Balance

Agile Coach Camp - Measuring ROI

2010-04-20T04:28:00.000-07:00

Another topic of discussion was how do you measure your return on investment and whether you are making progress. The team may provide anecdotal evidence that things are better or will get better - but how do you know for certain that you are getting value out of your investment?

Here are some hard metrics to measure your success.

Customer Satisfaction

Conduct customer satisfaction surveys to gauge how receptive your customers are. This is a tremendously under-utilized and under sold benefit. Customers love interacting directly with the development team and relish the higher degree of control they have along with the flexibility to adjust the product as they see it evolving.
Analysis gaps - Rework related to missing or mis-understood requirements typically decreases since the product is demoed often and gaps are caught sooner. You need to be able to articulate the savings from this.
Predictability of release - The cadence of XP/SCRUM projects typically allows for monthly releases. This could be more or less frequent based on your situation but the benefit is decreased anxiety from knowing that a feature or a set of features hasn't "missed the boat". This leads to lower churn and better prioritization.

Product Quality

Defect count - Given the tighter feedback loop & the XP engineering practices, the defect count should trend lower over a period of time.
Passing Builds - The percentage of passing builds to failing builds should increase as the team becomes more disciplined.
Test coverage - The test coverage is the percentage of code covered by tests. There are many caveats to this measure but its always better to have more coverage than less. You can measure this easily and gauge the impact of adopting agile practices in your organization.

Gains in Productivity

Cost of Ownership - The cost of ownership of the software produced in the organization should reduce over a period of time with smaller defects, better test coverage and hopefully better design principles that support iterative development.
Pre-release stabilization period - The amount of time needed for stabilization before a release should reduce.
Release faster - The team should be able to produce releases in shorter durations and the frequency of releasing software should also go up.
Lower ramp up time - With practices like pairing, collaborative design and tests to highlight the usage of the code, the time to ramp up new people on the team should decrease including reduction of the negative velocity of experienced people on the team who need to spend time to ramp up newer members.

Employee satisfaction

Lower Attrition - If all parts of the development ecosystem are performing well, it should provide people better job satisfaction and lead to lower attrition rates.
Survey - Surveys measuring employee satisfaction should show evidence from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective that the morale (related to delivery) is better and the comments are moving to more complex issues from the baseline measurements.

Agile Coach Camp - Pragmatic Agile

2010-04-20T03:35:00.000-07:00

This was an interesting conference for me for several reasons -

It was a 'coach' camp and by definition had people who were already practicing and leading their teams to excel at agile development
It was my first conference in India after a very long time, the last one was a decade ago when Steve Ballmer smashed a mac at the Taj (i think) to make a point.
It was hosted in Goa
It was a smaller group which was extremely passionate about delivering software.

The style of the conference was open space. I conducted a few sessions in that, the pragmatic agile session was one that was probably the most interesting. In the idea generation phase of the discussion, I got a sense (perhaps wrongly) that people wanted to question everything which in and of itself is not a bad thing but possibly because if you didn't you didn't have the chops.

Being Anti-Dogmatic != Pragmatic

We structured the session such that - each person in the group presented a hypotheses of a good practice that "must" be followed for an agile project to be successful and another in the group provided an argument against it. Here is a quick summary of the discussion

Assertion: You must practice TDD to produce good designs and well tested code that can be changed iteratively.
Dissension: You can't test drive main frame applications or legacy code.

Assertion: You must use relative estimation to scope out the work.
Dissension: Corporate environments, external forces client or team do not always allow for that to happen.

Assertion:You must have acceptance criteria without which you did not have a good definition of being done.
Dissension: In smaller teams, the product owner role can simply state the story and developer's familiar with the domain can develop the feature without every single thing being spelled out.

Assertion: Continuous feedback is a prerequisite in whatever form be it builds or product features.
Dissension: Too much data can be distracting and not allow the team to focus or lose out on real information in the deluge of data.

Assertion: Team must buy-in to be agile
Dissension: Political or other organization structures may prevent this from happening so while that's better, its not necessary .

Assertion: A release must be time-boxed.
Dissension: A team/product owner can choose between time boxing or scope boxing for a release.

Assertion: There are no pre-requisites needed to be successful at delivering (in an agile fashion)
Dissension: While there is no check list, not considering proven practices is going to make the learning process time consuming and will probably lead to similar conclusions in a lot of cases.

Assertion: Must retrospect periodically to improve the process and solve underlying issues.
Dissension: Not looking around for outside feedback can narrow the amount of feedback you can generate internally and lead to tunnel vision.

Assertion: Must have a product manager
Dissension: Do not need a product manager, anyone on the team can play the product owner role.

Most of the discussion as you can see was pretty mainstream and those 'opposing' the assertion were often providing guidance on when to bend the rules vs. opposing the practices. Take for example TDD for main frame development, while it may not be possible in the traditional sense of test driving java or .net code, its certainly possible to write test code that calls main frame functions. The key takeaway being that its important to strongly evaluate a 'best practice' before discarding it as being irrelevant to your particular situation.

Prototyping and Field Evaluation as Risk Mitigation in Mobile Product Development

2009-02-11T19:12:00.000-08:00

Next momo meet should be interesting. Its a chat by Frank Bentley on prototyping mobile apps. Frank does research in ambient interfaces, mobile computing, and social media and teaches Communicating with Mobile Technology at MIT so I'm pumped!

http://momochitown.eventbrite.com/

If you do decide to invest in that Roth..

