Basharat Wani

No more Branches: Use flags and flippers!

2011-12-08T18:59:00.000-08:00

Why I believe in code repository with no branches, everything is checked into head, & head is pushed to production several times a day.

Cheers
Basharat

War-room Driven Deployment

2011-12-05T15:37:00.000-08:00

I like the post, so sharing it.

Cheers
Basharat

2011-09-16T15:53:00.001-07:00

Test

First, what's node.js?

2011-08-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

I love this post, another jem from Scott Hanselman's blog

Installing and Running node.js applications within IIS on Windows - Are you mad? Why would I want node.js to run on Windows and IIS?

Cheers
Basharat

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of REST APIs

2011-06-09T12:59:00.000-07:00

I liked this article a lot.

Throttling is a terrible thing to do and OAuth is a terrible API authentication scheme unless the sole target content for your API is a browser.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of REST APIs

Cheers
Basharat

NuGet in a Continuous Integration Automated Build System

2011-05-24T18:30:00.000-07:00

NuGet for the Enterprise: NuGet in a Continuous Integration Automated Build System.

The team did a demo of this last week, I really liked it.

Cheers,
Basharat

MSBuildShellExtension

2011-04-09T08:21:00.001-07:00

MSBuildShellExtension lets you build Visual Studio solutions and projects as well as any MSBuild file, without ever opening the Visual Studio IDE or the command prompt. MSBuild targets can be executed from your favorite file system tool like Windows Explorer or Total Commander.

Cheers,
Basharat

A heart touching Kashmiri Song

2011-04-08T16:45:00.000-07:00

Waheed Sa'ab, Kashmiriyat is alive and well!!

Thank you
Basharat

How Do Story Points Relate to Hours?

2011-04-06T08:50:00.000-07:00

This is from Mike Cohn’s Blog,

http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/how-do-story-points-relate-to-hours

Cheers,
Basharat

Top 7 Responsibilities of a ScrumMaster

2011-03-27T07:33:00.000-07:00

Traditional project managers don’t usually make great ScrumMasters.

Cheers
Basharat

Cross Functional Teams Work - How Middle Management Destroys Them

2011-03-27T07:22:00.000-07:00

Read it twice, very informative

I took this from Jeff Sutherland blog.

Cheers,
Basharat

Guide to Writing Testable Code

2011-02-20T15:08:00.000-08:00

All credit to Google Developer Misko Hevery, thanks for sharing.

It’s very good, These guidelines apply to many languages and I feel the code has improved a lot just by reading this.

Cheers
Basharat

The Zappos Way of Managing

2011-02-13T16:09:00.000-08:00

Very inspirational. As a company looking for success through stellar customer service.

Cheers
Basharat

10 Blogs By Entrepreneurs You Should Be Reading

2011-01-15T19:55:00.000-08:00

10 Blogs By Entrepreneurs You Should Be Reading

Having trouble keeping up with the young entrepreneurial crowd?
Here are 10 young entrepreneur-themed blogs that will help you stay on top of the game.

Cheers
Basharat

Seven Technologies That Will Rock 2011

2011-01-09T12:09:00.000-08:00

I will revisit this next year.

Cheers
Basharat

5 Predictions for APIs in 2011

2011-01-02T12:48:00.000-08:00

As we head into 2011, here are five predictions for what’s next in APIs:

thanks
Basharat

ASP.NET MVC3 Razor Script Loading Tips

2010-12-26T16:22:00.001-08:00

Very good article about JavaScript usages

http://kazimanzurrashid.com/posts/asp-dot-net-mvc3-razor-script-loading-tips?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kazimanzurrashid+%28Kazi+Manzur+Rashid%29&utm_content=Twitter

Cheers
Basharat

Why designers fail: the report

2010-12-16T17:02:00.000-08:00

Scott Berkun RSS feed.
Excellent Read with good data

The top 15 issues, ranked by average scores were:

