process or methodology you follow, you would certainly NOT leave your most critical objective to chance..certainly NOT by adopting an ad-hoc approach.

My moment of epiphany arrived when I realized "Continuous Self Learning" is the most critical aspect of my career. Probably the same applies to most of the readers of this blog.

So, how to you approach your personal 'Learning'? Is there a method? Or is it left to chance?

VMWare Cloud Foundry

2011-04-14T15:14:00.000-07:00

VMWare launched Colud foundry, an open extensible PaaS cloud built entirely on Ruby. VMWare is focusing on the following 3 key differentiators

Multi-cloud - Enables seamless transition between Private, public and hybrid clouds
Multi-framework - Spring (Java), Rails (Ruby) and Node.js - extensible to other frameworks
Multiple applications

Checkout this quick intro

VMWare is pitching the Cloud Foundry directly to the developer community. This strategy is well summarized by this quote by one of the VMWare developers "Developers should write code, not IT trouble tickets"..

Time will tell how well the developer community adopts this new service. Nonetheless, VMWare has managed to set itself apart from the multitudes of 'also ran's (read other run of the mill cloud service providers).

jStat: Advanced Statistics using Javascript

2011-03-23T12:10:00.000-07:00

While 'R' is getting enterprise ready, it's no longer the only open source option for advanced statistical programming. jStat.js is the new kid on the block.

Things in favor of jStat:

Based on Javascript, jQuery - future is assured
Light-weight
Ability to visualize data using flot (jQuery plugin)

Still no match for 'R' yet (complete API documentation is yet to come out), but certainly a bright prospect in application which require basic statistical analysis and data visualization (where 'R' is an overkill).

Possibilities with jStat.js - check this out

Thinking out loud..
Node.js + jStat.js ...=..=!=..=... RIP 'R' ??

Demystifying the financial Crisis

2011-03-14T16:11:00.000-07:00

A small presentation I prepared to explain the Causes of the Subprime led Financial Crisis.

Subprime Financial Crisis on Prezi

Please feel free to give feedback.

The travels of a T-Shirt in the global economy

2011-03-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

Read an interesting book "The travels of a T-Shirt in the global economy". Author Piethra Rivoli traces the travels of an ubiquitous T-Shirt, from the cotton fields of western Texas to the manufacturing bases in china, back to the US market and then to continetal Africa. In the process she introduces the complex labyrinth of market forces in place, global trade, protectionism and power.

A bit detailed at times, but still interesting read if you want to understand global trades..

Seth Godin on Leadership

2011-03-12T17:55:00.000-08:00

"Say what you believe, see who follows."

Inspiring!

Exclusive interview with Seth Godin from GiANT Impact on Vimeo.

Tipping point by Malcolm Gladwell

2011-02-28T16:51:00.000-08:00

Just completed reading 'Tipping Point: How little things can make a big difference' by Malcolm Gladwell.

The book primarily covers three basic rules that apply to spread of any epidemic. Those are [sic]:

Law of the few: There are always Early adopters for any new idea. Success of the idea depends on the work and influence of the Early adopters. Typically Early adopters can be one of the following categories a) Mavens - One who accumulates knowledge b) Connectors- Who knows a lot of people c) Salesmen - People who can influence others
Stickiness Factor: There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is to find it.
Power of Context: Human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.

While the author discusses the above mentioned points in the context of epidemics in general, in hindsight, these laws have profound application in Managing Organizational Change. I would certainly apply these rules, when I plan next to introduce a new process in the organization.

When Agile becomes Anarchy

2011-02-15T12:57:00.000-08:00

I have seen successful agile teams innovating on process front..and quite successfully so. While I am in favor of such evolution in Agile ecosystem, what bothers me is the resulting lack of discipline.

One of our high performing project teams has successfully implemented Kanban processes into Scrum framework, but to my surprise, in the process the team has lost focus on some key agile processes. For example, there is neither any sprint commitment (Scrum CTQ*) nor any limit on WIP items of each workflow state (Kanban CTQ*). While the team continues to measure sprint velocity, the complete lack of predictability is equally puzzling (i.e Avg Sprint velocity assumed to be 40 SP**, where as, for last number of quarters team is consistently maintaining a higher velocity). To the credit of this particular project team, it's successful in meeting sponsor expectations (The process works!?..so it seems.)

While some teams can get away with such transient process implementation (like the aforesaid team), in order to be successful over a long run, I would strongly recommend to bring in process rigor.

Agile is already lean on processes, but it requires a disciplined approach towards maximizing value from it's limited set of processes. Keeping with the ethos of 'Inspect and Adapt' if you plan to change any of the existing processes, consider this simple approach:

Make sure the process changes doesn't break any of the agile values or practices
As a project team, discuss and agree on the new set of processes to be adopted (if possible share with others as well - make it public)
As a team commit to the new processes with utmost discipline

Agile without discipline would result in Anarchy.
It may work for you today but you can never be sure how it turns up tomorrow.

Thoughts? Reactions?

*CTQ - Critical To Quality
**SP - Story Points

If Powerpoint were designed today..

2011-02-14T08:02:00.000-08:00

Check out SlideRocket - Enables development of sleek presentations powered with
- Online polling
- Rich Media
- RealTime data
- Online sharing

Which feature(s) do you find to be useful?

Android 3.0: Honeycomb - Preview

2011-02-01T07:48:00.000-08:00

My LinkedIn InMap

2011-01-25T12:52:00.000-08:00

Shown above is my "InMap" (Infographics on my LinkedIn Connection).
My Reading? Got to connect with professionals from more diverse background.

Visualize your network at: http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com

Google Goggles

2011-01-10T12:50:00.000-08:00

nice :-)

Weekend reading

2011-01-09T17:32:00.000-08:00

Three short links that caught my attention

Free developer e-books: http://refcardz.dzone.com/
Steps to use firebug-lite on Internet Explorer: link
On a lighter note - 15 biggest flops in Tech for 2010

The Agilists - Facebook Group

2010-10-26T11:30:00.000-07:00

I have created a Facebook group (what is it?) named 'The Agilists'. As the name suggests, this forum is dedicated to foster collaboration among all agile practitioners (starting with those in my network).

If you are an agile practitioner or just interested to stay tuned, please feel free to join the group by clicking on the below link.
- Join 'The Agilists'

NOTE - Having a Facebook account is a prerequisite.

Frameworks enabling XP Engineering Practices on Android Platform

2010-10-18T13:53:00.000-07:00

My recommended frameworks enabling engineering practices for android development:

Test Driven development: Use android Test Instrumentation Framework (Android extension to JUnit framework)
Automated Blackbox/Functional testing: Consider Robotium (Selenium for Android)

If you are interested, check these out (at your own risk)

Automated Build: AndroidAnt
(Alternate) Test Driven Development: Positron

Hope this helps you in writing better Android Applications.

Please feel free to drop a comment, if you come across any other framework enabling adoption of XP engineering practices on android development

Product lifecycle in an agile enterprise

2010-10-15T10:30:00.000-07:00

Borrowing from Dean Leffingwell.

Part II - Design patterns for scheduling a batch job in an Android Application

2010-10-08T12:24:00.000-07:00

In my previous post we discussed usage of AlarmManager to schedule batch Jobs in Android Applications. In this post, we will dig dipper into design patterns specific to scheduled jobs executing resource intensive operations.

Any process having a Broadcast receiver object, is treated as foreground process and get's priority by Android Runtime. Consider a situation where you have a resource intensive process scheduled as a batch job. Let's say, the user has been playing a rich UI game (with significant frame changes/sec) when AlarmManager triggers your resource intensive job via the Broadcast Notification. Since BroadcastReceiver object gets priority in the order of execution, the user may experience slowness / lag in the application (i.e. the game in this case) running on the UI.

In order to circumvent this problem, it's recommended to design your batch job as a service within your application. Use AlarmManager to trigger the notification and let the BroadcastReciever start (or Bind to) the service to execute your job in the background. In this way, the user would not experience any impact on the application running on the UI. As with other components, don't forget to register the Service in the Manifest.

Sample code for registering a service in the AndroidManifest.xml

Refining further, one last scenario to be considered. What happens if your phone is already in a sleep-mode when the scheduled job gets triggered. Incidentally, you can set the 'type' parameter in the AlarmManager to wake-up the phone while Broadcast is being triggered. The Phone will automatically remain awake as long as the BroadcastReceiver is executing. However once the BroadcastReceiver object starts your service and completes it's scope, we run into the risk of the phone again going to sleep mode, there by stopping your (long running) background job abruptly.

To avoid such unpleasant situation, I recommend to obtain a Wake-Lock from PowerManager system service. Release the Wake-Lock after your background process completes successfully. This way you would ensure that your background process gets all due attention from the Android device.