2008-12-02T07:50:00.000-08:00

Here are some ultra long etfs that provide good diversification and leverage at the same time. Clearly if you are close to retiring you shouldn't venture down this path :)

Moving to India

2008-12-02T05:12:00.001-08:00

A close friend moved back to India recently and started blogging about his experiences of moving back after living 10 years in the US. He has promised to post regularly on the joys, tribulations and just plain information from someone who has experienced the comforts of the US and heads back.

That's not the Apple I know..

2008-11-30T19:13:00.000-08:00

My one year old daughter poured soda on my last macbook pro and hastened its demise prematurely. It served me well until its last day. I've been without a mac for over a month so naturally I was a bit excited getting a new shiny toy - until I tried to connect it to my shiny LG monitor. The new macs don't come with a remote, and more importantly they don't come with any video adapters out of the box.

Given most mac enthusiasts are spending top dollar, the one thing you don't expect from Apple is out-of-the-box-inconvenience. The situation is even more aggravating since the mini DisplayPort adapters aren't readily available in your neighborhood electronic store or anywhere else on the $#% planet except apple.

So now I have to make another trip to the store to buy a stupid video adapter that should have come with the mac like it did with the "old" macbook pros.

Use That Roth!

2008-11-26T08:29:00.001-08:00

Its a good time to put some money in a Roth IRA account. The money grows tax free and your chances of making a profit are decent in the long term, given that we are somewhere between 5 to 11 year lows (depending on what day and time you put money to work!).

Agile Barometer: Burn down charts

2008-11-25T12:06:00.000-08:00

You don't always need burn-downs. If you are using them, think about why you need it. Let me explain - Typically burn down charts illustrate the delta between the slope you need to be at to achieve your go-live dates vs the current slope of your work. If you intend to release in a two week cycle, you have 10 business days to develop meaning your burn doesn't give you any more visibility than what you already have from your daily standups. Any project/iteration manager worth their salt should be able to glean from the standups + the story wall where they stand in that 10 day period.

There are often times when a critical mass of stories needs to be developed without which the feature is not fit for user consumption. Only when this cannot be released in a short period of time (say 2 weeks) are burn down charts useful. If you are doing it purely to be agile - you've just proven you truly aren't!

Win 10 Grand

2008-11-22T10:42:00.000-08:00

My team is sponsoring a holiday contest. If you are doing or have been interested in doing a home project or just want to win 10K go check it out! Also please please give me feedback on your experience of using the site and any issues you may run into!

Agile Barometer: Reviews & Sign-offs

2008-11-08T12:02:00.001-08:00

How agile is your team? Many software and non-software teams are jumping on the Agile bandwagon. I interviewed a candidate recently whose organization did SCRUM. On further questioning, I found that they did daily stand-ups which were referred to as daily scrums but they didn’t do much beyond that. This brings me to the topic of today – how agile is your team? How do you measure their agility?

On our team, the question of reviews and signoffs is surfacing more often. I stress on the need for peer analyst reviews, business reviews and reviews with developers before they start working on stories. In talking with the PMO there is a focus on meeting the gating criteria to measure confidence in delivery. In the forest of all these (sometimes conflicting) needs of an organization the mettle of true agile teams is tested. A team who understands the philosophy of agile does reviews not to cover for gaps (abdication of responsibility) but to share knowledge.

The goal of a peer analyst review is to measure quality of the narrative and completeness of the acceptance criteria – not approval from the lead BA.
The goal of a business review is to ensure that the product team can see their intentions expressed in the story – not to “lock down” scope.
The goal of a developer review is to discover gaps in requirements, clarify story goals and allow a conversation between the execution team and analysts – not to “hand-off” to development.

This is not to say that you don’t need any sign-offs and ownership of outcomes, you certainly need that but when the focus is on the latter, you start doing things for the wrong reasons.

I’ve seen teams emailing heaps of documents to everyone to review, most people never read these documents and if they do they don’t provide the quality feedback. The motivations for information sharing, reviews and sign-offs applies to any type of team or organization. To truly create an engaged team, challenge your team and yourself on both the intent and outcomes to measure how agile you truly are. In the end, these measurements may turn out to be stochastic and more an art than a science.

Beta HomePage

2008-10-20T15:35:00.000-07:00

I've published a new blog entry for ManageMyHome.com. Would love to get some feedback on what you think about our new beta homepage compared to our existing homepage. Make sure you log-in because that will allow you to preview what a user with an account will see as well.

The Big Takeaway

2008-09-30T17:35:00.001-07:00

By Sunday night, every market around the world had seen the full shape of the revised bailout bill. Most markets including the US markets responded by thumping the index down around 3-4%. On Monday afternoon the bill was voted down. The not-so-good option that wall street was reluctantly accepting was no longer available. Hence the phrase "take away". The bill will probably come back, even more unfavorable for the street and (i suspect) the markets will rejoice in response.

Bailout - Its your fault really

2008-09-29T19:30:00.000-07:00

Much has been made of bailing out greedy wall street bankers and executive compensation in the last week. Today the market wiped out over a trillion dollars in wealth. There is a lot of truth to this accusation of greed - however not much has been talked about another actor in this debacle *you*.

