Blog location moved

Everyone - the InfoBeans blog has been moved to infobeans.wordpress.com

I find that platform much better and cleaner than this.

Please do update your bookmarks.

Best regards,

Siddharth

Happy Diwali

This is to wish all our clients, readers, visitors a very happy Diwali and a prosperous new year ahead. May all of us find peace, prosperity and happiness!

Read more about Diwali

Outsourcing

Not a direct software example, but this one does show what people can do with outsourcing.

Read this CNN article to get some useful tips on outsourcing and how one company has pretty much outsourced everything.

InfoBeans team member of the month

We recognize the efforts of our team members every month through a nomination of team member of the month. Check out the presentation below. Feel free to forward to your friends if they are interested in a career at InfoBeans.

InfoBeans Team Member Of The Month Award Roster

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: careers at)

The InfoBeans engagement life cycle - part 2

This is the second part of this post.

So once we go into the development part of a project, we look to validate what we have done and make sure that the quality is within acceptable limits.

The quality measures and the relative emphasis that we lay on are different for different projects and are really a requirement. For some deliverables, sub second response time is extremely critical, while for others, clients are looking to do a lot of number crunching which again is performance optimization. Yet another aspect is the visual appeal. Some web applications lay a lot of emphasis on visual appeal when the users of that application are say, retail consumers. We fator in these requirements are an early stage of development and that is really what it means when we say that QA is involved in the very beginning of the project lifecycle. We like to have our QA team or at least some representation of it, involved in the development process right from the business understanding phase. 

Apart from quality testing the application, we also rely on our QA team to be our consultants. We have found that the QA team is extremely useful as a sounding board of ideas and their feedback on various issues, including usability is important to the project. They also have probably the most holistic view of the application and are quick to identify impacts on areas for any changes. I personaly rely a lot on feedback from such quarters. In complex implementations, such feedback becomes critical.

We also have a keen emphasis on just reducing the number of defects created in the first place by the development team. A lot of testing goes into the development at the time of development. We understand that a single defect increases costs a lot and therefore the most more we rein in the number of bugs in the first place, the better off we all will be. You as a client would be better off with lower number of issues and higher turn around time. We as a vendor will be better off with lower costs, lower developer fatigue and higher margins. A true win-win!

A user acceptance testing phase is something that we bank on a great deal to get the final issues ironed out and make sure that we have met expectations of the user who is actually going to be using the system. Many a times, the folks who think about the app, ones who develop it and the ones who actually use it are different people. And different in many senses of the word. Different in capabilities, knowledge spheres and domains. The UAT phase helps us in making sure we have gotten most of the application right and there aren't any surprises to the end users before the application is released to production.

Releasing to production is not the end of our relationship with our clients. It is the start of a new one. We constantly help our clients monitor the health of the implementation and give support proactively. We understand that our task merely moves to the next phase of the project where we have to provide support to our clients after they have implemented the system, rather than the end of an engagement at that point, like many other vendors like to put it.

This two part series tries to shed some light party on the actual engagement lifecycle and partly on the philosophy with which we try to approach the engagement. Please feel free to post any questions or write to me at siddharth.sethi@infobeans.com 

Microsoft includes Drupal in its web installer

Check out this page at Microsoft.

Hmm, we are interested in Microsoft and Drupal and SharePoint. Microsoft is inching closer to embracing more open source. This is one more step.

I am not sure what the strategy is here. Anyone?

Apple releases new MacBook PRO

Was not too interested in the Apple MacBook PRO release but the coverage is so overwhelming, that I was sucked into the frenzy and saw a few blog posts. Those links ultimately took me to the apple home page that had a link to a video regarding the new features of the laptop.

Apple does a great job of marketing these things, however, this time I am disappointed. 

My grudge is against the way Apple is touting the unibody aluminium case. I saw their video and the amount of footage that is devoted to that piece of engineering from a consumer's standpoint is just way too much and actually put me off. Sure, it must be a great piece of engineering but what is the point in talking about is so much in a consumer video? Does not make sense.

Another feature, which I can say without trying it out, is the touchpad button feature. Why is that a big deal? You can click on the touchpad already without it being a button - you can tap it.

Apple has been a great innovator and I like the company for it. I am very big proponent of the iPhone, but this time round, I am disappointed!