People in non-design roles making design decisions 4.18
Managers making design decisions w/o design training 4.14
Designers don’t seek enough data before designing 3.92
No time is provided for long term thinking 3.81
Not receptive to critical feedback 3.69
Lack of awareness of the business fundamentals 3.66
Only lip-service is paid to “User centered design” 3.64
It’s never made safe to fail or experiment 3.62
Designer’s power diluted by too many cooks 3.60
Over-reliance on one kind of design style 3.54
Poor collaboration skills 3.51
Poor persuasion / idea pitching skills 3.49
Poor communication skills 3.49
Poor understanding of domain 3.48
Pressure to use first solution, not a good solution 3.45
Big Ego / Expects others to cater to their whims 3.41

Cheers
Basharat

How Ford Profits from its '24 Hour Rule'

2010-12-05T15:03:00.000-08:00

Good Read.

24 hour rule is an excellent heuristic model for shared destiny & driving/forcing collaboration

Cheers
Basharat

Being wrong isn't terrible. Being passive is.

2010-12-05T14:37:00.000-08:00

Why It's Better to Be Smart and Wrong than Just Silent
I liked this article a lot, I took it from Harvard Biz Review.

Cheers
Basharat

How 20 popular websites looked when they launched

2010-11-21T11:14:00.001-08:00

From Google to youtube, from craigslist to flickr - how some of today's biggest sites looked back in the early days of their existence.

I am not sure I will buy anything from Amazon back in 1995, craigslist looks same.

Cheers
Basharat

After 20 Years 20 things I learned : HTML5, browsers, and books, twenty years later

2010-11-21T11:10:00.000-08:00

Very nice, I went through the whole book.
I like Page Flips or Roll, Drop Down Ribbon on the left side of the page and thumb nail view at the bottom.

Good Work.

Cheers
Basharat

Salesforce.com to Adopt REST APIs - What is the Significance?

2010-11-13T17:39:00.000-08:00

http://t.co/sUnsGGv

I recommed this article, very good read.

I do not like JSON, I still prefer XML representation.

thanks
Basharat

Investing in Innovation at Google

2010-11-07T15:48:00.000-08:00

Very good read

thanks
Basharat

Why smart People defend bad ideas.

2010-11-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

Fantastic read, I like this article very much.

Cheers
Basharat

Remoting in Windows PowerShell 2.0

2010-10-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

ok, I collected multiple bit of information from multiple blogs and MSDN site to compile the below.

Remote PowerShell Session
When you have a series of commands you need to enter, or you have some work you need to accomplish on a remote server or workstation, a remote interactive session is the remote tool you will need to use. A remote interactive session turns the Windows PowerShell session on your machine into a Windows PowerShell session on a remote machine. All commands you type are executed as if they were typed on the console of the remote computer.

Be careful with path commands in a remote interactive session—they resolve to the remote computer. This can be very confusing at first.

You are allowed to have only one remote interactive session running from your Windows PowerShell console. It is permissible, however, to have multiple Windows PowerShell consoles open, and for each to have a remote interactive session running. To begin an interactive Windows PowerShell session, you use the Enter-PSSession cmdlet. You do not need to rely upon pass-through authentication because the cmdlet supports the parameter. This syntax is illustrated here:

Enter-PSSession -ComputerName Berlin -Credential nwtraders/administrator
To create a remote Windows PowerShell session, you use the New-PsSession cmdlet. The use of New-PsSession and Enter-PsSession are illustrated here.

PS C:\> New-PSSession -Name server1Test -ComputerName server1

Id Name ComputerName State ConfigurationName Availability
-- ---- ------------ ----- ----------------- ------------
4 server1Test server1 Opened Microsoft.PowerShell Available

PS C:\> Enter-PSSession -Name server1Test
[server1]: PS C:\Users\administrator.NWTRADERS\Documents> hostname
Server1
[server1]: PS C:\Users\administrator.NWTRADERS\Documents> gwmi win32_operatingsystem

SystemDirectory : C:\Windows\system32
Organization :
BuildNumber : 7600
RegisteredUser : Windows User
SerialNumber : 00486-001-0001076-84399
Version : 6.1.7600