The primary issue in the markets is based around the face value of mortgage backed securities. Meaning when you and I bought our $1M house, the lender sold it to someone else who packed 1,000 of our loans created a trade-able security and sold it to someone else - imagine their greed. All is well in Disneyland until you stop paying your $6,000 per month mortgage because you can afford only $3,000 and figured when the place appreciates you could get away with a tidy profit. THAT my friend, is what is called leverage in the financial industry. The only problem is that when the market goes south you stop payments which brings us back to the crisis. These MBS securities are suddenly risky because you are not paying your loans and your house is not worth much.

Banks have to mark-to-market securities so if one of their securities tank (over simplification), they have to write down the rest of it. So banks now are writing down billions in asset value even though they don't really have equivalent cash losses. The banks have to raise fresh capital to meet their capital requirements which they can't because no one will buy that piece of paper which holds your mortage on it. Blimey we have a credit crunch!

There is a third actor who is much under appreciated - Mr. Greenspan. When you lower interest rates so low that putting money in the bank is stupid, you force people to buy stuff. Stuff like houses and when everyone is buying a house you don't want to be left out. So you buy a house which has shot up in price - but you must - because everyone else is buying. Few years go by and you are lamenting about the greed on wall street and complaining about how they should have never lent you the money to buy your house.

Pull Pairing

2008-09-26T13:19:00.000-07:00

A colleague of mine pointed out that my earlier parallel-paired programming blog had a really simple way of expressing it in lean terms "pull pairing". A developer pulls their pair into design as needed vs. push pairing where all development is done in pairs.

Do story points need to be ephemeral?

2008-09-22T14:29:00.000-07:00

On pretty much every agile project I've been on story points mean nothing in of themselves. After taking over managemyhome.com & partsdirect.com - I had a challenge. Stories required different skills for completion due to a complex stack of technologies, there are different websites but common teams, and add a distributed nature on top of that of which half don't speak the same language and soon you run into issues where a ambiguous point understanding is hurting both in and outside the team!

To make things easier we switched the connotation of a point to being ideal days. Stories are estimated in ideal days with binary progression. Since everyone understands that, it makes life much easier for all the developers estimating across time, geography & language barriers while getting consistency across our estimates. We still use these numbers as story points in terms of scoping, velocity and reporting so it feels like a good intersection between using story points and estimating in time and has been working quite well for the team.

Reverse Auctions

2008-09-22T06:58:00.001-07:00

I heard on CNBC this morning that the mechanism the Fed is considering for purchase of (under performing/illiquid assets) securities is a reverse auction. What this means is that the Fed will ask banks to compete for a pot of money. Meaning if the Fed has a 1Bn dollar auction, banks can compete on whether they want to put up e.g. a) $2Bn in really bad bets vs. b) 1.5Bn in not-so-bad assets etc. I like the market driven nature of this. However, I am sceptical that treasury can determine the actual worth of these securities so as to make a meaningful determination of whether (in my fictitious example above) option a or b is a better offer. The other interesting consideration is that if the assets are marked to market in this process, banks will lose their capital anyway and it won't solve anything.

Social fascism

2008-09-21T07:04:00.000-07:00

The current proposal to congress on purchase of distressed assets contains no language on what the banks will give up in exchange for their ability to pass on illiquid or poorly performing mortgage assets to the government. Given that banks have reaped tremendous gains in the past, its only fair that any proposal for takeover of over these assets outline how any proposal will separate goals of liquidity and fair pricing. In absence of that Jim summarizes the situation best

Wait a minute, the dude and his pals who created this crisis now get to make unfettered decisions related to cleaning up a mess which not only benefits them but protects them. By any other name it is called Social Fascism. Where is that wake up America dude?

Wikipedia defines social fascism as

Social fascism was a theory supported by the Communist International (Comintern) during the late 1920s and early 1930s, which stated that social democracy was a variant of fascism.

Fact Sheet of Treasury Proposal

Full text of legislative proposal from Treasury Department for authority to buy mortgage-related assets from WSJ:

Section 1. Short Title.

This Act may be cited as ____________________.

Sec. 2. Purchases of Mortgage-Related Assets.

(a) Authority to Purchase.–The Secretary is authorized to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, on such terms and conditions as determined by the Secretary, mortgage-related assets from any financial institution having its headquarters in the United States.

(b) Necessary Actions.–The Secretary is authorized to take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary to carry out the authorities in this Act, including, without limitation:

(1) appointing such employees as may be required to carry out the authorities in this Act and defining their duties;

(2) entering into contracts, including contracts for services authorized by section 3109 of title 5, United States Code, without regard to any other provision of law regarding public contracts;

(3) designating financial institutions as financial agents of the Government, and they shall perform all such reasonable duties related to this Act as financial agents of the Government as may be required of them;

(4) establishing vehicles that are authorized, subject to supervision by the Secretary, to purchase mortgage-related assets and issue obligations; and

(5) issuing such regulations and other guidance as may be necessary or appropriate to define terms or carry out the authorities of this Act.

Sec. 3. Considerations.

In exercising the authorities granted in this Act, the Secretary shall take into consideration means for–

(1) providing stability or preventing disruption to the financial markets or banking system; and

(2) protecting the taxpayer.

Sec. 4. Reports to Congress.

Within three months of the first exercise of the authority granted in section 2(a), and semiannually thereafter, the Secretary shall report to the Committees on the Budget, Financial Services, and Ways and Means of the House of Representatives and the Committees on the Budget, Finance, and Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate with respect to the authorities exercised under this Act and the considerations required by section 3.