Sample code for a service implementing a Wake-Lock


public class ScheduledPostService extends Service {

 @Override
 public IBinder onBind(Intent arg0) {
  return null;
 }
 
 @Override
 public void onCreate() {
  // initialize the scheduleTimer
  Log.d(Const.TAG, "Scheduled Post Service created");
 }
 
 @Override
 public void onStart(Intent intent, int startId) {
  
  // get a PowerLock
  // Retain the wake lock till this process completes
    
  PowerManager pm = (PowerManager) getSystemService(getApplicationContext().POWER_SERVICE);
  PowerManager.WakeLock wl = pm.newWakeLock(PowerManager.SCREEN_DIM_WAKE_LOCK, "SMSPost Tag");
  
  // Acquire lock
  wl.acquire();
  
  // perform your operation
  
  // Release lock
  wl.release();
 
 }
 
 @Override
 public void onDestroy() {
  super.onDestroy();
  Log.d(Const.TAG, "Scheduled Post Service destroyed"); 
 }
}

Don't forget to update the Android Manifest, giving permission to the application for using the WakeLock

Hope this has been helpful. Please feel free to share your experiences.

Design patterns for scheduling a batch job in an Android Application

2010-10-07T17:38:00.000-07:00

In this post, I will discuss design patterns for scheduling periodic jobs in an Android Native Applications. For illustration, i will be referring to sample code from my SMSPost project.

Let's start by discussing how to trigger a job at a predefined time? For many developers, Android Services becomes the default choice. However scheduling jobs through Services is not an optimal solution. Here is why

Running a service in the background all the time is a resource drain
There is a risk that Android may terminate the service in case of shortage in RAM (Refer to Android process and lifecycle)

Thankfully Android provides APIs to tap into Android system services. The AlarmManager System Service proves handy in this case. For scheduling your job, simply tap into the AlarmManager and schedule a Broadcast Notification event at the desired time. You have flexibility to schedule any date/ time or set fixed intervals for initiating the Broadcast notification. Your application should provision for receiving these asynchronous Broadcasts and perform desired operations.

Sample code for setting a Broadcast using AlarmManager

try {
     Long firstTime = SystemClock.elapsedRealtime();
     Intent intent  = new Intent(this, AlarmReceiver.class);
     intent.putExtra("alarm_message", "Alarm Scheduled!");
     PendingIntent sender = PendingIntent.getBroadcast(this, Const.url_REQUEST_CODE, intent, 0);

     AlarmManager am = (AlarmManager) getSystemService(ALARM_SERVICE);
     am.setRepeating(AlarmManager.ELAPSED_REALTIME_WAKEUP, firstTime, 60*1000, sender); // set your own frequency
} catch (Exception e) {
     Log.e(Const.TAG, "ERROR IN CODE:"+e.toString());
}

Sample code for Receiving the Broadcast Notification

public class AlarmReceiver extends BroadcastReceiver {
@Override
public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
 // TODO Auto-generated method stub
  
 try {
      // your code for scheduled job goes here        
     } catch (Exception e) {
      Log.e(Const.TAG, "ERROR IN CODE:"+e.toString());

     } 
}

Up Next: We would explore design patterns further in specific cases where your scheduled job is expected to execute some heavy resource intensive operations

How to conduct effective Sprint Reviews

2010-10-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

Thinking out loud on how to conduct an effective sprint review. The points below are written keeping project teams in mind.

Structuring the Sprint Review

Set an objective for the Sprint review (i.e What do you want to achieve out of the meeting?)
Start with your sprint goal (if you don't have one, spend a few minutes in sprint planning to set one). Share a subjective assessment on how the team fared against the sprint goal
Outline how the progress on each story (of the sprint) lead towards the eventual sprint goal

Conducting the Sprint review

Make sure the logistics are in place (Phone, webex, sametime etc) before the meeting
Organize the sprint review around demo of working-software (though no doubt, but very effective)
The Project team should drive the meeting (i.e make sure you are sharing your screen, you are showing the features and answering queries)
Pause at appropriate time to encourage discussion on the value being delivered

Avoidances (if you do any of the below mentioned, you are wasting time)

Reading stories from the backlog
Focusing too much on the story points (vis-a-vis actual value being delivered)
Treating sprint review as just a progress update

Are your project sprint reviews effective? Think again, and please feel free to add your perspective.

Five levels of Leadership

2010-10-04T08:09:00.000-07:00

"Five levels of Leadership", Quoting John Maxwell

I couldn't have agreed more. All Managers start at level 1. The picture above outlines what it takes to make a transition from being a good Manager to be a good Leader.

thoughts?

The Social Network Ladder

2010-09-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

Where Do you Figure?

Welcome MeeGo

2010-09-28T10:41:00.000-07:00

MeeGo is a Linux-based platform that is capable of running on multiple computing devices, including mobile handsets, netbooks, tablets, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems.

In February this year, Intel and Nokia announced joining their existing open source initiatives (Moblin and Maemo respectively) to form MeeGo project. MeeGo is hosted at the Linux foundation.

Why do I take notice? The following attributes of MeeGo makes it real interesting

Aimed at Developers and other OEM manufactures - a proven product placement strategy (ask Android)
Lowers complexity for targeting multiple device segments
Enables all players of the industry to participate in the evolution of the software platform and to build their own assets on MeeGo
Offers differentiation abilities through user experience customization
Offers a compliance program to certify software stacks and application portability
Offers a compliance program to certify software stacks and application portability
Supports multiple app stores

It's too early to say whether MeeGo can pose serious challenge to Android. Nonetheless it's good enough a platform for IT leaders to take notice.

Which software development methodology is right for you?

2010-09-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

Over the past few months, I have interacted with many IT leaders in various agile forums. Irrespective of the process maturity in their respective organizations, I have always seen a pattern in all such discussions, which invariably leads to the question "What software development methodology is right for me?"

If we have interacted, you would know my response already...

To me, this is NOT the most important question you should be asking. Before you call any agile consultant, Kanban specialist or a RUP expert (?!$!), I would recommend you find answers to the following questions

1. What are my business objectives?
2. Does my current software development methodology encourage behavior aligned to my business objectives?
3. If not, can it (existing software development methodology) be optimized to align with my business objectives?
4. If yes, Which practices from other software development methodologies can integrated with my existing methodology?

If not, (Must you change to a new software development methodology)

Which behavioral changes you would like to see in your work force?
Which software development methodologies encourage such behavior?

Any software development methodology should be looked as a means to an end (achieving your business goals). In my experience, the the most common mistakes IT leaders do, it to incorrectly assume that adoption of a new software methodology is the end in itself. That is a recipe for disaster.

Thoughts? Experiences?

Lotus Traveler on Android - Lotus Calendar

2010-09-20T11:29:00.000-07:00

In this last post of the series (covering my experiments on lotus traveler software on Android client), I explored the Lotus Calendar application closely.

IBM follows the consistent minimalist design approach (consistent to Lotus Mail on Android) where by default you see the meetings scheduled for today. You would see today's day and the date (default color 'red') just below the Action Bar.

Upon invoking the Options Menu (Menu button on your Android handset) you get the following options
- Option to see events for 1 day, 1 week or 1 month
- Option to Sync the Calendar with the server
- Option to see events planned for today

Upon invoking the more option menu, you get the following choices

- Goto Date - A nice feature to look up your planned events for any specific future date
- New Events - Probably to create new calendar entry, was not available in the current beta release.
That means you can't create meeting invites from Lotus Calendar, but can view all existing calendar events after syncing up with server.

All in all, I was not overly impressed by the user experience. But it works!
All I wish is IBM opens up a few APIs to allow enterprises to do basic customizations as per their needs.

NOTE - Lotus Traveler for Android will NOT be shipped with Lotus Domino 8.5.2. Disappointed with the delay, I am waiting for next beta release.

Lotus Traveler on Android - Lotus Mail

2010-09-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

Follow-up to my previous blog post, I explored Lotus Traveler on Android client in detail. Here are my findings on Lotus Mail

Folder Options:

Provides the following four folder options by default
- 'Inbox'
- 'Draft'
- 'Outbox'
- 'Sent'
Personal folders are not support yet (at least in the current beta)
Existing emails in the sent folders are not synchronized by default

Inbox:

Displays up to 5 emails (Only!) without having to scroll. Personally I would prefer to see a better use of available real estate
Nice little message icon (highlighted) appears on the Action bar, whenever you have an unread mail. Nice feature to inform you about new mail, even if you are using some other application at the time email arrives
What is key here is IBM approaches a minimalistic design and you don't see any menu options upfront. You need to use the 'Menu' of your handset to invoke what we call in android world as the 'Options Menu'

Available Actions:

By invoking the Options Menu, you get the following actions on the Inbox

Compose - (Needless to say) composes a new memo
Settings - Opens all application setting (including mail, calendar etc)
Show folders
Sync Now
Search Mail - Queer observation - Search mail, doesn't work unless your mail database is full text indexed (!) - but you don't get any such warnings. Not a high degree of user experience on the search

Other Observations:

Attachments of any kind are NOT Supported yet
Easy browsing through emails as you get some contextual actions to move to next email or delete the current email
Ability to search for names before adding to the sender list
IBM has not exposed any APIs to customize the current Lotus Traveler for android. Hence it's a closed package now, take it or leave it

Up Next - My observations on the calender feature of Lotus Traveler for Android

First Look: Lotus Traveler on Android - Installation

2010-08-31T10:39:00.000-07:00

With ample support from of IBM, I got an opportunity to participate in the limited beta release of Lotus Traveler (what is it?) for Android client. Here are the steps to install Lotus Traveler client on an android device.

