Sunday, April 06, 2008

Another 2 wickets down

A Team that made miracles... and is now loosing wicket after wicket, no worries we will still manage to play it all and off..... while I pray that we bounce back and win the world cup again... I would say the Sr. members of the Team keep patience....

After all we have to win... and we are playing to win... So what if India looses now... there is another round of matches....this is not a simple game of cricket.... it is the game where the evil of bad quality (game) has to be fought by the team who has worked extremely hard.....

The coaches are watching and the board is going to help.... Dont get disappointed by an innings an 90 run defeat... the stars of the new Team will see difference in the next match....

r u reading too much? boys read between lines.....
Posted by Sameer :: 1:48 AM :: 2 comments

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Thursday, March 06, 2008

Software testing offers big ROI

Software testing offers big ROI

By Jennette Mullaney, Associate Editor
05 Mar 2008 | SearchSoftwareQuality.com

NEW YORK -- Software testing is an expense that ultimately saves an organization a great deal of money. It has a quantifiable return on investment (ROI) and testers can follow a simple series of steps to calculate it, explained Rex Black during a session at the recent FutureTest 2008 conference.

Black, president and principal consultant of RBCS, emphasized the cost-effectiveness of creating quality software. "The money you spend to build it right the first time is always less than the money it costs to fix it," he said. The amount of money saved can be two times, four times or even 32 times the cost of investment, he continued.

Testers concerned about their budgets can cite a wealth of well-established references to justify upfront costs to management, Black said. He listed four ways testing saves money: Finding bugs that get fixed, finding bugs that don't get fixed, running tests that mitigate risks and guiding the project to success through timely, accurate, credible information for project tracking.

The ROI for finding and fixing bugs
When figuring the ROI for finding bugs that are fixed, Black instructed his audience to measure the cost of quality. The cost of quality combines the costs of conformance and nonconformance, he said. Conformance costs are those accrued when an organization creates and tests quality software and can be broken down into prevention and protection costs.

The cost of nonconformance consists of the cost of internal failure before release and external failure after, including the expense of finding and correcting bugs in released software, handling phone calls from angry customers, and losing business due to a damaged reputation.

Black set up equations for a series of hypothetical case studies. He estimated 1,000 "must-fix" bugs occur in a quarterly release. Bugs cost $1 when found during review, $10 when found through developer testing, $100 when found through tester testing, and $1,000 when found by customers.

If an organization conducted no formal testing, developers might find 250 bugs and customers 750, Black hypothesized. Using his figures, the software vendor spends $2,500 for the bugs found by developers and $750,000 for those found by customers for a total of $752,500 for the cost of quality.

If the vendor hires an inferior testing group for $70,000 and that group finds 350 bugs through manual testing, the total cost of quality is greatly reduced, Black told the audience. After paying for the testers, the vendor spends $2,500 for the bugs found by developers, $35,000 for the bugs found by testers and $400,000 for the bugs found by customers. The cost of quality in this case is $507,500, Black found.


Software testing resources
What's the ROI for a Testing Center of Excellence?

The role of a software test manager

How to evaluate testing software and tools

In another hypothetical case, Black armed the testing team with automated tools costing $150,000 ($12,500 a quarter for 12 quarters). The testers find 500 bugs and the cost of quality is reduced to $385,000, he calculated. Costs can be cut further if bugs are found earlier, added Black. "Suppose the test manager realizes it's cheaper to find bugs in requirement and design reviews," he said. If the testers manage to find 150 bugs this way at a price tag of $1, the cost of quality drops to $235,150.

For these hypothetic cases, Black deliberately picked an unexceptional testing team. "A good team should find 85% or more of defects," he said. "A mediocre job still saves the company a lot of money."

The value of finding bugs that aren't fixed
"The rule of testing is 'find the scary stuff first,'" Black said. Once the "scary stuff" has been fixed, there may be many bugs remaining. However, knowing about these bugs and preparing for them can generate value, he explained. An organization can decide to turn off the feature that contains the bug, warn users of the bug in release notes, or provide technical support staff with a workaround. The workaround provides value by shortening calls to tech support.

Black set up another equation to demonstrate his point. In this case, each software bug initiates five calls, a call for a known bug is 15 minutes shorter than the call for an unknown bug, and each member of technical support is paid $40 an hour. There are 60 minutes in an hour, so put 15 over 60, multiply the fraction by five and by 40. The result is $50 saved.

Convincing management
"The value of information is found in enlightening management and executives," Black said. "We don't do a good job of this." He encouraged the audience to perform their own calculations.