Sec. 5. Rights; Management; Sale of Mortgage-Related Assets.

(a) Exercise of Rights.–The Secretary may, at any time, exercise any rights received in connection with mortgage-related assets purchased under this Act.

(b) Management of Mortgage-Related Assets.–The Secretary shall have authority to manage mortgage-related assets purchased under this Act, including revenues and portfolio risks therefrom.

(c) Sale of Mortgage-Related Assets.–The Secretary may, at any time, upon terms and conditions and at prices determined by the Secretary, sell, or enter into securities loans, repurchase transactions or other financial transactions in regard to, any mortgage-related asset purchased under this Act.

(d) Application of Sunset to Mortgage-Related Assets.–The authority of the Secretary to hold any mortgage-related asset purchased under this Act before the termination date in section 9, or to purchase or fund the purchase of a mortgage-related asset under a commitment entered into before the termination date in section 9, is not subject to the provisions of section 9.

Sec. 6. Maximum Amount of Authorized Purchases.

The Secretary’s authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time

Sec. 7. Funding.

For the purpose of the authorities granted in this Act, and for the costs of administering those authorities, the Secretary may use the proceeds of the sale of any securities issued under chapter 31 of title 31, United States Code, and the purposes for which securities may be issued under chapter 31 of title 31, United States Code, are extended to include actions authorized by this Act, including the payment of administrative expenses. Any funds expended for actions authorized by this Act, including the payment of administrative expenses, shall be deemed appropriated at the time of such expenditure.

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Sec. 9. Termination of Authority.

The authorities under this Act, with the exception of authorities granted in sections 2(b)(5), 5 and 7, shall terminate two years from the date of enactment of this Act.

Sec. 10. Increase in Statutory Limit on the Public Debt.

Subsection (b) of section 3101 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking out the dollar limitation contained in such subsection and inserting in lieu thereof $11,315,000,000,000.

Sec. 11. Credit Reform.

The costs of purchases of mortgage-related assets made under section 2(a) of this Act shall be determined as provided under the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990, as applicable.

Sec. 12. Definitions.

For purposes of this section, the following definitions shall apply:

(1) Mortgage-Related Assets.–The term “mortgage-related assets” means residential or commercial mortgages and any securities, obligations, or other instruments that are based on or related to such mortgages, that in each case was originated or issued on or before September 17, 2008.

(2) Secretary.–The term “Secretary” means the Secretary of the Treasury.

(3) United States.–The term “United States” means the States, territories, and possessions of the United States and the District of Columbia.

Death of paired programming. Its 2008 move on to parallel pairing.

2008-09-05T10:20:00.000-07:00

Time and time again, the question comes up – to pair or not to pair. Its understandable to have that question since productivity has a direct correlation to the number of people. Interestingly enough the correlation remains the same for a good team or a poor team but the productivity is progressively lower.

Here’s an example - If you have 4 people who are really good and produce higher quality software as the team grows – say from 4 to 6, a 50% increase the software developed may increase by 40%. Now consider a poor team which increases from 6 to 9 developers the software developed may only increase by 30%. Each 50% increase in team size brings about a 40% increase in the good team vs. a 30% increase in the poor team. So the correlation in both cases is the same but as the capacity of the two teams increases linearly the gap between productivity of the two teams will increase non-linearly.

Why do I bother talking about the correlation? The reason should be fairly clear by now simply thinking about software development as a numbers game with more people = more software is not sufficient. Quality of software produced is a better metric to use to drive productivity calculation than capacity.

So what has this got to do with pairing? Software productivity is not an exercise in speed typing, meaning design not typing is the key driver for productivity. Meaning, the faster the design process, the better the productivity – and two heads are usually better than one. Code ownership and collective understanding of design to evolve the code are immeasurable benefits of pairing.

However, in the mad rush “to be agile” we’ve forgotten the underlying reasons we started pairing in the first place – collaborative design. In most software development there are stories where the design is unclear and needs to evolve and there are the cookie-cutter stories when people just know what to do. But I’ve seen time and time again that developers on agile teams don't consciously disengage when there is no value add to pairing. This is not the agile I signed up for.

I personally like the model of “parallel – paired programming”. In this model you actually have two developers working together on a story on related task independently but co-located. E.g. I have a widget that needs to show up on a webpage. This may needs several pieces of code to work, a bit of hibernate mapping, some sql, some services perhaps, a controller, a view etc. The pair would work top-down and bottom-up simultaneously but co-located. When they were each done with their bit, one of the developers would create a patch and send it to the other developer who would apply it on their code. The two developers together would resolve any integration issues before checking the code in. I find this approach to be a more pragmatic way to work.

Does this make you a leaner team? Are you cutting out the fat from your agile process?

Looking for explorers

2008-08-27T13:00:00.000-07:00

Since I left ThoughtWorks last month, I've taken over managemyhome.com and partsdirect.com. Its been an interesting transition from consultant to consultantee (if that's a even a word). Its a pretty cool environment with a great bunch of people using hardcore agile practices with a blend of XP engineering practices and SCRUMs project management practices. We do lots of pairing, big whiteboard walls, TDD, automated acceptance testing, etc.