Step #1: Identify the environment:

Lotus Traveler for Android requires "Lotus Domino Release 8.5.2 Code Drop 5" or above
Download the Lotus Traveler server task from IBM (Run the Lotus Traveler executable and point to the existing Domino server). Once installed, Lotus traveler task runs as any other server tasks (like Http, POP etc) on the domino sever. (Please refer to the screenshot)
Unzip the content of the "Lotus Traveler client for Android beta" file into the Domino/data directory of the server
Append the content of "VersionInfoExt.txt" into the existing file "VersionInfo.txt"
Identify a Android device running Android OS v 2.0.1 or above

Step #2: Access the url "http://<ServerName>/servlet/traveler" using the standard browser from your android device, Provide the login credentials as required. On the landing page, Click on the link 'Select an IBM Lotus Mobile Installer'

You should see Android as one of the available platform Options (Refer to the image on right). Click on the "Android" platform Option.

IBM provides the following two *.apk (android package) files (which you would have placed in Domino\data directory of the server as per step#1)

LotusInstall.apk
Lotus Traveler.apk

Upon selecting Android platform Option, the LotusInstall.apk file gets downloaded to the android device.

IBM separates out Actual Traveler software from the Installation Package. My guess, you will install "Lotus Installer" app only once and it should in future periodically check for the latest release of "Lotus Traveler" app from the server and download if there is a newer version.

Step #3: Starting the Installation
Running the Lotus Installer program would initiate the download and installation of the Lotus Traveler client.

Before running the Lotus Installer program, verify the Domino Server configuration document. Check the value in Server Document -> Lotus Traveler -> External Server Url. This field should be Non-blank and should point to your domino server. Apparently the Lotus Installer Program picks up the server name from this field and checks for availability of Lotus traveler client in there. As per the latest from IBM, in future releases, this issue will be fixed.

Once the file is downloaded, you would be prompted to initiate the installation. Once installation is complete, you would see the following four icons on your android device (see the picture)

Lotus Calendar
Lotus Installer
Lotus Mail
Lotus Traveler

The top three icons are self explanatory. Lotus Traveler icon will be used for checking status and monitoring operations that cross applications.

As I understand there would be another Lotus Traveler icon in the future release named 'Name Lookup'. This application will help users in directory/contact look up.

There you go, you have Lotus Traveler client on your android device.
In future posts, I will share my findings on usability/ functionality aspects of the Traveler email client.

Further Reference:
FAQ: Clarifications on Android beta release - Ed Brill's blog
Link to participate in the beta release of Lotus Traveler for Android

Ruby on Android

2010-08-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

All Ruby developers interested in Android development, check this out

Ruby development package for Android: Ruboto
Source code on Github: http://github.com/ruboto
Background: Developed by Daniel Jackoway (still WIP) as a project in Ruby Summer of Code

Android musings: Options for storing persistent data

2010-08-19T11:08:00.000-07:00

Android provides the following options for storing application data:

Preferences: Store primitive data in key value pairs (a detailed explanation below)
SQLite database: Preferred approach if your application needs relational data. Further, android SDK provides sqlite3 tool, which enables you to manage the SQLite database from a remote shell
Internal Storage: Save data in a file directly to device's internal storage. By default this data is private to the application only. When the user uninstalls the specific application, these files are removed
External Storage: Save data in a file into a removable media (such as an SD card) or an internal (non-removable storage). NOTE: There is no security enforced on files written to external storage. All applications can read and write to such files. Moreover users can manually (or accidentally) remove such files

For my SMSPost project, I had the specific need of storing two persistent parameters, e.g. frequency of scheduled run and URL for SMS upload.

I chose Shared Preferences as the persistent data storage approach, purely because of the ease of use in handling preferences. Shared preferences, enables relatively static data to be stored as Key Value pair and the data is accessible to all activities and services in the application. (NOTE - You can share your preferences across other application by defining the preference mode as MODE_WORLD_READABLE or MODE_WORLD_WRITABLE. For SMSPost application, we just needed the data to be available within the application, hence we set the mode as MODE PRIVATE)

Sample Code:

// get handle to the shared preferences (called from an Activity Class)
        preferences = getSharedPreferences(Const.PREFS_NAME, MODE_PRIVATE); 

// writing to shared preferences
       SharedPreferences.Editor editor = preferences.edit();
       editor.putString(Const.PUBLIC_STATIC_TIMEPICKER_IDENTIFIER, resultFrequency);
       editor.commit();

//Reading from shared preferences
       if (preferences.getString(Const.PUBLIC_STATIC_TIMEPICKER_IDENTIFIER, "") == "")
                        return false;

Source: SMSPost.java

Please leave a comment if you have used any of the data storage options and would like to share your experiences.

Follow-up: What do story points relate to?

2010-08-16T12:57:00.000-07:00

This is a follow-up to my earlier post.

When asked "What do story points relate to?"..here is how the readers responded.

Result of the poll conducted on my earlier blog post

In My opinion, story points have evolved to be a reflection of "relative" effort required to accomplish the story from just being a representation of "relative size". Here is why.

In traditional software development, the size of a requirement doesn't change until there is a scope change. The size estimation doesn't take into consideration the factors which potentially may impact the effort involved..such as the unknowns, risks and complexity. Even if projects encounter schedule / effort slippages, the size remains constant and traditionally adept project managers attribute the delays to lower productivity.

However in the value driven world of agile development, the bottom line is 'When can the working software be delivered'. The team comes together and estimates in story points to get a better handle in sprint / release / product planning. But the key aspect here is that story points intend to convey not just relative size (read scope of work), but also the capability of the development team, level of complexity and level of unknowns. Hence in my opinion, the story points best relate to the effort required to get the story 'DONE'.

Does this explanation fit your view of story points? If not, please leave a comment.

Android UI design patterns

2010-08-11T13:52:00.000-07:00

Good to see effort from Google towards bringing consistency in Android UI design. It was long over due.

A must watch for all android developers.

Please share if there are any other good resources on Android UI design.

SMSPost: My first open source project

2010-08-10T13:32:00.000-07:00

For quite some time now I have been working on developing a "native mobile application" on Android platform. Finally I have mustered the courage to publish the source code as an open source project.

Details:
Name of the Project: SMS Post
Source Code: https://code.google.com/p/smspost/
High-level Functional Requirements: Reads SMS from any android device and posts the content to a predefined website
License: GNU GPL v3

In coming days, I would share my learning from the project.
Please leave a comment, if you would like to contribute to the project.

What do "Story Points" relate to?

2010-08-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

All agile teams use "Story points" for sprint/release/product planning. However, I still notice confusion around what does the unit 'Story point' represent.

To that effect, request you to participate in the below poll and share your subjective feedback via comments.

In agile projects, the term "Story Point" best relates to:survey software

I would compile the findings and share my thoughts in two weeks time.

Adopting enterprise mobility using Smartphones

2010-07-30T10:56:00.000-07:00

With ample help from my colleagues Basav, Jayendra and Dipen, I compiled my first study on role of Smartphone in enterprise IT. Check out the first draft:

Adopting enterprise mobility using Smartphones

View more presentations from Lalatendu Das.

Comments are welcome.

Food for thought....07/18

2010-07-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

few short articles for weekend reading...

Stakeholder acceptance always trumps the greater good..does it??

2010-07-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

Things ..all agile organization must avoid..

In search of Excellence

2010-06-05T16:27:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I had read the book "In Search of Excellence" by Thomas J Peters and Robert H Waterman. One particular quote from this book had left an indelible impression on my understanding of Leadership. Sharing the same below..

"An effective leader must be the master of two ends of the spectrum: ideas at the highest level of abstraction and actions at the most mundane levels of details"

As professionals move up in the corporate ladder, I observe they becoming less and less Hands-On. Decisions made without proper understanding of ground realities or without enough attention to details almost always prove to be wrong. Hence it's imperative for professionals to keep themselves abreast of the latest happenings in their core business area.

For those who are interested, the book describes following 8 attributes of innovative organizations

A bias for action
Close to the the customer
Autonomy and Entrepreneurship
Productivity through People
Hands on Value driven
Stick to the knitting
Simple form Lean Staff
Simultaneous loose-tight properties

Yet another quote from this book on "Creativity vs Innovation"

"Creativity is thinking up new things, Innovation is doing new things.. A powerful new idea can kick around unused in the company for years, not because it's merits are not recognized but because nobody has assumed the responsibility of converting it from words into action. Ideas are useless unless used."

