Aug 26
By : Anjoo Navalkar
Global IT Outsourcing started off with the Software Product companies outsourcing their non-core activities like product maintenance and bug-fixing projects. For the ISVs, the Product was their cash-cow till it was re-engineered or discarded. For the end-customers, there was a greater upfront and hidden cost involved during implementation. Unforeseen hardware requirements, maintenance, upgrades and support fees would add up quickly. As a result a major portion of the total IT budget was spent on the enterprise software infrastructure. At the turn of the decade, end customers of the ISVs started demanding pay by use solutions which could be accessed by them anywhere, anytime. This pushed Software Product companies to think of on-demand options like SaaS. Continue reading »
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Jul 13
By : Anjoo Navalkar
Globalization has shrunk boundaries, made connecting to people in different continents just a click or a call away and brought in its wake – Outsourcing! Organizations (reluctantly or willingly) saw huge savings and efficiencies in offloading ‘non critical’ work to locations with a larger skilled resource pool available at lower costs than their home countries.
“Outsourcing” is now a decade-old phenomenon. It has grown, evolved and become an integral of part of every organization’s strategy in one way or the other! Having worked in the industry myself for over a decade I thought it was a good time for all of us to look at the evolution of outsourcing – what it was, how it is today and how it might be in the near future! I am not talking about long monologues on outsourcing or debates on whether it has been good but a dialogue to find out how we all feel about outsourcing and view it for the future. Continue reading »
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Jun 15
By : Vidhi Vig
Requirements Elicitation, Analysis and Specification – How much is too much?
As a business Analyst we are often posed with this question from time to time. Not only are we expected to answer this at the estimation, proposal making and/or project planning stage, but also, several times during the lifecycle of the project.
So then the obvious thing that comes to mind is how does one define the scope of the Business Analysis process and perhaps more important – is it possible to define the scope of the Business Analysis process? Continue reading »
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Jun 11
By : Anjoo Navalkar
We just conducted a poll on CMMi to find out if professionals within the technology industry perceived it as a marketing gimmick or if it really adds value for the company. The verdict: 45 % thought it was a marketing ploy where as 50% thought that it really helped in streamlining processes and 5% weren’t sure of either. The participants also had additional comments about the delivery process and marketing benefits.
Having gone through the poll results and the interesting discussions by the respondents, I thought of the three most important things that matter the most in a CMMi initiative: Continue reading »
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May 18
By : Amod Kadam
In my conversations with software engineers there is always a lot of curiosity about ‘Cloud Computing’? There are number of questions lingering in their minds- Why is everyone talking about cloud computing? What is the buzz all about? Should we care about Cloud Computing? How does it benefit businesses?
I will try and answer these questions in this blog as I had similar questions and dilemma a year and half back. Continue reading »
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May 14
By : Manasi Kore
When we go to a Supermarket to purchase things we want, we do get impressed with the décor and ambience. We see the goods displayed in a neat orderly manner. Every section is logically arranged for a customer to get easy access to whatever he / she wants.. What if the goods are just displayed on shelves and you had to struggle to search the items? You will prefer not to go to that place again or just walk out of it as soon as possible in spite of the décor and the ambience. That is exactly the case of a website visitor, he visits the website with the intention of getting information he is looking for… Continue reading »
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May 10
By : Apoorv Shukla
Thinking back into the dark ages of software development, I can remember when I first read about “non-functional requirements.” The term threw me off balance – “If it’s non-functional, why do I care about it?” A couple of reference books clarified this for me, but the term has always seemed an odd one to me. I prefer to think of non-functional requirements as “constraints” we put on the system. When a product owner says “this system must perform adequately with 100,000 concurrent users” the product owner is putting a constraint on the development team. The product owner is effectively saying, “Develop this software any way you’d like as long as you achieve 100,000 concurrent users.” Each constraint we put on a system narrows the design choices a bit; calling these “constraints” rather than “non-functional requirements” helps us remember this. Continue reading »
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May 04
By : Bhavneet Sekhon
The RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry) e-platform is a result of months of collaborative work and is a perfect example of ‘Multisite Agile’. The RSC and Rave Technologies association started in April 2009 when RSC Publishing decided to partner with Rave in the development of a powerful new content delivery platform that would house RCS Publishing’s 165 years of scientific knowledge. It was a huge assignment but also a fantastic opportunity for Rave to be part of an industry success story. Continue reading »
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Apr 29
By : Bhavneet Sekhon
Early in March RSC Publishing (Royal Society of Chemistry) announced the release of its new content delivery platform, ‘RSC Publishing beta’ developed in partnership with Rave. Released as beta, this product is undoubtedly one of the finest platforms in the ‘STM publishing’ industry. It was a combined victory for users, technology, agile methodology, collaborative team work and of course, sustained commitment and support from RSC – it also showcased Rave’s domain expertise and technology prowess in the STM Publishing industry! Continue reading »
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Apr 08
By : Pardha Saradhi Mantravadi
In the previous post, we discussed useless and useful products. We also saw a few real life examples of these. Before delving into the usable products, let me now give away the answers to the quiz we had last time. Well, most of you who responded were correct about 80%. Please refer to my previous post for a quick look at the images I am referring to, below.
Images 1A, 1B, 1C and 1D
These are the pictures of a specific Hand Dryer installed in a common rest room ( I would not disclose more details, but I have seen a lot of people banging their hands first and heads on it later). Let us go by the process of elimination to decide which category this belongs to. First, it is not a usable product, as it does not give any greater user experience than what it is intended for, i.e., drying wet hands. You might argue that it has great looks and more presentable, but as I mentioned earlier, great user interface does not make a product usable. If you want to assess the usability of this product using the ‘Ten Heuristics of Jakob Nielsen’, well, it flouts the very first heuristic principle ‘indicate the system status clearly’. Continue reading »
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