[server1]: PS C:\Users\administrator.NWTRADERS\Documents> exit
PS C:\> gwmi win32_operatingsystem

SystemDirectory : C:\Windows\system32
Organization :
BuildNumber : 7600
RegisteredUser : win7
SerialNumber : 00392-918-5000002-85015
Version : 6.1.7600

PS C:\>
Remote command execution
If you only have a couple of commands you wish to execute on the remote computer, you can use the Invoke-Command cmdlet. When using the Invoke-Command cmdlet, a remote connection is established on the remote computer, the command executed, data returned to the originating computer, and the connection broken. A subsequent command to the remote computer would create a new temporary connection in the same manner as the first. There is no persistent connection, data, or shared state between the connections. In the code below, we execute the Get-Host cmdlet on a remote server named berlin. You will see that the results from berlin are returned to the host computer:

PS C:\> Invoke-Command -ComputerName berlin -ScriptBlock { get-host }

Name : ServerRemoteHost
Version : 1.0.0.0
InstanceId : 4bef95fc-7ee4-4be6-93b8-be7ea9ed3757
UI : System.Management.Automation.Internal.Host.InternalHostUserInterf
ace
CurrentCulture : en-US
CurrentUICulture : en-US
PrivateData :
PSComputerName : berlin
Persistent connection
If you wish to run a series of commands on multiple computers and maintain the ability to share data between the commands, you will need to first make a persistent connection prior to using the Invoke-Command cmdlet. To create the persistent session, use the New-PsSession cmdlet and specify the name of the computer. You will need to save the returned connection object in a variable. You then use this connection when running the remote command. In the example here, we first establish a persistent session with a computer named berlin. We store the returned session object in a variable named $session. Next we use the session parameter when using the Invoke-Command cmdlet to run two commands. The first command uses the Get-Command cmdlet to get a collection of commands from the remote computer. It stores those command objects into a variable named $a. In the next command, we continue to use the persistent connection, and this time we share the $a variable between the running of the two commands. We pass the objects contained in the $a variable to the Get-Help cmdlet. This code is seen here:

$session = New-PSSession -ComputerName berlin
Invoke-Command -Session $session -ScriptBlock { $a = Get-Command }
Invoke-Command -Session $session -ScriptBlock { $a | get-help }
As seen in the following image, you cannot use the session name that was created earlier in our example. This is because the session name is a string, and the –session parameter wants to receive a session object. If you attempt to use the session name from an earlier command, you will receive an error that states that Windows PowerShell cannot bind the –session parameter to a string. After a new session object is created, the Invoke-Command cmdlet can be used to run a command on a remote computer. This is seen here:

Remote script execution
If you have a script you need to execute on a remote computer, but the script is stored locally on your host machine, in the past you would have had to physically copy the script to the remote computer, and then use something like the create method from Win32_Process to execute remote computer. In Windows PowerShell 2.0, we can use the Invoke-Command cmdlet to execute a script that is stored locally and have it run on a remote computer. When the script is run, the results of the script are returned to the local computer. In the example shown here, we use the Invoke-Command cmdlet to run a script called getBios.ps1 on a remote computer named berlin. The filepath parameter is used to tell the Invoke-Command cmdlet where to find the script. This path must resolve locally.

PS C:\> Invoke-Command -ComputerName berlin -FilePath C:\fso\getBios.ps1
SMBIOSBIOSVersion : 080002
Manufacturer : American Megatrends Inc.
Name : BIOS Date: 02/22/06 20:54:49 Ver: 08.00.02
SerialNumber : 2096-1160-0447-0846-3027-2471-99
Version : A M I - 2000622
PSComputerName : berlin
As a best practice, use a remote interactive session when you wish to perform multiple commands on a single remote computer. If you have one or two commands that you wish to run on multiple remote computers, use remote command execution. If you have multiple commands you wish to execute on multiple computers, use a persistent connection. If you need to run a script that does not exist on a remote computer, use remote script execution.

Cheers
Basharat

Pixar"s Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation

2010-10-16T17:38:00.000-07:00

http://gigaom.com/2008/04/17/pixars-brad-bird-on-fostering-innovation/#comments

Very good read, I like it.