HTML5 Readyness

2010-06-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

Source: HTML5Readiness.com

Good To Great

2010-06-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading "Good to Great" by Jim Collins.

I quite enjoyed reflecting/debating (with self) on the ideas put forth by the author. In the process, got moved by the following perspectives/Quotes

GOOD is the enemy of GREAT
"I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job" - Darwin Smith, CEO Kimberly-Clark (1971-1991)
People are NOT your most important assets. The RIGHT people ARE
Great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best OPPORTUNITIES, not their worst PROBLEMS. Managing your PROBLEMS can make you GOOD, where as building on your OPPORTUNITIES is the only way to become GREAT
Stockdale Paradox: "You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be" - Admiral Jim Stockdale, PoW - Hanoi
Lead with QUESTIONS not with ANSWERS
Spending time and energy to motivate people is a waste of effort. The real question is not "How do we motivate our people". If you have the right people they will be motivated. The key is not to demotivate them.

The Hedgehog Circles (refer to the picture)
Leverage the Hedgehog Circles to define Organizational strategy
The more an organization has discipline to stay within it's three (Hedgehog) Circles, the more it will have attractive opportunities for growth. The challenge becomes not opportunity creation, but opportunity SELECTION
Sustainable transformations follow a predictable pattern of buildup and breakthrough

The book helped me putting leadership and management in right perspective. Recommended for all.

My take on Google I/O - 2010

2010-05-23T17:27:00.000-07:00

Sunday afternoons are usually my preferred time to catch-up on my Youtube subscriptions. I put that to good use today, by checking out Google I/O - 2010.

Vic Gundotra's interpretation of I/O (as in Google I/O) as "Innovation in the Open" pretty much set the tone for the event. As expected Google bundled a slew of new technologies like Open Media Project, GoogleTV, GWT 2.1 + Roo and renewed support for existing technologies like HTML5 and Google Wave etc. In the process Vic Gundotra and team took every opportunity to make subtle innuendos at apple's perceived "closed-technology" stack, skillfully showed solidarity with troubled tech players like Adobe and Opera and lined-up an impressive panel of venerable CEOs for support of GoogleTV.

To me, the launch of Android 2.2 was the key announcement. Here are the salient features of Android 2.2:
- New JIT compiler to the Dalvic VM - resulting in 3X speed
- Tethering
- New APIs - Cloud-to-device messaging, data backup
- Updated web browser - with V8 engine, HTML5 support, Support for Flash 10.1 and access to more and more native apis
- 20 new enterprise oriented features, integration with MS Exchange server
- Updates to AppStore : Installing apps directly on SD Card, AppStore accessible from PC
- AdSense for Mobile Apps

My take, Google continues to maintain it's leadership position to define the future of the Web.

Some may argue that Google has lost focus by trying to attempt too many things at the same time. But to me there is always a method to the madness. Having already attained absolute control of online advertising, Google is lining up products aimed at the way people will consume the web in future i.e Mobile (android), entertainment (GoogleTV, YouTube) and traditional PC based access (with Google Wave, Google App Engine) etc. Many of these technologies are bound to fade into the oblivion, but I am sure at least one of these technologies will stand the test of time and that would be a Game Changer.

Hail Google!

Designing Android GUI - Unit of measurement

2010-05-16T16:16:00.000-07:00

Android supports multiple units of measurement (such as Pixels, inches, millimeters, points etc). However the following two units of measurement are critical for a good design:

- Density-independent Pixels (dp) - an abstract unit that is based on the physical density of the screen. These units are relative to a 160 dpi screen, so one dp is one pixel on a 160 dpi screen. The ratio of dp-to-pixel will change with the screen density, but not necessarily in direct proportion.

- Scale-independent Pixels (sp) - this is like the dp unit, but it is also scaled by the user's font size preference. It is recommend you use this unit when specifying font sizes, so they will be adjusted for both the screen density and user's preference.

As a best practice, never use anything but sp or dp unless you absolutely have to. Using sp/dp will make your Android applications compatible with multiple screen densities and resolutions.

Google I/O 2010 - Live on Youtube

2010-05-13T18:10:00.000-07:00

Google I/O 2010 is coming to San Francisco on May 19-20 2010.
Both the keynote talks will be streamed live on GoogleDeveloper Channel on Youtube.

Grapevine is abuzz over potential release of Android 2.2 (Code name Froyo) during the I/O. Among other things there is talk of GoogleTV as well. We will wait and see.

Here is the complete agenda.

Rules of Thumb - 52 truths for winning at business without losing your self

2010-04-11T15:03:00.000-07:00

Rules of Thumb (by Alan M. Webber) was my cerebral diet for the weekend. The book outlines 52 practical advices on how to win at business without losing your self. Alan's approach of putting his points across by relating to past experiences is easy to read and easier to connect.

Here are rules, I could relate easily:
#3 - Ask the last question first
#5 - Change is a math formula. Change happens when 'Cost of maintaining Status Quo is greater than the Risk of Change'
#10 - A good question beats a good answer. Asking questions can be dangerous; Not asking them can be fatal
#12 - The difference between a crisis and an opportunity is when you learn about it
#17 - Entrepreneurs choose serendipity over efficiency
#29 - Words matter
#30 - The likeliest sources of great ideas are in the most unlikely places
#32 - Content isn't the king; Context is
#35 - Loyalty is a two way street - Arnold "Red" Auerbach - Coach, The Boston Celtics
#41 - If you want to be a real leader; First get real about Leadership
#43 - Don't confuse Credential with Talent. Hire for Attitude; Train for skill
#45 - Failure isn't failing; Failure is failing to try
#51 - Take your work seriously; yourself 'Not so much'
#52 - Stay Alert! There are teachers everywhere

Recommended reading..

"Android is Apple's Burger King" - my perspective

2010-04-11T08:37:00.000-07:00

During my weekend browsing on twitter, I came across this interesting analogy comparing Apple vs Android to McDonald vs Burger King : http://bit.ly/a8ZSl2

In the article Rob Diana argues
- McDonalds leads innovation and consistency supported by detailed market study in selecting locations of their stores (comparable to apple's product innovation)
- In contrast, Burger King follows a simple yet effective strategy of opening their store near to existing McDonald store and differentiates offering by allowing customers to choose the ingredients of their burger (comparable to Android's strategy of following iPhone with flexible hardware platforms)

Here is my take:
1. apple is undoubtedly the leading innovator in mobile computing. They are maximizing the tight coupling of hardware and software to deliver products that are more often than not prove to be game changer

2. Android on the other hand is fast catching up, but I see following impediments to android's future growth
- lack of control on underlying hardware: OS design is likely to get more and more complex (there-by inducing potential bugs) in future
- As more and more manufacturers (without any differentiating value added services) adopt Android, it's only a logical conclusion that Android platform will be commoditized and cannibalized, their by allowing apple to strengthen it's lead

It's high time that manufacturers like HTC, Motorola, Samsung, take a cue from "Burger King" model of being flexible in giving users what they want (at least in terms of innovation in service delivery, if not on technology)..

Performance evaluation in Agile teams - Part III

2010-04-11T08:14:00.000-07:00

In this concluding part, I am sharing the retrospective findings from our new approach towards Performance evaluation in agile teams

Continue:
1. Empower associates to select their own goals (albeit within an organizational framework)
2. Peer evaluation process

Start:
1. Periodic peer evaluations instead of waiting till the end of the evaluation cycle
2. Include more subjective feedback

Stop:
1. None

On hindsight, we realized partial success with the new process we adopted. Further in the process we realized there is a significant opportunity for disparate agile team to share and learn from each other.

Performance evaluation in Agile teams - Part II

2010-03-14T16:16:00.000-07:00

This is a follow-up to my earlier post on performance evaluation in agile teams

Traditionally our organization followed a balanced scorecard approach where organizational priorities get cascaded down to each individual in the form of performance goals for each evaluation period. Usually the Goals of the Appraisee is tied to the goals of appraiser. Performance evaluation happens in a bottoms-up manner where performance of each individual is aggregated to the next level (i,e, individual -> project team -> account team -> solution unit etc)

Tailoring done for Self Organizing Agile Teams

While we retained the basic philosophy of Balanced Scorecard, we did a number of tailoring specific to a self organizing agile teams. Following are the salient points:
1. Introduce certain degree of flexibility in selecting your individual goals: While we retained the alignment of individual goals to organizational priorities, we allowed some flexibility for individuals to pick their own goals. We defined a framework around Impact on end customers, Impact on organization and effort towards self development and allowed individuals to pick their own goals and targets around these.
2. Peer Evaluations: While we retained the best practices of bottom up evaluations, we added an additional step of "Peer Evaluation" specific to the agile teams

Peer Evaluation process

As the name suggests, Peer Evaluation process focuses on sharing your own assessment of your performance with your Peers (i.e Project teams) and getting their feedback. While we encouraged team to give constructive feedback on areas of improvement, we deliberately avoided any criticism of performance in this forum (Other mature teams may choose to disagree). At the end of the session, each individual provides a performance ranking of rest of the team and hands it over to the 'Appraiser' or 'functional Manager' as appropriate. Looking at the sensitivity around performance evaluations, we chose to keep this part confidential (again - other team may chose to share these rankings with the team too). The Appraise/Functional manager aggregates these rankings from all member of the team and prepares the performance ranking of the entire team.