We do both Ruby on Rails and Java (Rails on JRuby) so its fairly cutting edge. Come back to managemyhome.com on Wednesday 09/17 and see the projects section to see what I mean :)

Its well funded and we’re growing, and growing quickly! We’re looking for some great developers to join the team. We have open positions for Senior Java Engineer positions, Rubyists & CSS/Javascript die hards who love to talk about web semantics. I am also interested in BAs & ScrumMaster/Project Managers with a penchant for details and deep understanding of Agile.

Email me at vivek dot vaid at gmail dot com

Moving on..

2008-08-19T15:49:00.000-07:00

Five years seems like a lifetime and it probably is. After a exhilarating time at one of the most dynamic companies I've had a chance to work at (and I've seen many as a consultant over the years) i'm moving on from ThoughtWorks.

As with my startup experience, it will allow me to do what I enjoy doing even more than technology. Integrating strategy, operations & technology at managemyhome.com & partsdirect.com. Should be a fun & challenging journey.

Anywhere.FM

2007-10-11T13:07:00.002-07:00

Anywhere.FM is a really well designed concept around keeping your music portable and sharing it in a private fashion with friends. They've cobbled together a number of technologies like ts flash\flex for the player & ruby on rails\php on the back-end among other things. Check it out if you haven't already! Web 3.0 anyone?

Barefoot College

2007-10-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

I've been living with my head in the sand, or so it seemed to me after I went for my first non-profit conference. I met up with Bunker Roy among many others. Funny name but a brilliant guy. His story is well known to many. He started a new type of education system all the way back in 1972 targeting vocational skills in rural regions. Barefoot College is now a pioneer in rainwater harvesting and solar energy among its many achievements. Definitely worth a peek. In fact you can simply show up in Tilonia and work with the college! The only rule Bunker has is to leave your preconceptions behind you in the city where you came from.

Yunus in the making?

2007-09-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

You've probably heard of Grameen Bank, Yunus and the nobel prize that put microfinance on everyone's radar. I came across another institution called the SKS Microfinance founded by Vikram Akula a former McKinsey consultant and Fulbright scholar, which seems to be on the same trajectory.

SKS has approx 1 million clients and Rs. 452 crores ($111 Million) in outstanding loans currently. It raised a whopping $11.5 Million in March 2007 making it the largest Venture backed Micro finance institution in the world.

The interesting thing about SKS is not just what they do but also how they do it. Before I get to what they did here's what the status quo was. A loan officer typically spent one hour in a village meeting approx 40 customers in that period. 50% of that time was spent in bookkeeping. Only 10 minutes per village was spent in new loan proposals or discussions! One would naturally assume the business required more people to conduct it.

What SKS did was go to Smart Cards and actually saved $20,000 in the process. Here's an excerpt from a world bank case study.

With the new technology, the loan officer downloads borrower information from the main computer terminal into his hand-held PC each morning before his first group meeting. At this meeting, each group member gives the loan officer her Smart card in place of a passbook, which the loan officer inserts into a special reader on his handheld computer . Using a custom-designed interface, the computer displays information from Smart card. Both, handheld device and Smart card then record the transaction, whether with a single button-press if the customer makes her payment in full for all loans (as is typical in Grameen methodology), or with an entry representing that she is a few rupees short. Loan officer then repeats the
process for deposits and loan disbursals. He then returns the Smart card to the customer and continues with next. Transactions that usually take a minute each can be done in half the time. After he has finished meeting with all his groups, he returns to the branch office and with press of a button uploads all information into the main system. A read-only computer is left in the village for customers to check their balances.

Journey Through Two Indias

2007-08-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

Ram Krishnan a member of IDCA with the help of Ram Narayanan is organizing an interesting journey to India.

A group of 30 Indian-Americans from all over the US have signed up to spend 7 days in India – actually to see the ‘other India’. A tour named as ‘Learning Journey’ will take these people to visit the villages of India. They will visit villages where no development has taken place, some villages after the benefit of rural development, as well as some NGO’s working in this field. A similar journey that Ram undertook 4 years ago.

Here is the full document Ram created to describe the trip.

WPF Tips: Static and Dynamic Resources

2007-05-29T22:25:00.000-07:00

WPF will render the page in its entirety when you change any resource for that page. You can only change dynamic resources not static resources. So use dynamic resources sparingly and even when you do don't change them too often. You get an additional hit when you use dynamic resources even when you don't change them since the look up is at run time not compile time.

More WPF performance tips here

Earth Shots

2007-05-15T13:14:00.000-07:00

Being an amateur photographer - I enjoy sharing the kind of photos I would love to have taken. Here's one from EarthShots.org

Music man of Jaipur by Sam Stearman

Now that's a good April 1st

2007-04-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

Google Free Broadband (TiSP)

Prior years

GoogleGulp
Lunar Job
Mental Plex
Pigeon Rank

Social Entrepreneurship

2007-02-19T08:26:00.000-08:00

I came upon the term ‘Social Entrepreneur’ while exploring an idea to supply energy to those who are still ‘disconnected’ in this day and age. The term is so simply stated that it I almost missed the significance of it. The world of non-profits seems to be separated from the for-profit world almost like it was law.

The underlying reason for this maybe that anyone who does something socially responsible is concerned about one thing – are the proceeds getting to what they were intended for. If a non-profit is associated with any kind of profitability, it may limit their ability to raise funds. Is that a dogma we've lived with too long now? I suspect a for-profit organization usually more efficient in capital allocation & utilization than a non-profit could be (I am generalizing here – not ALL non-profits are necessarily less efficient than for-profits). This assertion is not on the basis any evidence but simply based on the fundamentals of the resources available at their disposal. How many Harvard, MIT or IIT graduates go to non-profits?

