With great effort, you have got access to the key stakeholders of the product organisation. You also identified the specific persons, their roles and responsibilities in the organisation. What are you going to ask them? You would obviously focus on the software product’s features and functionality, because well, that is what you need to know before designing and developing any software application. How about a few questions on the Technology? Well, yes of course, because after all, you are developing the software product using a specific Technology. Let us discuss if these are good enough to get you a head start in the product development or do you need to focus on any other areas during your stakeholder interactions.

Technology or ‘Trick’nology
While nobody can deny the significant role played by Technology in our lives today, one needs to be wary in focusing only on Technology and ignoring the rest. Technology is verily what IT and Software development organisations like us thrive on and I am in no way suggesting to drift away from it. However, I support the view that Technology should be seen as an ‘enabler’ and a means but not the end. All products that have been invented or innovated so far, did not succeed merely based on the technologies used to build them. The underlying technologies in each of these products, if I may call so, helped achieve some business objectives to their users-from the Potter’s Wheel to Radio, from Mainframes to Laptops, from ERPs to Web Applications and from Java to the Multi-Touch Interface. The moment one focuses only on technology ignoring other aspects, that product is bound to fail. Continue reading »

Being part of the software testing business for nearly two decades now, I have witnessed the changing face of software. Life in the past was simple – the software dictated and the user obeyed. But now the users are becoming more and more demanding. Software has dropped its black-white flavor and has become more colorful. There is no respite to the software development or testing team. In the recent past software evolved from client-server to web-based and now SaaS-Cloud has opened up a multitude of challenges to the technical teams. This has also put pressures on the testing teams for ensuring accelerated testing cycles, and developing consistent processes and tools to manage testing requirements for new applications without compromising on the quality of service delivery. “Quality” as perceived by the customer is now a multi-dimensional entity.

I am challenged till date with a very probing question which my customers have always asked me (and still do!) – “ How do you and your team give me “ Quality” product on time, within cost , on time and of course without cutting corners?”.- A tricky question that I would take the liberty of answering based on my experience of working on large testing projects with multinational organizations and the client interactions at Rave. Continue reading »

In the previous post, we realised that the first step in making a successful software product is to know your users. But even before that, we need to get the clearance from the stakeholders to gain access to users. They play an important role in managing the product development, budgets, customer expectations and user experience. In short, stakeholders are the gateway to users and are responsible for the software product’s life. To gain better understanding about stakeholders, we need to imbibe ‘product thinking’ and shun ‘project thinking’. While this is hard to practise, I think that this ‘product and not project’ perspective makes a great deal of difference in the context of software product /application development. By stating this, I am not undermining the importance of projects, nor do I underplay the contribution of project managers. However, for all of us who are working as Analysts, Designers, Developers and Testers, this product perspective helps get more clarity about the stakeholders, product, customers and users. We will discuss this in greater detail perhaps in a separate post later. Continue reading »

Whenever a new project is awarded to us, lot of people come to me and ask questions about the technology platform and name of the client organisation, in that order. Often times, some of them also want to know the domain or functional scope. This thirst for their knowledge of technology, client or customer and functionality continues even during the project initiation and knowledge acquisition stage. Their undeterred focus on the above perspectives extends throughout the execution of the project and lasts till the end of the project too. Surprisingly, not even once do I get any questions on ‘who the users’ are for the underlying product or application. Even more surprising is the fact that the project sponsor or client team may not ask this question to themselves, leave alone answering it.

This is surprising for people like me who are working on Usability! Therefore, as a strong proponent of usability I would like to share some of my own experiences and real-life case studies to highlight ‘why usability and how usability’. Continue reading »

With more opportunities emerging in the outsourced product development space in India, Rave Technologies wants to focus on doing high end product engineering work.

Today, Indian IT has moved away from offering staff-augmentation services to global software market to software product development, testing and other challenging functions. And, outsourced product development (OPD) has become a major vertical. “When I returned to India after my college education at Cornell and work experience in Silicon Valley where I worked with AMD and Clarity, my passion was to continue working on cutting-edge technologies. I viewed software product development as cutting edge and hence Rave has focused on doing high end product engineering work for our clients,” says Anand Jhaveri, Founder and CEO of Rave Technologies. “Even before anyone thought about OPD (Outsourced Product Engineering) or gave it the now familiar acronym, we were already doing it.” Rave has come a long way in helping customers with product engineering and has acquired a deep understanding of the software product lifecycle and a deep domain expertise in product verticals like Human Resources, Accounting, Legal, Business Intelligence, Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Publishing, Retail, Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare and Social Networking (Web 2.0). Rave has an excellent grasp on the drivers and pain areas of ISVs through various stages starting from early stage proof of concepts through product roll-out, steady-state product maintenance and end of life product re-engineering. The service offerings are developed around these stages. “Our teams are purpose built and dedicated to user experience engineering, architecture, development, testing, maintenance and on-going support,” claims Jhaveri. Continue reading »