This process work in conjunction with the one-to-one performance evaluation discussion where the appraiser provides subjective feedback. At the end of the evaluation cycle, the performance ranking of the team gets rolled-up to the next level.

In the next post, I will share our experience and learning from applying the above approach within our team.

Performance evaluation in Agile teams - Part I

2010-03-07T08:55:00.000-08:00

This is a three part blog discussing ways of doing effective performance management in agile teams. In this part, I will try to establish the problem statement. In Part II, we will discuss one approach I am trying out as a pilot in my team. In the concluding part, I will share results from the pilot.

As usual, i would request all netizens to add their valuable feedback on the way.

Problem Statement:
For quite some time, I have been grappling with finding ways to do effective performance evaluations in Agile teams.

In ideal agile organizations we should be assessing the performance of the project teams, instead of assessing performance of individuals. Extending that line of argument, agile teams should also share the realized business value delivered by their project. But that's Utopian.

In real world, enterprise IT invariably is treated as a support function to the business. Instead of sharing business value, enterprise IT is typically run with a predefined budget with a certain number of project teams. Most of the enterprises (like ours) use Forced Ranking as a means to incentivize high performance. Performance of individual employees are ranked relative to each other and the resultant grouping is fitted into the form of a bell curve, there-by separating high performers from average performers and from the rest.

This approach works for many organizations. In order to make forced ranking model work efficiently, pioneers of this model - General Electric Corp, defines following three success criteria for your performance evaluation system:

- have dimensional consistency: Its scales and criteria must be applicable across all employee categories
- be based on objective data: "You just aren't going to be able to find quantitative measures for everything that is important to you. But you can still be objective—you can make decisions that are not colored by your emotions or personal preferences."
- produce rich analytical feedback: Employees value meaningful assessments of their work more than any other performance motivator

So far so good..but things get blurry when it comes to agile teams. Is it possible to set "dimensional consistency" for agile teams? Can there be a single scale for a number of different self organizing agile teams? How objective can you get to derive performance indicators vis-a-vis following agile practices of reducing ceremonies and minimizing waste. Most important, who does performance evaluation in agile teams? A functional manager? Or (in scrum context) the scrum master/ product owner?

So how do we approach performance evaluations (maintaining the essence of force ranking from organizational standpoint) in agile teams? In following post, I would discuss the process we are trying out within my group (comprising of a number of agile teams).

Reference:
For whom the bell curve tolls
Punishing by Rewards

Android Tablet

2010-03-07T06:06:00.001-08:00

For all first time tablet users:
Before committing to the pricey apple iPad, here is a cheaper option to get familiar with tablets..

FirstView offers $95 tablet, running on android 1.4 (??# - Well..there is a plan to upgrade to latest version of Android!)..comes fully loaded with wi-fi and 3G..

GMail goes social

2010-02-10T17:56:00.000-08:00

What is Google Buzz?

Why Google Buzz?

Android - Microwave & Laundry

2010-01-11T09:18:00.000-08:00

Touch Revolution has brought Android to home appliances. At CES Las Vegas, they showcased Nimble NIM1000 module, which allows OEMs to easily embed touch screen android into any home appliances.

Checkout..Android Microwave

Android Laundry:

The decade in retrospect: Story of innovators, imitators and idiots

2010-01-10T16:29:00.000-08:00

As we closed on a momentous decade, I wonder what impact the events of the decade will have on our future. In retrospect, I can summarize the decade (borrowing from Warren Buffet: http://tinyurl.com/3pwx7m) as the story of three I's..that of Innovators, Imitators and Idiots.

The decade started with the waning euphoria of new dot-com economy and ended with probably the greatest recession seen since the great depression of 30's. On hindsight the great financial disasters (dot-com bubble or the sub prime crisis) are marked by some great innovations.

Analyzing the dot-com bubble, Innovators in Netscape, AOL, Google, Yahoo and Amazon redefined the way internet was perceived. Traditional heavy-weights like Microsoft, Cisco and Time-Warner realized the potential of the new economy started imitating to a great extent. However things go awry when the idiots arrived, whose avarice undid the very innovation they were trying to use to get rich. Easy money flowing in from IPOs, venture capital funds were spent on massive advertising campaigns without giving any thoughts to the long term commercial viability of the product at hand.

The decade also saw, some of the greatest financial product innovation from the traditional investment banking firms of Wall street. In the process the world economy got intertwined as never before. The world economy grew at a scorching pace in the later half of the decade till..the over indulgence tool over. Early warnings were overlooked and we saw some high-risk transactions on already high leveraged market. When reality caught on..the fall was steeper than anything in recent memory.

Both the above mentioned events have a lasting impact on the ways of doing business. As we look forward to a new decade, I am sure there would still be innovators. There would still be smart imitators who would be willing to cash on the innovations as they happen. However it would be interesting to see what the idiots learnt from the previous decade.

Droid vs Nexus One

2010-01-03T09:08:00.001-08:00

Spoken Web

2009-11-29T14:35:00.000-08:00

A team of researchers at IBM India have embarked on creating a parallel of the World Wide Web. The research effort is named as Project 'Spoken Web'.

"The basic principle of Spoken Web lies in creating a system analogous to the World Wide Web using a technology most of us all have in common - speech. Spoken Web helps people create voice sites using a simple telephone, mobile or landline. The user gets a unique phone number which is analogous to a URL and when other users access this voice site they get to hear the content uploaded there. Interestingly, all these voice sites can be interlinked creating a massive network, which can work like the World Wide Web."

As I eagerly await the outcome of Spoken Web implementation for a project in western India (for Gujrat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation), I can't help but wonder..would this be the killer app that can bridge the digital divide prevalent in the developing countries? Only time will tell..

Where Cynics Dare

2009-11-28T06:37:00.000-08:00

I read an interesting post on organizational change management by Biju Bhaskar.. adding my 2c..

Many a times, while implementing organizational changes, we overlook the role of cynics. To me, having a cynic (who is equally passionate against the change) in the team helps in the following ways:
1. you get advanced warning on possible failure points
2. You get real time results on the change management process (i.e if you can help the cynic understand the merits of the change during the process..then you are on right track)

But then, the key is to create a conducive environment where even the cyncis 'dare' to stand-up for whatever they believe in. I would rather have bunch of highly opinionated people against the change, over having a set of people who don't have an opinion at all.

Agile Metrics

2009-11-08T16:05:00.000-08:00

I am a firm believer in the age old adage 'You can not improve what you can not measure' (unrelated - here is an interesting antithesis). I believe in the importance of having the right metrics, especially in IT projects aiming to achieve continuous improvements.

Off-late i have interacted with some agile teams to get their perception of metrics in agile teams..responses have been varied, starting with outright cynicism to a mature approach towards using just enough metrics to achieve project goals. However one aspect was common through out, there is lack of awareness on various metrics options available for agile teams.

I would encourage project teams to look at all principles behind agile manifesto, and see which are the top three principles the project team values the most and consistently achieves in each iteration. Brainstorm within the team to see if the team can objectively measure progress for each of the three most important principles. Whether team velocity and burn down charts sufficiently describe team progress in each of the practices or is there a need to think about other possible ways of describing project progress?

If you see the need of looking beyond velocity and burn down charts, here are some starting points:

1. Heuristics for agile measurement: Refer to this seminal article on Appropriate agile metrics by Deborah Hartmann and Robin Dymond

2. AgileEVM : Pretty useful if you are in an organization with strong inherent PMI practices. Though AgileEVM is pretty neat in showing consistent business value, I personally am unclear on it's implementation in projects where the scope of work changes over time. Please share your experience if you have applied AgileEVM successfully in projects where the overall project scope increased during the project lifecycle.

Some metrics towards technical excellence
3. Running Tested Features: Ron Jeffries explans RTF. More detailed description

4. Static Code analysis

5. Code Coverage

What metrics do you use for your projects?

Andriod 2.0 on Motorola Droid

2009-11-01T06:24:00.000-08:00

Code named as 'Eclair', Android 2.0 has some interesting improvements.

Check out the video on new features:

Motorola launches Droid on November 6th (first smart-phone running Android 2.0), with some nifty features such as:
- inbuilt app for gmail, facebook
- Google navigation
- plug in for flash 10

Would Droid be the iPhone killer?

JSON vs XML

2009-10-25T15:58:00.000-07:00

Following up on my previous post, I explored XML vs JSON for exposing Domino data.