This leads me to the significance of social entrepreneurship – I suspect that a profit making business model with a social agenda could be quite effective. Surely the fact that an entity is profiting from our donated funds should be cause for alarm right? I think – not quite. Non-profits play two roles – one as an agency for operations management for a relief effort and second as an agency which disburses funds for executing (part of) the operations e.g. a donation for Katrina might go to an agency which hires a contractor for clean up. So there are always parts of the supply chain which are executed by for-profits.

So how would a for-profit social business model define itself? Say instead of donating money, you actually bought ‘shares’ in the non-profit. The entity would use these funds for whatever purpose it stood for e.g. renewable energy (an area that I am interested in). Now its return would be in the form of carbon credits it had generated. As a shareholder you would get return in form of carbon credits – which by the way have an attached monetary value. The more credits they generate the ‘profitable’ they are and more ‘investment’ they generate. Or even in the form of cash returns e.g. generation of advertising revenue, or other leverage they have in terms of their market reach. Wouldn't this encourage more investment rather than less? Wouldn't we have more entrepreneurship with a social agenda if there was a clear profit motive & expectations of results?

Now I realize that this is very simplistic and not all the output that non-profits result in can be neatly monetized but it is something to think about. Grameen Bank is a good example of creating a business model with a social agenda.

iPod vs Zune

2006-12-01T22:33:00.000-08:00

Here's (yet another) post on the two since I spent a good hour with the Zune last week. I'll skip over the spec comparison and just give my personal observations.

Device Comparison

Zune has great navigation. It takes less clicks to get to what you want than the iPod.
I like the display of both Zune and iPod - both provide a good experience in different ways. Zune has a bigger display, iPod has a crisper brighter one. The resolution on both is the same. So it depends on what you prefer - I liked the Zune display a little more than the iPod.
iPod has much better form factor. Zune feels a little clunky.
I liked having the FM receiver & Wireless capabilities on Zune
Given all the above - I preferred the iPod for one reason - the form factor - the FM and wide screen display were the two features i would have chosen the Zune had it a better look.

Media Availability Comparison

You are also choosing how you get your music with the device selection - iTunes has fixed 99c pricing and URGE has the all-you-can-eat option.
Urge probably has all the music you need but the PodCasts still live on iPod for now - i don't think (i may be wrong) you can play them on Zune. Clearly MS will catch up with Apple on the big banner studio type of stuff - but for now if you want Podcasts stay with the Pod.

iTunes vs. Windows Media Player 11 Match off

Unfortunately the device comparison must include a iTunes vs. Windows Media Player match off as well since you are inherently choosing the software you wish to live in when you buy the device.
WM11 has a nice feature, and look & feel - In fact, I spent a good amount of time considering the Zune because of it. However there are two features which I can't live without in iTunes 1) The Quick Browse three-pane-filter 2) Smart play-lists.
In summary, I found iTunes was easier to use.

So i bought an iPod.

The BMW M6 & Aston Martin Vantage

2006-12-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

*Sigh*

$104,000 - 5 Liter V10 - 500 bph - 0 to 60 in 4.5s

*Sob*

$107,000 - 4.3 Liter V8 - 380 bph - 0 to 60 in 4.9s

So on that note, it seems James Bond has fallen on hard times, in the latest flick I was surprised to see him show up in a (cough) Ford Mondeo - but not to worry he is back in the faithful Aston soon afterwards.

Here's a good way to get fired.. really!

2006-11-12T19:53:00.000-08:00

In the recent past the options backdating scam has me all fired up, not because its illegal but because it seems all you need to do is leave and that makes it all OK!

I'd like to do a "agreed to leave" with 20 mil in the bank!

Rambus took a $200M charge related to options backdating

11/2006 - KB HOME CEO BRUCE KARATZ agreed to leave the home-construction company after an internal investigation found that he backdated his own option grants to increase his pay.

09/2003 - Yesterday, Grasso agreed to forgo an additional $48 million he has already "earned"...

More goodness here

VS Designer Blues - II

2006-10-24T15:07:00.000-07:00

Here was the first post on this. Some more contributions since then..

Troy:
Another one I've done that works. Close the Form that is in the designer. Rebuild Solution and open it back up. Now, if only VS2005 would allow you to have abstract User Controls and Forms..

Mike 2:
An assemply that your UI project is referencing, has a dependent assembly itself. While doing a regular compile the complier is able to bring all these dependencies into bin and it all works out however while in design mode whatever engine the Designer is using can't to resolve these. This can be fixed by adding downstream dependencies as direct references to the UI project.

Anand Narayan
If you get a non-descript error with your forms in visual studio...clear out the following directoryC:\Documents and Settings\your_login\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ProjectAssemblies

Vivek Singh:
Close Visual Studio. Delete obj and bin folder for project which has the controls. Build and open the designer. We even have batch file for this as well for closing VS, deleting and opening VS again.

If all this fails, go to the nearest pub, drink a six pack, hit your head on a concrete pavement and try going into a coma - maybe in your next life it will all magically work..

AJAX Beta 1 musings..

