Saturday, March 13, 2010

Systematic Innovation - Darrell Mann

I am honored to have the opportunity to meet with Darrell Mann, one of the many technical or engineering background man who is looking into technical and organizational issues and even improvement capability using a method known as Triz or better known as a systematic way of studying and applying innovation. Darrell has a lot of researcher helping him to continuously study how to innovate things with a method originated from a Russian guy.

Some of the key points during his presentation includes
- successful theory and method of successful innovation
- asking the right question is important in order to solve or even find a way to innovate.
- some tools that is going to help us do the job of innovation
- many application examples to help us see the light



Also we explored areas such as
-Why do so many software companies do the innovation job so badly?
-And essential to that, the area of business, technology and software, and in fact in many organization, opportunities missed because everyone has a silo view. For example, technical problem is perceived as a problem for the technical team only. Business unit is seldom put in to see if they can make any good of the situation.. 

Some ideas here may be in contrast with improvement, as Darrell mentioned that, moving forward, improvement projects may be saturated. It is time to move in with innovation, systematically.

~~ Show me the data.

Agile Methodology - Scrum

Recently, I attended a workshop discussing about an interesting framework of software development. It injects a rather new taste into traditional waterfall software development that I know of. It is called Scrum. Scrum is one of the many Agile methodology founded upon or built up from the Agile Manifesto. The manifesto concentrates on areas that my generation of IT professionals tried to move away from.
1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

The catch is items listed on the right is important, Agile adopters 'value' more, the items on the left.

Interestingly enough, a very loosely defined Agile Manifesto now has several framework that is designed based on this manifesto. Some of the more famous ones are: Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Lean, Crystal, Feature Driven Development (FDD) and Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM).

Scrum in a nutshell is quick shot of software development, that attempts to produce working software within a period of about every 2 - 4 weeks. One period of 2 - 4 weeks is known as a sprint and every sprint produces a working product. Team works things out among themselves and they produce what Product Owner wants with the facilitation of a Scrum Master. The team is independent and the core of how this works is that, the team has to be protected and trusted to get the work done.

The traditional Gantt Chart that serves us so well with a lot of other tracking tools are thrown out if you decide to use Agile. In place of that, we have burndown chart and product/sprint backlog. Though a lot of tracking tools are thrown out, we have to follow a few Scrum rules closely, meaning, it should not be skipped to ensure success.

Of course there is a lot of debate on whether it works, it is not difficult to understand, but it may be difficult to implement and blended into our traditional environment. It may seem that a lot more issues will crop out as it is implemented, but then again, nothing good comes easy. Anyone who has implemented Scrum, do share your experience with me. I am all ready in reading your experience :)


~~ Show me the data.

Friday, March 05, 2010

Embracing yourself for the tough questions

The economic turmoil is far from having fully recovered. Company's management team will look into all aspect to strengthen their stake in the market share pie that they have and also looks for way to expand it. At the same time, they will also be looking for ways to reduce operating costs.

I found some tough questions that I need to address when I attend meetings on operating costs reduction. Below are some of it and I am about to share it with you. See if you face the same problem in your environment and are you addressing it. If you have some good answers, do share it with me

1. Reduction of development team size meant they have less time to address most of the minor bugs. They will only fix the major bugs. As for the rest of the bugs, you may work hard to find the bug, but development team is not going to do much about it. What can the quality team do about this?

2. What does the software tester thinks is best for the quality of the product, agile or waterfall?

3. Is exploratory test better or scripted test better? How can you be sure?

Well I find different people have different argument or thought about this. Do share what you have in mind with me. 

~~ Show me the data.