In order to evaluate both the formats, i set out to build a small component to achieve the following: "Read all names/emails from Domino address book and implement AJAX to optimize name search".

I defined the critical success factors to be a) Performance b) Ease of use.

I am yet to complete the development of my test component, but based on initial findings I bet on JSON to be my preferred mode.

Here is why:

Performance: Given below is the time taken for exposing a domino address book (with over 140,000 entries) (Using Firebug 1.4)

In JSON format:

In XML format:

Clearly domino renders data in JSON format much quicker.

Ease of use: JSON data is as good as any other Javascript object. Hardly any learning curve for using JSON output.

Caveat:
Be aware of possibility of malicious cross-site scripting on JSON output. Need to be judicious before using javascript 'eval()' on JSON output.

JSONView:
For all JSON enthusiasts, JSONView (current version 0.4) is a nice firefox addon to render JSON outout on the browser itself.

Exposing Lotus domino data to external systems

2009-10-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

As a part of project work, I have been exploring alternate ways of exposing data from a Lotus Domino system.

Since Lotus Domino release 4.5, Domino comes with an inbuilt web-server and can respond to http requests with notes data from .nsf file. However this approach tightly binds data with the presentation layer, hence is not really efficient.

Starting Domino release 5.0.2, it adopted XML as the standard data exchange format and provided services (i.e http://server/notes db path/view name?Readviewentries..) to expose domino data in XML format for external systems to read and and present as they like.

With Domino Release 7.0.2, domino extended its services to expose Lotus notes data in JSON format. Without adding any complexity, you can simply specify that output format as JSON from the Readviewentries service. i.e .. extending the example in the previous section, you can get JSON format by calling this url..
http://servername/notes db path/view name?Readviewentries&outputformat=JSON..

In future posts i would evaluate Domino's XML vs JSON services..

Enterprise Security 2.0

2009-09-23T11:25:00.001-07:00

Traditional information security measures primarily involved securing enterprise network from outsiders using firewalls. However with growing focus on collaboration, evolution of web 2.0 (and cloud computing), we are seeing a paradigm shift in the way enterprises used to operate.

These days we work with people and organizations that are partners rather than employees. To be effective, they need access to data and intellectual property that the organization owns, but it must often be delivered to an environment that it does not control. Ultimately the only reliable security strategy is to protect the information itself, rather than the network and the IT infrastructure.

In this context I came across the following recommendations from the Jericho forum:

Extending these ideas, checkout Jericho forums' recommended 11 commandments on enterprise security.

In coming days, as we move more towards distributed computing over the cloud, I see the above recommendations gaining in relevance.

Google Fast Flip

2009-09-14T18:41:00.001-07:00

Google launched Fast Flip - A web application that let's users discover and share news articles.

On first look, It greatly enhances the UX factor i.e I liked the feeling of being able to flip through pages before reading the details. You automatically get 'Most Viewed' and 'Recent' news items which helps you keep abreast of latest top stories.
Fast Flip also features a search engine and let users share content. Based on their reading choices, users will see suggestions for other articles they might find interesting.

Downside: At this point, Google isn't making any tools available for external developers to integrate Fast Flip with their Web sites and applications.

To me, It's unclear how this product is positioned vis-a-vis google news. Nonetheless, I won't complain as long as I have option to choose.

Cloud Taxonomy

2009-08-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

'Cloud', probably is the most over used word in the IT Industry in 2009. Big enterprises to small start-ups alike are rushing in slew of cloud based products to rake in first mover advantage. The usage of the term 'cloud' is getting muddled in the process.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a Forrester research paper on a 'Proposed Cloud Taxonomy'. Sharing the excerpts to clarify confusion around what 'Cloud' really means.

The article proposes to map all cloud flavors in the following two dimensions:
- Level of Sharing: Extent of sharing infrastructure services or business applications with other companies and tenants
- Business Value: Complexity of business process

As the diagram suggests, most of today's existing software products and services can be positioned along a level-of-sharing axis and a business value axis. The illustration uses a cloud symbol for services that will resonate as cloud services, while a squared box represents other concepts that should not be simply relabeled as cloud services.

Mobile application development - made easy!

2009-08-18T17:03:00.000-07:00

After my fair share of procrastination, I finally succumbed to the charm of mobile application development. However, as the initial enthusiasm subsided, the reality struck..i.e where to start? Should I start learning Objective C?!@# malloc’s and calloc’s are certainly not my forte. Should I brush-up Java? or JavaME? will it work on iphone?

I chose the easier path out. I set-out to find cross platform tools, which can accelerate native mobile application development. To my surprise there are quite a few tools out there catering to wannabe mobile developers like me.

Here are my favorite picks:

Rhodes –

My Ruby developer friends will love me for sharing this (if not using it already). Developed by Rhomobile – free under GPL v3, easy pricing for commercial usage. The framework is referred to as "Ruby on Rails" of mobile development. It provides MVC framework (Model with – RhoSync & View and Control using Rhodes). Provides deep cross platform support, with application once developed can easily be deployed to iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian(! if still stays afloat after Nokia dumps it) and 'of-course' Android.

For iPhone fans: Support for native iPhone features is the best in the breed. Rhodes supports geolocation, camera, contacts, accelerometer, SMS, push, road map and audio / video capture.

One more interesting stuff, use of rhohub for distributed development and easy packaging of applications.

Phonegap –

By far the most widely used cross platform framework in the mobile world. Phonegap is developed by Nitobi – free under MIT license. Developing applications in Phonegap is as simple as it gets. All you need to know is Javascript and HTML. Provides cross platform support, portable to iPhone, Blackberry, and Android.

Provides decent support for native iPhone features such as geolocation, accelerometer and contacts.

Downside: you still may need to learn Objective C for executing server side action. Off-late Apple appstore has rejected some of the Phonegap developed apps under pretext of compatibility issues with future iPhone OS and the use of unsupported 3rd party APIs.

Titanium –

Developed by Appcelerator – free access to beta version – licensing is evolving. Easy to develop application using Javascript and HTML. Provides some sense of cross platform support, with option to port applications to iPhone and Android only.

Titanium provides decent support for native iPhone features such as geolocation, accelerometer, contacts and photos. Better integration with underlying apple libraries enables more standards compliant results.

Corona –

Developed by Ansca – free access to beta version – licensing is evolving. Uses Lua scripting language to develop applications. As of now, Corona enables application development for iPhone only.

Corona provides access to iphone file systems. Support for other native iPhone features such as camera and accelerometer is still under development.

Corona provides built in support for flash, hence has its advantages for development of two dimensional gaming applications.

As I make up my mind to take the plunge (leaning more towards Rhodes), please feel free to share your pick and experience on working with cross platform mobile development tools.

Google Caffeine

2009-08-13T18:52:00.000-07:00

Google unveiled their next-generation search technology, a project code-named Caffeine. As google puts it, "It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions".

Being cynical (of all tall claims) the way I am, I set-out to verify the developer preview site of google caffeine. My tried and trusted search query for testing out any search engine is my (relatively unique) full-name and I tried the same on both google sites (the one live vs the developer preview site).

And the result.. Google Caffeine works..

At least it's faster and more comprehensive (77400 hits in 0.11 secs with Caffeine vs 77300 hits in 0.17 secs in the current google site)
- on a separate note Bing gives me 355 hits only :-(..but hey! isn't it a decision engine?

Back to caffeine - User Interface is unchanged, ordering of search results is nearly same..I couldn't make out if there is any improvement in accuracy..may be that part is still work in progress!

While I eagerly wait to see Caffeine live in action, I can't help but wonder 'what's next'

The Meta Cloud - Part II

2009-08-08T19:27:00.000-07:00

The Meta Cloud concept (my earlier blogpost introducing Meta cloud) has taken a step closer to reality.

Cloudkick (a San Jose based start-up) unveiled an open source project named libcloud, which aims at providing a single programming interface for a host of infrastructure clouds such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Slicehost and GoGrid. For example, using libcloud you can make a single API call to potentially reboot your server instances across Amazon EC2, EC2-Europe, Slicehost and Rackspace.

In long run, the plan is to extend these Python based APIs to cover more and more infrastructure clouds such as Linode, Flexiscale and the open source Eucalyptus. If things go as planned, this concept can potentially enable partial interoperability, there by breaking the biggest entry barriers for enterprise adoption of clouds.

For those of you interested in contributing to libcloud project, here is the source code on Github.

Twitter 101 - for business

2009-07-26T18:45:00.000-07:00

#business:RT@NYT - http://tinyurl.com/nwel29

Augmented Reality

2009-07-14T10:58:00.000-07:00

“The real world is way too boring for many people,” says Mr. Sánchez-Crespoa, project leader at Novarama, a game developer based in Barcelona. “By making the real world a playground for the virtual world, we can make the real world much more interesting.”

Welcome to the world of Augmented reality: a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data, where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.