2006-10-22T20:10:00.000-07:00

The ATLAS effort (as you may have heard) has been folded into ASP.NET with the AJAX Beta 1 releasing last week. You can find it here. I found a couple of interesting things with this release namely 1) Everything under the ASP AJAX library will be Safari compatible 2) It will play nicely with other other AJAX libraries like Prototype & script.aculo.us 3) Source modification license!

I haven't played with this yet but would be interesting to see if anyone has tried to use AJAX libraries from different sources in a single app.

Ruby plugin for IntelliJ IDEA

2006-09-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

You can get the latest ruby plugin for IntelliJ IDEA and a bunch of other goodies from JetBrains here

http://svn.jetbrains.org/idea/Trunk/ruby/

or better still browse..
http://svn.jetbrains.org/idea/Trunk/

and if you have trouble compiling the plugin see
http://www.intellij.net/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=5140742

When your Visual Studio Designer just won't listen

2006-09-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a Winforms application for some time and fairly often the Visual Studio Forms Designer will just refuse to render the control. Well if you are building a web application you don't care anyway since you can use your faithful browser to see any layout changes, or even hack HTML to get what you want. In WinForms however I don't have all the pixel positions memorized so I really need the designer. Here are some tips.

1) Try a ReBuild solution
2) CleanUi or CleanBuild on the Build Menu and then Rebuild
3) From Mike 2: If you have a UserControl that is using some type of reflection, try moving that code out of the constructor or field initialization.
4) Anand mentioned this one - Open a simple user control first and then try to open the complex one you are really trying to work on. I don't know why, but this works.
5) Ofcourse you could add a dose of closing the solution (or Visual Studio) and reopening it.

If you've seen other "jiggle it" techniques please post.

Analytics for your blog

2006-09-20T07:36:00.000-07:00

I've been using Google Analytics for observing activity on my blog. It's nice, easy to setup and provides you with pretty pictures. All in two easy steps -

1) Sign up
2) Insert some javascript on your blog / website template

that's it. go indulge yourself every morning!

Feel like hijacking XP today..?

2006-09-18T08:50:00.000-07:00

should wake u up..

Running A Desktop With Full System Privileges
http://passivemode.net/updates/2006/6/5/windows-xp-privilege-escalation-exploit.html

Finally svnserve as a native Windows service!

2006-09-18T07:06:00.001-07:00

The windows platform has always been (and perhaps will remain) the step child environment for subversion. Something as basic as running the source control as a headless windows service required downloading SVNService a host which ran svnserve.

Well finally svnserve has a --service option which allows you to run svnserve as a windows service. So here is what you have to do -

1. Install subversion -> http://subversion.tigris.org
2. Create the repository (if you don't have one already, or skip this step)

svnadmin create c:\svnrepo

3. Create the service (command on one line ofcourse)

sc create "svnservice" binpath= "C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin\svnserve --service -r c:\svnrepo" displayname= "Subversion Repository" depend= Tcpip start= auto

4. Start it up

net start svnservice

More information here.

That's it!

Small methods != Good code

2006-09-14T17:33:00.000-07:00

Often I see code that pretends to be good code. Small methods meant that it was comprehensible and you could read the code without scrolling, usually no more than 7-10 lines of code. Well if you write small method but do the following, it doesn't qualify as "good code"

BAD: Methods that return void but change the state of a variable passed
GOOD: return the variable that you modified even if its a reference type

BAD: Methods that modify variables outside the scope of the method
GOOD: Even if you are modifying class level fields, pass them into the method.

BAD: methods with signature bool validateSomething() that return true if valid but throw an exception if invalid
GOOD: If your method signature is void validateXX() you better throw an exception if the validation fails or return true/false if its bool validateXXX(). And yea don't tell me that you are adding to the validation collection because the method won't have a void signature it should have a ErrorSomething as a return value

BAD: 1) boolean methods that don't start with is or are etc. 2) boolean methods that throw exceptions
GOOD: bool isSomethingInThisState() or areTheseValuesGood() should return true or false. For heaven's sake don't throw exceptions in these method types. They are named for a specific reason and have convey specific behavior expectations

BAD: Object methods. These are the most insidious! So e.g. email.SendBySMTP, email.SendByPOP, email.SendByIMAP
GOOD: You are really dealing with three objects here SMTPEmail, POPEmail & IMAPEmail which have a Send() method. Object patterns are well documented so this is nothing new but I had to point this one out again.

BAD: Thanks to Simon for pointing this one out -> Classes-That-End-With-er e.g. Helper, Manager.
GOOD: Well you need some of these but contain your enthusiasm.

BAD: Lost methods. Methods which don't act upon the state of the object
GOOD: You guessed it - they belong on another object which is feeling a little envious. If a method doesn't represent behavior of the object it exists on it doesn't belong there!

Well that was fun. Feel free to add your own gripes..

Cheers.. V

Using DSLs to drive usability

2006-09-07T06:34:00.000-07:00

A lot of excitement around DSLs is centered around allowing the system to be expressed in terms that both the business and developers understand. Even with well factored OO code the intent of the business is sometimes obscured and hard to piece together. I met with Sanjay Parthasarty from Microsoft last year and he said something quite interesting (i'm paraphrasing here) - We've spent a lot of time on the serverside, we need to come back to the client. And as is apparent both Microsoft and Google are racing very very quickly in that direction.