"What gets measured gets done, what gets valued gets funded," said Black. "What we do as testers has value and we can quantify that value."

Posted by Saket :: 10:25 AM :: 0 comments

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Thursday, December 13, 2007

10 Career-killers To Avoid

Like other workers, IT pros can unintentionally sabotage their careers

Nov 7 2007

To help IT professionals become more aware of potential career blunders, Computerworld spoke with John M. McKee, president of BusinessSuccessCoac h.net, a Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based career coaching and consulting firm. McKee is the author of author of Career Wisdom: 101 Proven Strategies to Ensure Workplace Success. Here are 10 career-killers, with McKee's advice about how to recognize and avoid them.

1. Failing to have a life plan. "This is the No. 1 biggest mistake that I run into with my clients. I work with a number of clients in IT, many of whom are in C-level roles. A life plan is a business plan, in the same way that a company leader creates an annual business plan for what the future is going to bring from a corporate perspective. Three life aspects to focus on include one's career, personal and family, and financial goals. If someone has a good title and a satisfactory personal and family life but they're struggling to make monthly payments, then they're not going to be satisfied. They should look at those aspects for themselves. They should look at the competitive environment, the job marketplace and whether their skill set is current. If someone can replace them because they're cheaper, faster or better, it's no different than looking at your IT requirements. Most importantly, this plan should be written down. Only 14% of people do that. 86% are putting their futures in the hands of others. It's not a good place to be in."

2. Not keeping your skills current. "The business landscape is ever-changing and there is more demand for jobs than supply. Not staying on par with colleagues and those vying for your job will be a death knell. With individuals able to do the same work that someone is doing anywhere in the world today and the prospect that organizations will chase skill sets around the world, if you're not up to date with your skill sets in IT, you're significantly at risk of being replaced. This includes the need to stay up to date in technical skills, business skills and soft skills."

3. Failing to deliver results. "Winners in business know that it's all about accountability. Those who harbor a sense of entitlement for simply having put forth effort, irrespective of the results of those efforts, are guaranteed to fall by the wayside. It's very easy in a corporation to believe that becoming more efficient will translate into becoming more effective. So becoming preoccupied with creating greater efficiency may be a short-term solution to helping the bottom line, but it doesn't help the organization to grow. I rarely see people get the big bonuses in the organization simply because they understand the policies and procedures of the company. It has to do with delivering the goods. You have to know your customers, know what your marketplace wants. Great leadership is all about asking questions."

4. Confusing efficiency with effectiveness. "Those who think that communicating via e-mail replaces the need to actually talk with people around them fail to recognize the importance of personally connecting with others in today's highly automated and technological environment. Communicating in person whenever possible is imperative for success-seekers. "

5. Believing that you are irreplaceable. "There is no room for divas in the workplace. As soon as you convince yourself that you and only you can do the job 'right,' your star will surely start to fall. In any organization, any person can have a good couple of ideas, a good couple of years and a few successes under their belts and they start to think that the company can't do without them. They start to sit on their laurels and find themselves in greater jeopardy of losing their jobs. Comparing notes with others in the organization helps keep people grounded. It helps anyone in the organization to have different trusted advisers' perspective on what's going on and how their performance is being viewed."

6. Knowing all the answers. "This old adage remains true: Knowledge is power. Professing to know it all can readily stagnate a career. Winners remain unceasingly interested in learning new ideas and approaches. Asking a lot of questions is a hallmark of great leaders and great managers. When one stops asking questions and starts believing they've seen it all, they are devaluing the amount of change going on in the world today."

7. Surrounding yourself with "brown-nosers. " "Losers like having people tell them how smart they are, whether or not it's true, while successful managers and other professionals accept and encourage intelligence and creativity in others. If you're constantly being told by your peers that everything you're doing is wonderful, you need a better group of advisers. If your supervisor believes that you're doing a great job, that's terrific -- it's probably reflecting well on him or her."

8. Forgetting to give credit to others. "Losers inappropriately take full credit for positive events despite the help or input received by others, while winners give credit where credit is due. Losers inevitably reap what they sow. If your boss is a real pumpkinhead, you can probably get away with this a few times. But if you keep doing this, chances are your boss is going to catch on that you're a glory hog."

9. Failing to self-promote. "Bragging is one thing, but letting colleagues throughout your industry know of your success through case studies, promotion bulletins, or other such tools is quite another. Losers often fail to recognize the importance of letting others know about their successes, or go about it in entirely the wrong way. In today's disconnected business world, where many people work at a distance from their supervisors, it's important to let your boss and leadership know your contributions and that you are a valuable asset. This could be as simple as providing your supervisor with an e-mail once a week to inform him about what you're working on and your progress. By doing that, when decisions are made for promotions or job transfers, you're more likely to get what's due to you."