Though the concept of Augmented reality (AR) has been around since early 90's (term first introduced by Boeing Corp), it's only in recent past we are seeing a surge in interest for AR. In mobile computing and gaming software, AR is finally realizing a viable business model.

Austrian Company Mobilizy launched Wikitude.me in late 2008. Wikitude.me running on Andriod platform, provides information on 800,000 points of interest around the world on real time.

Earlier this month SPRXmobile, a dutch telecom company launched an Android application named 'Layer', which is being termed as the first AR browser. People in Amsterdam who download 'Layar' on their cellphones can look through the camera and see information about nearby restaurants, A.T.M.’s, and available jobs displayed in front of buildings that house them. This information is provided by companies like Hyves, the Dutch social networking site, and ING, the financial services company. The businesses pay a fee to SPRXmobile for publishing their data.

See the video below on Layers.

Epilogue:

AR adoption is likely to increase in near future. I think what is key to success of AR adoption is the data quality and completeness. Big players like Nokia (owns Navteq - provider of map data and content)or Google can leverage this technology to bring in more and more value added services.

Open Cloud Manifesto

2009-07-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

Checkout the Open Cloud Manifesto: http://www.opencloudmanifesto.org/

The manifesto outlines the following six principles

1.Cloud providers must work together to ensure that the challenges to cloud adoption (security, integration, portability, interoperability, governance/management,(metering/monitoring) are addressed through open collaboration and the appropriate use of standards

2.Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms and limit their choice of providers

3.Cloud providers must use and adopt existing standards wherever appropriate. The IT industry has invested heavily in existing standards and standards organizations; there is no need to duplicate or reinvent them

4. When new standards (or adjustments to existing standards) are needed, we must be judicious and pragmatic to avoid creating too many standards. We must ensure that standards promote innovation and do not inhibit it

5. Any community effort around the open cloud should be driven by customer needs, not merely the technical needs of cloud providers, and should be tested or verified against real customer requirements

6. Cloud computing standards organizations, advocacy groups, and communities should work together and stay coordinated, making sure that efforts do not conflict or overlap

Reuven Cohen's introductory blog post on Open Cloud

In-spite of Amazon/Google's resistance and Microsoft's frontal attack, Open Cloud manifesto is getting attention. An active user group is already into writing the Open cloud use cases.

My personal take, the might of Microsoft / Google, may be able to kill the initiative, but idea would live on.

Contextual Ads - based off your Social Network Profile

2009-07-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

Volkswagen has come-up with a contextualized online advertising campaign that intends to help prospective buyers find the right VW model based on their social profile. Check it out..

Type 1: Context Ad based off of opt-in Twitter profile.

Above Ad: Enter your Twitter name to see a product recommendation

Type 2: Contextual Ad based off of Facebook profile.

“Meet the VWs” Facebook app asks users to opt in to analyze their profile and then recommends VW products based off simple profile info.

Looks to me as the next generation of online advertising. What do you think?

May the force be with you..

2009-06-30T13:15:00.000-07:00

As a kid, I was really fascinated with "Star Wars" in general, and the aforesaid lines from Master Yoda in particular. For the uninitiated Yoda is the famous Jedi Master in the 'Star Wars' universe, who is a strong proponent of 'the Force' (a binding, metaphysical and ubiquitous power in Star Wars universe).

'The force' might be a figment of imagination of George Lucas, but it was intriguing nonetheless. I was really fascinated about a particular scene in 'The Empire Strikes Back', where Master Yoda teaches Luke Skywalker on how to use your mind power to interact with 'the Force' and move mundane (and almost always heavy..) objects from one place to another, without batting an eyelid.... I wished I could do that..

But that was then..

Coming back to our real world, how about moving a real object by just thinking about it? fascinating?? There is a new start-up company named nuerosky, who have developed a technology called Brain Computer Interface (BCI). BCI let's you catch your brainwaves and translate your thoughts to actions!!! (well almost...).

Check it out... And may the force be with you..

Alternate iPhone native application development platform

2009-06-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

Ansca - a start-up company, launched a new iphone native application development platform named 'Corona'. Corona uses a scripting language named 'Lua' (more in line of Javascript/ActionScript).

So far, one of the entry barriers for new developers was the steep learning curve of Objective-C (on Cocoa/XCode). With Corona, we are likely to see many more first time developers developing native iphone apps. Happy browsing the AppStore !

Opera unite: Reinventing the Web

2009-06-17T11:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Opera labs launched 'Opera unite' which claims to 'reinvent the web'. ..and how?

This new technology essentially turns every computer running the Opera browser into a full fledged web server. You can use Opera unite to share documents, music, photos, videos or use it to run websites or even setup chat rooms without needing any third party software.

As per the concept, i think it's noble, a bright idea and has potential to change the way we work. As per Lawrence Eng (a product analyst in Opera software)..."This technology is a radical first step towards addressing what I call “the Internet’s unfulfilled promise”, which is about our ability to connect with each other and participate meaningfully online—on our own terms, and without losing control of our data"

So far so good, but does it work?? I checked it out.
I downloaded and setup two services to explore those better.
FileSharing: - Pretty interesting, you can share files from your file system, directly with all netizens. You can specify security rules as well.
Fridge:- lets you put notes, stickies on your fridge. What's more, you can share your fridge will all, so that others can see your notes and put more notes also (if you permit). But this service was not very reliable. not sure if it works for you, but you can see my notes at http://office.lalatendu.operaunite.com/fridge/

My verdict. Concept: 8/10, Implementation 5/10 (see more idepth analysis on why Opera unite doesn't deliver what it promises to : http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/06/16/thoughts-on-opera-unite/)
Nonetheless, recommended for all.

Web 2.0 and Collaborative governance

2009-05-25T15:39:00.000-07:00

Check out Stimuluswatch.org
The site lists all proposed "shovel-ready" projects, where the Obama administration is planning to invest the stimulus money.

OKay...What's new??
It let's people (not just administrators, contractors..but just about anybody who cares) to rate these proposed projects.

Simple, yet effective. Citizens with their knowledge on the local environment, rate these projects on it's viability. Provide comments on it's priority, suggest improvements. In turn, this gives an 'on the ground' perspective to the policy makers sitting in the capitol hill.

A number of critical attributes of such 'collaborative governance' stand out, such as
- Brings in transparency to decision making process involving public spending
- Makes authorities accountable for decisions made
- Harnesses collective intelligence
- Inclusive approach in policy making brings in a positive energy

I wonder if we can extend similar web 2.0 features to bring more transparency in Corporate Governance. In the current economic environment, where the purse strings are tighter than ever, can we go for an inclusive approach in determining where to invest the money on? Can we use this approach in prioritizing projects we pick for execution?

Would like to know what you think...

97 things every software architect should know

2009-05-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

While browsing through my daily dose of RSS feeds on Google reader, I came across this interesting website, which talks of "97 Things every software architect should Know". Here are my top three picks (not in any specific order) out of the list of 97 'things' :-

1. Simplicity before generality, use before reuse :- Couldn't have agreed more. Having been a developer myself, I have seen developers often resorting to speculative design, under the guise of re-usability

2. Seek value in requested capabilities :- With apt examples the author, describes, how the role of a technical architect should be to help sponsor understand what they need. Ties back well to the agile manifesto

3. Pattern Pathology :- At times we assume design patterns to be the solution to all complex business problems. We enforce certain design patterns in project without checking if there are any simpler/ better solution available. The Author describes this symptom as 'Pattern Pathology' and makes a Strong case against it

Recommended reading for all..would like to know what are your picks..

My picks from Web 2.0 Expo - San Francisco (03/31 ~ 04/03)

2009-04-06T21:26:00.000-07:00

"The Power of Less" - was the theme in the Web 2.0 Expo this time. The theme couldn't have been more apt given that the world is facing it's worst ever financial crisis since the Great Depressions in 1930s.

Focus was to present ideas on how to leverage web as an platform, introduce lightweight tools, improve user experience, help organizations to maximize resources and streamline productivity.

There are a number of interesting discussions, given below are my personal picks..

- Web 2.0 - Five Years on - by Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media)

- The Year of Mobile Computer - by Anssi Vanjoki (Nokia)

- Building your First Android experience - by Tony Hillerson

http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/22/Building%20Your%20First%20Android%20Experience%20Presentation.pdf

- Designing Social interfaces: Principles best practices and patterns for designing social web - by Erin Malone (Tangible UX), Christian Crumlish (Yahoo!)

Social Patterns Talk - Web 2.0 version

View more presentations from Erin Malone.

- Effective Twitter for Communication and Product integration - by Sarah Milstein (20Slides.com)

http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/22/Effective%20Twitter%20for%20Communication%20_%20Product%20Integration%20Presentation.ppt

- Future of Mobile: Native App vs Mobile Web vs Hybrid App. - by Jason Grigsby (Cloud Four)

Native vs. Web vs. Hybrid: Mobile Development Choices

View more presentations from grigs.

