My Take on Agile Testing Framework - Constant Visibility and Risk

The assumption that is usually invalid in the traditional waterfall process is that the requirements will not change during the lifecycle of the project. In reality, requirements change a lot in most of the projects.

The classical waterfall model has a fundamental flaw. A mistake in the requirement phase cannot be detected in a waterfall process until near the end, when the customer gets to see the finished product. This leads to a huge cost in correcting the mistake. To reduce impact of such changes, incremental or iterative development models are becoming popular. Customers are not ready to wait till the complete development is over. To keep the short releases of 2-3 weeks span and delivering the product in good shape is a very big challenge, especially when the business gets complex. There is not much time that can be devoted to testing after the construction is complete. The testing needs to be started as early as possible. For this the testing strategy needs to be robust and effective enough to ensure low
defect density and reduction in time and efforts spent on testing and re-testing.

Various methods could be used to achieve the objectives of such a testing strategy. Some of them are as follows:

- Use of test first style programming
- Involvement of developer in creation /extension of unit test cases
- Use of automated tools
- Continuous integration and build
- Short release cycles

Developing and performing acceptance tests iteratively complements and strengthens the development effort, helping to deliver improved quality. This approach provides improved project control. With agile testing strategy, progress is not just seen at regularly scheduled update meetings. It's seen every time a team member checks in code. Permanent control and testing provides constant visibility into project status, minimizing risk and enabling quality assurance throughout. Speed is the second benefit, as iterative development and delivery enables companies to prioritize critical functions and have them delivered first. Finally, improved productivity of the development team virtually eliminates over-scoping and subsequent rework. This leads to a substantial reduction in project costs.

©®Chitra Lele

Oil Prices Rise, Air Fares Follow and Travellers Suffer

Airlines the world over are raising fares to offset rising oil prices. Although Oil is still a costly resource, it has pulled down by nearly 15-20% from its recent highs, whereas Air fuel surcharges haven't all fallen by the same measure. Airlines have been resistant, and some have even hiked their surcharges , despite the drop in fuel prices.

From the competitive aspect, many Airlines are colluding to use fuel surcharges to keep prices higher, which is a misguiding factor.What's the most alarming thing about all this is that there is no watchdog agency that is monitoring the way these surcharges practises operate.Slashing the sucharge will be a positive indication for the traveler. Hope and pray atleast a few responsible Airlines do join this bandwagon of 'No-Surcharge'

Happy Flyin'!

©®Chitra Lele

"KonFabulous Konfabulator"

Fabulous!. Konfabulator is a 'NEAT' widget program.. I was using Kapsules earlier. My only major concern is that each widget requires a separate instance of Konfabulator unlike Kapsules, which makes it more resource intensive . Still, Konfabulator has a lot more widgets available and is more stable.

Kapsules is a lot like Konfabulator, but it does not have as many widgets defined as in Konfabulator.

The link is http://www.konfabulator.com

©®Chitra Lele

Krispy Krunch

Hey i am not talking abt any mouth-watering chocolate here.I am talking of a winzip like tool.

Krunch is an online compression tool, yes something like our very own WinZip!! but it comes with a difference. Though Krunch is not a replacement for the desktop compression utilities, it makes your life alot more easier though.

Simple Equation of Krunch =
[Desktop Utilities - "Krunching" Issues] + Online Approach

In short compress,decompress all that can happen online and that too FREE!!

Happy KRUNCHING!!

©®Chitra Lele

Add that dash of colors to your life

Why colors? Colors create an immediate and memorable impression. They convey character and emotion.

Colors are the smiles diffused by nature and my way of diffusing more smiles is through Rangolis. I have been doing them for the past several years. All credit goes to my Mother for teaching me this beautiful art.

Hope you have a colorful time while going through some of my rangolis. I hope these these rangolis add a smile to your face.









©®Chitra Lele

3D Village -> www.3B.net

It is a 3-Dimensional browser.You can browse the Web as a 3D city of display windows.

You create a 3D space called a village and then you have an avatar to walk through the space looking at billboards of all the web sites you have choosen.It provides ease and convenience of shopping online which comes real close to physical shopping minus the Crowds. This experience is a BIG time-saver for users, advertisers and companies.'Shopping Without the Crowds' is the key factor.

According to me the same scenario can be replicated for various other needs like induction training,E-learning,Game Cheats n many more.

©®Chitra Lele

My Technical Neighbourhood

This is an ocean of knowledge, of course an abstracted version here from my site, which i swam through during my projects and research related thesis over the last few years. Well this is a collection of sites i have refered to for further R&D. Although this is not a comprehensive list, it does contain useful info right from code optimization to network routing techniques, from programming standards to FAQs.

Note: It's quite possible that some of the links may have expired.

http://searchdomino.techtarget.com/whitepaperPage/0,293857,sid4_gci1019621,00.html - Web Services wizardry with WebSphere Studio Application Developer

http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/sharepoint/articles/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/odc_sp2003_ta/html/sharepoint_integrating_sps_and_infopath.asp - Integration of Sharepoint and Infopath

http://www.parsian.net/set1252/pages/books.htm - Building an intranet with windows NT 4

www.oopweb.com - Design and analysis of computer algorithms CMSC451/Mount, David

http://www.cmis.csiro.au/mte/reports/BPM_IBMwebsphereMQ332.htm - EAI/BPM Evaluation Series: IBM WebSphere MQ Workflow v3.3.2 & EAI Suite by Middleware Technology Evaluation Series, Phong Tran & Jeffrey Gosper

http://www.parsian.net/set1252/pages/books.htm - MAPI, SAPI and TAPI developer's guide

http://www.hk8.org/old_web/ - Apache : The definitive guide, 3rd.ed.

http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/crypto-security.html,http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ - Security, privacy and cryptography

http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html - Linux documentation

http://www.teltrend.co.nz/documentation/networkiq/rel74/html/rmtoc.htm - Network iQ Router Reference Manual

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-11-2001/jw-1130-jsp.html - Some ways of improving JSP code

http://ocw.mit.edu - Relive your student life online with MIT's OpenCourseWare

http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/faq/ - Cryptography FAQ

http://www.webagesolutions.com/knowledgebase/waskb/waskb003/ - STRUTS

http://www2.linuxjournal.com/ - CORBA Program Development

©®Chitra Lele

Interesting Questions from My Question Bank

1)How can we better understand the value of technology before we consider budget changes?.

2)Is IT facing an "Innovation deficit", if yes how can it be overcomed?.

3)In the Bio-Technology arena,Pharmaceutical and biotech researchers have to face the problem of bringing various data types together such as gene sequence data, gene expression data, protein structure data, and integrating the same data of the same type collected using different technologies and experimental protocols.What role is IT playing to fulfill these complex data mining and collection processes?.

4)Small sized businesses, particularly those that lack the resources of a large in-house IT department, face the constant challenge of managing document versions and ensuring their security and integrity.What can be done in order to meet this challenge of theirs?.

5)What kind of defect-tolerant architectures,defect-tolerant architectures methods do you foresee in the Nano-age?.

©®Chitra Lele

Enterprise Architecture - Catalyst for Business Transformation

Aligning IT and Business is the Key function of EA, thus becoming a corporate responsbility. Both Business unit and IT managers need to appreciate the value of EA as an integrative tool, although overstating the importance may turn out to be less frutiful.

The main aim of EA should be:

A)Addressing key business process, flows and IT aspects in tandem.
B)Effective Strategic Thinking & Planning
C)More Dynamic, Better Informed Executive Decision Making.

As long as EA improves business quality and efficiency, Organizations can afford to go any length in implememting this holistic framework.

©®Chitra Lele