Basharat

Top Refactorings

2010-10-10T11:41:00.000-07:00

Here are few of the most-used refactoring things developer want to do when they are refactoring some code. The below listed was identified using VS-2005\2008 and VS-2010.

1.Rename
2.Introduce Variable
3.Extract Method
4.Inline variable
5.Inline method
6.Move Method
7.Change method signature

I was suprised how much I’m using introduce/inline variable, but quite often I’m doing that to make a block of code ready for method extraction. Having broken out small methods, I sometimes find a larger method to extract, and then I inline the use of smaller methods. It’s sometimes hard to find the right level of generality.

Cheers
Basharat

20-more-bugs-or-20-less-features

2010-10-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

Good read

Disclaimer : This isn’t an advocation that it’s ok to ship ordinary quality code. IMHO I believe in shipping less but with good quality and deliver more perceived value to our customers.

Cheers
Basharat

WebP, a new image format for the Web

2010-10-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

I got this from Chrome blog site.

In order to gauge the effectiveness , chrome randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39% reduction in file size. We expect that developers will achieve in practice even better file size reduction with WebP when starting from an uncompressed image.

As per the blog, this is supported only for Chrome browser right now.

Basharat

The Evolving Ecosystem -Twitter Example

2010-10-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

It’s great to see this kind of variety and growth in the ecosystem as it moves beyond basic Twitter clients. These new services help people get the most out of Twitter, contributing to user growth and new business opportunities—both of which are critical to the long-term viability of the ecosystem.
Twitter currently have more than 145 million registered users, ha and they are still growing fast.

Cheers
Basharat

Optical Illusions - I like this

2010-10-03T12:02:00.000-07:00

I liked some of them a lot.

Basharat

Internet Explorer 9 Beta: UI Smackdown

2010-09-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

It looks sleek, the tabs placement are better and they say improved speed and support for HTML 5, Internet Explorer 9 could be Microsoft's next step toward restoring its old mojo.

There is no easy way to access Chrome bookmarks without opening a new tab--IE 9 has a dedicated button for viewing your favorites, this one is smart stuff.

Check this out .
http://www.pcworld.com/article/205500/internet_explorer_9_beta_ui_smackdown.html/

Cheers
Basharat

Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

2010-09-12T18:47:00.000-07:00

I read this blog post about “Architecture” on joelonsoftware website few weeks ago.
Very good Read, I liked the example of Napaster ("Can you imagine a program like Napster where you can download anything, not just songs?" )
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html

Cheer
Basharat

RSS vs. Atom: What’s the Big Deal?

2010-08-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

RSS vs. Atom: What’s the Big Deal?

I took Aaron Brazell definition about RSS vs Atom from his blog, he is the author of Technosailor.com blog.

RSS 2.0
RSS 2.0 has the widest acceptance of any feed format. Much of that has to do with the defacto use of it by WordPress, but it is also the one variety of RSS format that seems to have solved some of the problems presented by earlier versions. Of the two feed types, RSS is most widley used but also has signifigant downfalls.

For one, RSS does not allow any well-formed XML markup in it’s content. This is very bad when it comes to using RSS-syndicated content elsewhere. In fact, it only supports plain text or escaped HTML which, without getting into the technical issues surrounding that, simply means it’s very difficult to work with.

RSS has only three required fields on a per item basis- title, link and description. There are a variety of optional fields but some key features, such as a “last updated” field are missing.

Atom 1.0
Atom is a relatively recent spec and is much more robust and feature-rich than RSS. For instance, where RSS requires descriptive fields such as title and link only in item breakdowns, Atom requires these things for both items and the full feed.
And my favorite – Atom feeds provide an “updated” field which means that any feeds that are modified have a timestamp associated with them. Trust me when I say I find this useful.