Semantic Web

2009-03-29T22:49:00.000-07:00

My research on Semantic web and possibilities of 'Linked data' continues...

The more I tried figuring it out, my understanding got fuzzier in the the myriad complexities of Ontology's, RDFs, OWLs and SPARQLs.. that is untill I came across this nice introduction on youtube.

Recommended Introduction on Semantic web for all those uninitiated, like me..

Welcome to the world of Semantics..

Linked Data - new paradigm of Information Management

2009-03-14T22:50:00.000-07:00

I work in 'Professional Services' Industry. Out here Information is 'vital' and making structural inferences out of disorganized information is 'Money' ($$). In my current organization, we have information stored in multiple data sources such as warehouse, wikis, blogs, document management systems, lotus notes based collaboration systems etc. The key challenge we are facing is how to find information ranked by relevance. How to link data from different sources to make meaningful inferences?

I heard Sir Tim Berners Lee, outlining the concept of Linked Data, and was greatly moved by it. Can Semantic web bring about the next revolution in the way we see, perceive and interpret data? Let's find out..

Try out the following steps.
1. Check out the Ontology viewer on Yago (a semantic knowledge base developed by Max-Plank Institute, Saarbrucken). NOTE - This would require Java applet enabled on your viewer
2. You should see an entity 'India' and it's relationships with other entities.
3. Click on other entities and browse through the semantic web (of course limited to the 2 million entities that Yago has put up so far)..

Hope this primer gets you initiated on Semantic web..more to follow on future posts.

10 habits of highly effective IT professionals

2009-03-01T20:51:00.000-08:00

Just completed reading Simon Stapleton's ebook titled '10 habits of highly effective IT professionals'. Here are the habits Simon propounds

Openly share knowledge
Coach Others
Learn by reviewing
Focus on strengths and strive to avoid weaknesses
Remember that "everybody is a resource"
Effectively deliver value
Delegate effectively
Escalate at the right time
Actively participate in a value chain
Create the right work-life balance

My take - it's a nice refresher of habits we know but at times ignore. Good news it's available for free download at SimonStapleton.com after a quick registration.

The Technical debt

2009-03-01T07:47:00.000-08:00

In the world of agile development, refactoring of code is an essential practice.

Watch Ward Cunningham reflecting on the history and common misunderstanding of the 'debt metaphor', as he presents the case for continuous refactoring.

The Meta-Cloud

2009-02-24T20:45:00.000-08:00

There is a buzz around Cloud computing these days. Amazon leads the pack and many start-ups are lapping on to the services offered. However the big question remains, are the enterprises tuning in? Answer is 'Not Yet'.

There are still concerns on the data security, cloud availability (more so after the GFail episode). There are question marks on near infinite storage space claim and the need for maintaining redundant sites for fail over. More so, not all enterprises will be willing to put all their data with a single cloud vendor.. So where do we go from here?

In comes the concept of 'Meta-Cloud'. How about having a service which let's enterprises 'pool infrastructure resources from multiple clouds' - giving you near infinite storage space? How about having a portability layer, which can become a neutral cloud management ? How about having an option to move your data from one cloud to another..seamlessly - ensuring that your infrastructure is available always?

Sounds interesting? keep a watch on the following companies as we will hear more from them in near future
- Elastra
- RightScale
Welcome to the fourth dimension of the cloud.

10 Cloud Computing Predictions

2009-02-23T03:16:00.000-08:00

follow-up to my last post, here are InformationWeeks top 10 predictions on cloud computing.
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=5NF45EUOCF3EUQSNDLPCKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=213000074&_requestid=72451
Interesting read!

The 'Azure' Cloud

2009-02-18T21:16:00.000-08:00

Yet another cloud over the horizon...

Microsoft has launched it's very own cloud computing platform named Azure. Services being offered by Azure looks promising ..at least to developers at this point. Only time will tell how 'Azure' fares against it's established rivals such as .. 'Amazon Web Services', 'Google App Engine' and 'VMware vCloud'.

For starters, here is a comparison of the services being offered by the above mentioned players in the space of cloud computing.

Any bets on who would win the race??

Ambassadors and Boundary Spanners

2009-02-05T20:33:00.000-08:00

In his last post, renowned Agile guru 'Scott Ambler' introduced two new roles for distributed agile teams e.g. 'Ambassadors' and 'Boundary Spanners'. Here is how he puts it..

Ambassadors are senior technical or business experts who travel between sites to share information between the subteams. Getting the team together at the beginning of the project sets the foundation for communication, but without continual investment in maintaining effective collaboration between teams you run the risk of your subteams deviating from the overall strategy.

Boundary spanners are located on site who focus on enabling communication between subteams as well as within their subteam. There are typically three flavors of boundary spanners—team leaders who take on project management responsibilities on the subteam, product owners who are responsible for representing the business within the subteam, and architecture owners responsible for technical direction on the team. These boundary spanners will work closely with their peers, having regular coordination meetings across all subteams as well as impromptu one-on-one meetings to deal with specific issues.

Does these roles sound familiar? Are we hearing the need for project manager/ coordinator roles in self organizing agile teams?? Does it mean, we need some amount of command and control..even in agile teams???

Seems like Agile methodology is re-inventing itself to infuse best practices of the traditional s/w development methodology. Distributed development team is a reality these days and it's about time for Agile methodology to do reality check and adapt to the changing needs of IT development......

Social Proprioception

2009-02-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

WordNet defines Proprioception as " the ability to sense the position, location, orientation and movement of the body and it's parts" - ?????- let's keep this in perspective and talk of something more mundane subject 'microblogging' ...la. 'Twitter'.

Since it's launch in mid 2006, Twitter user base has grown exponentially, surpassing the industry benchmark of 1 million users in first year of operation. Looking at the success of Twitter, Microblogging space is seeing a number of new entrants, with notables such as Plurk , Yammer and Pownce...and some newbies such as "Quix" developed by Web 2.0 lab in Tata consultancy services. Most of the social networking sites (like Facebook and Orkut) have added Microblogging component in their sites (e.g as Status bar on user profile).

For the uninitiated..they always wonder ..what's the buzz all about? What is that anybody can achieve by posting or reading all those seemingly incoherent snippets (Twiiter limits your post to 140 characters) describing what people are doing or have been doing?...

As Clive Thompson puts it in his seminal article on Microblogging "Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter — and the similarly mundane Dodgeball, a tool for reporting your real-time location to friends — is cumulative."

The beauty of microblogging is to limit each post to a certain number of characters. This encourages people to blurt out what they think..or rather helps capturing the current state of mind without any sanitizing. Individually these messages may not mean much, but collectively over a period of time, these posts can give a better understanding of the state of mind or experiences of the person you are following. When you meet such person next time, knowing his/her state of mind through the postings, will automatically create an emotional map of the person and help you adjust your responses in your personal dealings. Being humans, I guess certain traits are hard-wired in our brain...

Putting thing in context, this helps in creating a Social Proprioception..which will play a bigger role in social networking space in coming times. Now the question is how to leverage this concept in the enterprise? Any thoughts?

Three reasons to bet on 'Android'

2009-01-25T06:37:00.000-08:00

The humongous success of ‘iPhone’ has done enough to redefine the utility of ‘Smartphones’. While enterprise and consumers alike are betting big on future of mobile computing, it’s natural to expect fierce competition in the mobile software platform space. While veterans like Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberry have already cornered a good deal of the mobile software market, the new generation platforms such as Android, iPhone (Cocoa), Brew and host of other Linux based platforms are beginning to challenge the old order. As enterprises moving towards mobile application development, the big question remains, which platform to bet on..

Here are 3 reasons why I would bet on Android over other worthy competitors

1. Open Handset Alliance – Android is backed by the heavyweights of the industry such as Google, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, China Mobile and NTT Docomo..to name a few. The backing of Open Handset Alliance (OHA) will certainly raise the entry barrier for any future competition

2. Technical advantages – Open source, programming Java on Eclipse plugin (iPhone needs Objective C!!! on XCode IDE), can be developed on win/mac/Linux, runs natively (Blackberry needs special JVM). Along with the OS, you get host of other mobile applications such as an email client, SMS program, calendar and map applications..as bonus!

3. Positioning of Android – Shrewd marketing strategists as they are, Google is positioning Android in two parallel markets. With it’s leverage in OHA, there is a constant push for Android adoption by big players in both mobile handset manufacturing as well as mobile Operators. At the same time, as open source platform, it’s targeting consumer ‘first’. Eventually, when Android phones come to enterprise, it would come as consumer-purchased rather than enterprise-issued. On a related note, Google might extend Android to be a desktop OS..if and when such an event happens, the possibilities of cross platform application development would be huge..

All said and done, Android phones are yet to be launched in large scale (Currently being used exclusively on T-Mobile G1). The real test would come with it's application on more high-end phones in the hands of highly demanding consumers. However, as things stand, the future looks promising for Android.