10. Losing perspective. "Intuitive businesspeople recognize that, despite their best attempts to do everything right, sometimes they approach roadblocks and seek the advice and perspective of a respected friend, colleague or even a business coach. Those who fail to recognize their shortcomings are destined for the unemployment line. It has everything to do with forgetting the reasons why their business exists, why they're in this business, and what it is they intended to accomplish when they entered this industry. You need to be excited about what it is you're doing, and you need to put more enthusiasm into what it is you're doing. If you're not looking forward to getting out of bed in the morning, you're working on a downward trend -- you just don't know it yet."

Posted by Saket :: 10:47 PM :: 0 comments

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Friday, October 26, 2007

Ebay Scammer gets it

Just a recent one... where the ebay scammer got it from all sides....

Labels: ebay scam, ebay scammer

Posted by Sameer :: 12:21 AM :: 0 comments

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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Something to be known ( The big IT Dragon who eats up youth )

Something All Software Professionals should know

Six software professionals under the age of 33 have died and 2 top executives from renowned software companies have become paralysed because of stress-related heart ailments in the last six months in Chennai, says a study by Mitran Foundation, a Bangalore-based voluntary association of practising doctors.

"All the six who died, and the two who became invalid, had no family history of heart attacks or any pre-history of heart ailments or paralysis. They were all in their prime, between 27 and 33 years, and handled challenging projects at work in their respective companies. They worked long and continuous hours. The end struck them very suddenly, and it looked as if their hearts refused to take any more stress," said Dr Dwarakanath, director of Mitran Foundation, who has studied stress components in 40 software companies in Chennai during the last six months.

The study, conducted at a cost of Rs 45 lakhs, covered more than 4,000 software professionals from 80 companies who were in service for a minimum of three years. The email responses were scientifically tabulated and the findings were ready in 2002. Dr Dwarakanath, who was the late Dhirubhai Ambani's personal stress management consultant, said questionnaires extracting every minute detail were sent to the respondents. The personal background, family history and personal characteristics of these individuals were assessed and it was found that the stress in these professionals was only due to work pressure. All other factors were eliminated.

"Our study confirmed that the number of suicides, divorces, heart ailments, BP and diabetes patients and mental depression are the highest in the software industry. The fancy salaries of software professionals are no longer something to rejoice about," Dr Dwarakanath said.

"We found that the software industry has simply no routine. Deadlines hang before them and every day they chase new problems. During weekends more than 60 per cent of the vehicles are found parked in the office complexes. There is no physical exercise and new food habits favoured by pizza culture fuel the problem. Cervical spondilitis and wrist problems due to uncomfortable handling of the computer mouse, eye problems and discomfort in bowel movements are common.

The stress for couples where both are employed in the IT industry is the worst. The simple step of taking time off from work for three months allowed an IT couple wanting a child for years to conceive one," Dr Dwarakanath said.


M.T.R. Venukopalan, senior training coordinator, Covansys India, acknowledged that IT professionals were the most stressed individuals. "Even if the company sponsors a movie or self-care lecture, not many attend them," he said. Jyothsana, a travel coordinator for Temenos India Pvt Ltd, expressed concern for the young employees who complain of back and knee pains. She acknowledged that IT professionals require a specific eating and physical exercise routine to ease their stress. "Our lives are becoming mechanical, guided only by deadlines," she said.

So think again if you are staying late in the office regularly. Think again about your family. Think again about your social life and health.

Please forward it to your friends too... Work is essential. Your contribution to the goal should be great. But, please don't make it a habit to stay late.

Don't skip your Break Fast /Lunch/Dinner. None of these are equated by Pizza, Biscuits / Wafers / Chat items Please pass this to all you care for!!!

Posted by Puneet Garg :: 11:49 PM :: 0 comments

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Wednesday, October 03, 2007

For Any Aamir Khan fan followers

The promos and clips of Tare Zameen Par ... the latest production from Aamir Khan is getting released on 12th october.... unlike Lagaan it is not expected to have a seasoned promotional campaign... so the first few promos will be more tattoed than the later ;)

Labels: Tare Zameen par

Posted by Sameer :: 7:00 AM :: 0 comments

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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Reflection changes with passage of time!

Outcome of hair straightening done last week :)

Posted by Vatts :: 3:18 AM :: 2 comments

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