A cool feature of Atom has to do with autodiscovery. Most of the time, if you point your browser to a feed-enabled website, autodiscovery kicks in and the browser alerts you in its own unique way to the presence of a feed. The same thing happens when you point a feed reader to a feed-enabled website as opposed to the specific feed itself. While feed autodiscovery has been around for a long time, Atom feeds actually contain a self pointer autodiscovery URL which is highly unique from RSS itself.

There’s quite a lot different in terms of the two specs. If you’re really interested in discovering the technical differences between the two, I encourage you to read Tim Bray’s comparison piece. He really nails it very well.

http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared

Basharat

Pragmatic SOA Beyond Buzzwords and Flamewars

2010-08-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

The best part of this presentation is about RESTfull API's and ATOM feed, I like that part most. I still do not understand why ATOM is been pushed instead of RSS :)

The API related stuff roughly starts around 22.00 minutes into the presentation.

Basharat

Interesting article on Common API mistakes

2010-08-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

My colleague Kirk passed the below article about API to me, I found this article very interesting. This article identifies 10 top API mistake developers make. I pulled the top five most critical mistakes from this article that the developers make with API's based on my experience of working with API’s

1.Assuming Everything Will Always Work

2. Putting the API Under Website Domain
Case in point: twitter.com is now going to api.twitter.com for the API. The result is that they can scale the website and the API independently of each other as needed.

3.Lack of Real-World Testing
You can often tell the APIs that have had some real-world use before launching, and those that haven't. For example, an API that lists _some_ information about an object, yet needs a secondary call to get MORE information about that object. If your API requires two calls to find out everything there is to know, you and your devs will hate you for it eventually.

4. Not Recognizing the API as a Core Line of Business.
"The companies who succeed in the new web economy recognize that APIs are a core line of business and essential path to customers and partners.

5. Not Having Management on Board with the API

Cheers
Basharat

What is Bus Factor - Are You Prepared for it?

2010-08-18T14:42:00.000-07:00

The Bus factor is a irreverent measurement of concentration of information in a single person, or very few people. The bus factor is the total number of key developers who would need to be incapacitated, as by getting hit by a bus, to send the project into such disarray that it would not be able to proceed

From my personal experience, I'd say that more than 70% of projects suffer from a bus factor of 1. It only takes one specific person in those teams to not be able to be there for the project to halt or slowly die in painful agony as people try to makeup for lost knowledge.

How do you recognize the bus factor?
In your mind, go through each person in your team and ask yourself if
the project could go on pretty much as usual if they left tomorrow.

If you say “no” or even hesitate about the answer, you’ve found the bus factor in your team.

How do you get rid of the bus factor?
Most of the collaboration techniques you’ll find in many agile methodologies try to solve the idea of the bus factor, but you don’t have to be agile to use those techniques.

■ Use daily standups to share critical information
■ Program in pairs every once in a while, or at least on key components of the system
■ Do code reviews on every piece of code that gets checked in
■ Do weekly half hour or one hour presentations by team members about interesting stuff they did this week
■ Ask the bus factor carrier to teach someone else from the team to do their work and vice versa. Tell them that next week they will be working alone on that material so they should get ready for that by working together on it.

The biggest bus factor is you As a team leader, you might just be the biggest bus factor carrier of them all. What happens if you leave tomorrow? can the team go on without you?

Your biggest challenge as a team lead, over a long period of time would be to make yourself dispensable – to make the team mature enough to continue on day to day things without needing you. Removing yourself as a bottleneck is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your team.

A team that can self manage just needs a coach for the personal team members, to grow them, to teach them new skills. They need someone to keep an open eye for interesting things that they may not have noticed, and they can use (not need!) a second look every once in a while if they are facing interesting dilemmas.

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all"

Cheers
Basharat

Senior developer versus Junior developer

2010-08-01T15:13:00.000-07:00

Marek Blotny's blogs post about Senior developer versus junior developer , very interesting.

Good read
Cheers

"Code coverage goal: 80% and no less!"

2010-07-25T15:45:00.000-07:00

I found this on google testing blog, very good read.

cheers
Basharat

Testing the Limits with Google’s Patrick Copeland

2010-07-10T16:26:00.000-07:00

Part I | Software Testing Blog

I liked this blog post very much, very good read.
Very good read.