So last year we developed a web based system that was entirely driven by the keyboard - not one single mouse click was required to use the system! Essentially we used the browser + the internet as a delivery mechanism and nothing more. When we were in the midst of the design discussions, I was aghast at the thought of a web application with no buttons! Well we developed that application and deployed it in 6 weeks and I can tell you I have never seen any application used more efficiently by its users.

The design centered around using commands that the users were already familiar with to drive the system. We had a textbox at the bottom of every page in which the user typed their commands into and the system responded to those commands. Essentially we used the concept of DSLs to drive the application. So for example, if you wanted to see web stats for the day you could type "show stats" on any page you were on and you would immediately be redirected to that. Obviously the glossary of verbs, nouns and the grammar needs to be developed for each domain but the benefits in an internet world overloaded with information seem quite compelling. Even though this particular application didn't need the conventional navigation systems, I can't see why we shouldn't make user driven actions part of every application we write. I can easily see a "show order 1234" being very useful in my current project.

Databinding - an ORM turned on its head

2006-08-10T06:56:00.000-07:00

So Databinding in .NET is incredibly powerful. Most discussions around this technology revolves around how its implemented and how it works vs. what it represents. It seems in some ways quite similar to an OR Mapper turned on its head (ofcourse there are large number of functional differences). So perhaps OVM might be a good paradigm to refer to it - Object View Mapper. Two questions arise 1) Why bother with another TLA 2) How is an OVM different from a controller?

The answer to the first questions is - we really don't need another TLA. But using a TLA somehow has the effect of getting people to stop and think for a second.

The answer to the second is also quite apparent. Its akin to comparing a data mapping technique with your data layer. So the controller concept (as in MVC/MVP/PM) in addition to binding the view to the model also handles events and interactions with object behavior which is not handled by an object view mapper. It is certainly used by the controller but it doesn't replace it.

The fix for MAGE impairment

2006-08-07T17:52:00.000-07:00

So if you've developed a smart client applicaiton you may have used MAGE for creating your deployment and application manifest. MAGE it turns out is commandline impaired. Certain (rather important properties) like determining when your application should download updates and what the minimum version that allowed for the current build are either not available or don't work from the command line.

So one possible approach is to create the application manifest using Mage.exe but create th e deployment manifest using MageUI.exe and then link them up. I use mage to refer to the command line and MageUI to refer to the GIU tool. Here are the steps -

1. Create the deployment manifest using MageUI.exe and save it (check it into source code) with the options you need to set for your smart client.

2. In your deployment script - or whatever you are using to take the output of your build to create a deployment package - run mage to generate your application manifest

e.g.
mage -New Application -ToFile myapp.exe.manifest -Name "my cool smart client app" -Version %2 -FromDirectory deployment\Client -TrustLevel FullTrust -Processor MSIL

3. Sign your manifest

mage -Sign myapp.exe.manifest -CertFile MyKey.pfx -Password yourPassword

4. Now (here's the hack) instead of creating a deployment manifest update the one you created earlier.

mage -Update myapp.application -Version %2 -AppManifest myapp.exe.manifest

5. And sign the manifest since the first signature is now invalidated

mage -Sign myapp.application -CertFile MyKey.pfx -Password yourPassword

How extreme are you?

2006-07-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

50 marathons in 50 days..
http://www.endurance50.com/

2006-06-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

A story inspired by Starbucks..

Well sort of. I'm sure you’ve spent quality time bitching about some socio-economic issue which you couldn't do anything about. I’ve done more than my fair share of moaning and groaning. A month ago - I actually took action! Two things were a catalyst in moving me in this direction – Starbucks & Rang De Basanti. Seems to be a strange combination - let me explain.

Manvee (my wife) & I were driving around at 10:00 looking for Starbucks – clearly that’s not what most of the country wants at that time since most locations shut down by 9:00 PM. The need to spend $10 at 10:00 PM at night on ‘coffee’ tripped off something. My guess is that it had something to do with watching Rang De Basanti (quasi social – quasi entertainment film centered around challenges facing today’s youth vs. those fighting the British rule a 100 years ago in India).

The above mathematical equation resulted in me and Manvee deciding that *WE* needed to do something. Upasana, a good friend of ours in New York had done this with Asha last year and had told us about it. Nirav another chaddi-buddy of mine supports a child (no its not his illegitimate offspring) as well so we thought it’s a good time to act.

The outcome..

I will be running a marathon (involving around 400 miles of running to train) to support Asha for Eduaction's educational and development projects in India. Asha's mission is to catalyze socioeconomic change in India through education of its underprivileged children.

Literacy is one of the basic necessities for growth and development. Today in India, there are over 350 million uneducated people, 50 million more than the population of United States. Without any education, families for generations live in poverty. The objectives of this group are:

To provide education to underprivileged children in India.
To encourage the formation of various local groups across the world to reach out to larger sections of the population.
To support and cooperate with persons and groups already engaged in similar activities.
To raise the required human and other resources to achieve the group objectives.
To provide opportunities to individuals living outside India who wish to participate in Asha activities in India.
To address, whenever possible, other issues affecting human life such as health care, environment, socio-economic aspects and women's issues.

In particular I am raising funds to support 4 projects supported by Asha Chicago's Gramya, Navjyoti, Asmita, and Aralu. Together these four projects support approximately 1000 children, including 7 slow learners.

I hope you can contribute towards the cause.

Cheers.. Vivek

2006-03-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

The obligatory "my first blog post"...