The few things I liked in this post are "When we can’t find internal talent, community-based testing is an interesting solution to this challenge" and
70-20-10 rule for investing in technology. While the numbers are not carved in stone, the basic concept is that we invest ~70% on our existing core products, ~20% in related but new categories and ~10% on riskier bets or areas outside our existing core competencies.

Our approach is to do lots of experimentation and to release and iterate. We push bits to customers early and often, and then we listen and watch usage. Customers help us by “voting with their feet.” Popular features and products are improved, and poorly performing products are deprecated. With a big focus on innovation, we also need to “fail fast” and customer feedback helps us make those decisions.

Cheers
Basharat

On Design for Testability

2010-06-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

Hey Udi

Good stuff, I have been reading your post since last few years, also many times I quote from your post.

Going through “On Design for Testability”, I see few things differently, I considered the Unit testing as “white-box” testing — the tests are performed with full knowledge of the source code. Ideally, developer would be able to run unit tests so that all the code paths would be executed as a result of the testing. In other words, the unit tests would need to create the conditions to go through each line of code to ensure all the code was operating correctly today and tomorrow.

Unit Test is very critical because it is one of the first testing efforts performed on the code and the earlier defects are detected, the easier they are to fix. Early bug-detection is also the most cost-effective methodology, earlier we catch them less it would cost and later they are found higher the cost.

Also when we say Unit-testing should only be attempted with things which are units (or components), this is very subjective and depends on how much capital we want to spend, but I would always prefer to have all the new code written to have unit tests coverage, as an Investment in Future.

Basharat

udidahan Says:
April 21st, 2010 at 12:41 am Basharat,

Much of what you’re saying is “accepted truth” in the industry, but in my consulting I have seen a very different reality. Just like not everyone who writes code can write good code, not everyone who writes “unit tests” does that well.

The assumption that every unit test written is good does not hold up under scrutiny. In which case, it isn’t necessarily catching or preventing bugs – it’s just more code to maintain.

All I’m saying is for us to be more conscious of the investment choices we’re making, and following up with appropriate reflection from time to time on the return on those investments with real evidence rather than faith.

Thanks for your comments.

Bear caught on camera roaming through Blacksburg parking garage

2010-06-20T16:31:00.000-07:00

Bear caught on camera roaming through Blacksburg parking garage

http://www2.wsls.com/sls/news/local/new_river_valley/article/bear_caught_on_camera_roaming_through_blacksburg_parking_garage/105600/

This garage is where I park my car everyday, behind the maroon door is my office.

Cheers
Basharat

Microsoft IE 9.0 is doing some right things at last

2010-06-02T17:33:00.000-07:00

Here is my take on this
Ok, they’re still not going to give up their source code for IE9x, but they are allowing developers to play with it. Few of the real cool things which catches immediate attention are

1. IE9 supports the Media Query module in CSS3, which allows website developers a way to render pages in different ways according to the user’s client (desktop, notebook, or mobile).
2. Paying Attention to Performance, Finally they woke up after seeing the performance of Chrome
3. Now Microsoft’s site provides early adopters a way to test drive IE9 before it comes out, as well as a spot for IE developers to share data about speed and demos of HTML5 and CSS3 capabilities for anyone to try out. They are now trying to be like Twitter or Drupal, but I will give them credit for at least trying now. If the developer community likes it would be success.
4. Try it out : They also offer an installable IE9 platform preview for you to try out IE9 yourself.. IE9 has a suite of Developer Tools that developers can use to troubleshoot and test things with

Cheers
Basharat

Integrated Windows Authentication....Chrome supports it ....

2010-05-16T15:29:00.000-07:00

Integrated Windows Authentication
Google Chrome now supports Integrated Windows Authentication. If you have access to an intranet site that uses Microsoft IIS and requires NTLM authentication, open it in Chrome 5. This is one of the most requested Chrome features, after the support for Core Animation NPAPI, extensions and a bookmark manager.

Cheers
Basharat

Product Development : Moving towards "Zero Defect "

2010-05-08T21:00:00.001-07:00

One of my colleague started this conservation last week as we were in the final stages of pushing our Web Apps. 1.0 release in Production Environment, we are a SaaS based company using PUSH model for our releases.
He did asked some really good questions about defects we are producing in product development. Here in this blog post I tried my best to answer his questions and outline my vision for moving towards Zero Defects.

I want us to move toward defect free culture.
One of the fastest ways to kill motivation in the teams is what is called "allowing defect mentality". A defect mentality in software development is an atmosphere that tolerates same mistakes again and again, perfection is required down to the smallest detail as much a possible. I see this to be a serious problem, because it kills the initiative necessary for success.

Here are my few thoughts on this, we can move on them asap
1. Test your product every day as you develop it, and fix defects as soon as you find them.
2. Review your code regularly (make it a point to review code of repeating offenders especially, till they get it right).
3. Rewrite poor-quality modules.
4. Assume full responsibility for every bug.
6. Set QA objectives at the beginning of every work cycle.
7. Learn from every bug, each one represents a mistake that we made.
8. Don't rush debugging work.
9. Treat the quality of your code at the same level of importance as the quality of your product. ---Very Important
10. Test Driven Development. Nice side effect of TDD is a unit tests suite. You have tests for new code, and you have unit tests for old code. More tests — less bugs.
11. Continuous integration. Instant feedback helps to identify problems early and fix them early. It saves time (and money) and reduces bugs in production.
12. Automated regression functional tests suite. Unit tests are good, but you need something else. Functional tests emulate user behavior and find user interface errors, integration errors, etc. Needles to say you should have continuous integration in place to succeed with automated functional tests.
13. Root cause analysis. Stop hacking the code , look deeper into the problem

Saying this We need to assume full responsibility for every bug we found, ignoring them is not the option now. To enforce this we lead by example ,We need to be very strong in asking WHY, WHY NOT, HOW and WHEN. We are going to change "how the game is played here" not just trying to improve the process. Take more time but get it done the right way.

Basharat

Inside Pixar’s Leadership - Scott Berkun

2010-04-21T17:21:00.000-07:00

check this out

NetFlex now with Subtitles for Instant Viewing

2010-04-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

Subtitles starting to show up on Netflix instant viewing http://tcrn.ch/d5CEad, In January 2010 I asked for timeline and they said summer, their customer service is awesome :)

Initially I thought my request would die in some CRM, But it seems that this new feature was already in work. They also updated me with the challenges they were facing in implementing this feature, awesome 

Cheers
Basharat

Harvard Business School: Get Immediate Value from Your New Hire

2010-04-16T06:07:00.000-07:00

This is a great article.

Cheers
Basharat

Maven - What is Maven?

2010-04-07T13:08:00.000-07:00

Maven???

We have started using Maven few weeks back, here is a brief summary of what Maven is and how can it help.

What is it?
The great majority of Maven users are going to call Maven a “build tool”: a tool used to build deployable artifacts from source code. Build engineers and project managers might refer to Maven as something more comprehensive: a project management tool. What is the difference? A build tool such as Ant is focused solely on preprocessing, compilation, packaging, testing, and distribution. A project management tool such as Maven provides a superset of features found in a build tool. In addition to providing build capabilities, Maven can also run reports, generate a web site, and facilitate communication among members of a working team.

A more formal definition of Apache Maven: Maven is a project management tool which encompasses a project object model, a set of standards, a project lifecycle, a dependency management system, and logic for executing plugin goals at defined phases in a lifecycle. When you use Maven, you describe your project using a well-defined project object model, Maven can then apply cross-cutting logic from a set of shared (or custom) plugins.

Don't let the fact that Maven is a "project management" tool scare you away. If you were just looking for a build tool, Maven will do the job.

iPad

2010-04-03T05:56:00.000-07:00

After Reading through the blogs, here is what I found out

iPad: you can’t read books from the Apple bookstore on any other machine — not even a Mac or iPhone :(

iPad: no camera. Bye-bye, Skype video chats

iPad : How would this work with no USB jacks :(

iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine.

iPad: iPad can’t play Flash video(personaally I hate Flash, it drains the battery). Apple has this thing against Flash, the Web’s most popular video format; says it’s buggy, it’s not secure and depletes the battery. Well, fine, but meanwhile, thousands of Web sites show up with empty white squares on the iPad — places where videos or animations are supposed to play.

iPad: Internet service for $30. Or pay $15 for 250 megabytes of Internet data; when it runs out, you can either buy another 250 megs, or just upgrade to the unlimited plan for the month. Either way, you can cancel and rejoin as often as you want — just March, July and November, for example — without penalty.

I will wait for version 2.0 and then may be I may buy it.

Basharat

Hadoop

2010-03-06T16:13:00.000-08:00

Few weeks back I was speaking to one of my colleague in office and we stared talking about Hadoop, Yes, actually we do use Hadoop. After that I was really excited to know more about this technology and it usages and how it works. After spending lots of hours reading about it(yes I did buy the book), understanding some of its usages and going though various blogs about it. Here is what I see Hadoop as

Actually Hadoop is a software framework for writing applications which process very vast amounts of data (multi-terabyte data-sets) in-parallel on large clusters (thousand and thousands of nodes) of commodity hardware in a reliable, fault-tolerant manner.
Hadoop is available free, it is Java-based programming framework that supports the processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment.Hadoop was originally conceived on the basis of Google's MapReduce, in which an application is broken down into numerous small parts. Any of these parts (also called fragments or blocks) can be run on any node in the cluster. Hadoop makes it possible to run applications on systems with thousands of nodes involving thousands of terabytes. A distributed file system facilitates rapid data transfer rates among nodes and allows the system to continue operating uninterrupted in case of a node failure. The risk of catastrophic system failure is low, even if a significant number of nodes become inoperative.

http://hadoop.apache.org/#What+Is+Hadoop%3F

I Googled for companies that are using Hadoop; here are few of the companies I found
• A9.com - Amazon
• Amazon Web Services
• AOL
• Baidu - the leading Chinese language search engine
• Yahoo!
More than 100,000 CPUs in >25,000 computers running Hadoop
• Facebook
1100-machine cluster with 8800 cores and about 12 PB raw storage.
• Google
• LinkedIn
• The New York Times
large scale image conversions

Cheers
Basharat

Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

2010-03-01T16:56:00.000-08:00

coming soon

Cucumber & WATIR (Web Application Testing in Ruby)

2010-02-26T18:53:00.001-08:00

Since last couple of months Working with Cucumber it seems that it is indispensable for testing. It is simple that you can write documentation that you understand and then prove that the application does what it says.

Using Cucumber with WATIR (WATIR stands for Web Application Testing in Ruby) you can show that it really works in an actual browsers – (Safari, Chrome, IE, Firefox), the way user use it. One thing that I do not like about WATIR – is speed – as WATIR scripts the browser, an extensive test suite will take a long time to run.

Saying that I think Watir is the better tool, good documentation, agile and very active community and the right Horse to ride for long-term prospects for testing. I also understand the desire to standardize on C# for both production and test code.

Adding another language or tools does not matter, who cares.
Here is the Cheat Sheet for WATIR
http://pettichord.com/watirtutorial/docs/watir_cheat_sheet/WTR/Cheat%20Sheet.html

Here’s a simple example, I hacked from the web:
Feature: Google search
In order to find things on the web
As a user
I want to search for web pages containing specific text

Scenario: Load search page
When I go to the search page
Then I should be on the search page

Scenario: Search
Given I'm on the search page
When I search for "Rackspace”
Then I should see "www.rackspace.com" in the results

This reads almost exactly as the acceptance criteria. But it’s not just text. It’s a potentially automated test.

A developer or tester can come along and automate this test like so in Ruby:
============================================================
# assuming @google is an instance of a test DSL that wraps Watir, Selenium, etc.

When /^I search for "(.*)"$/ do |query|
@google.search_for query
end

Then /^I should see "(.*)" in the results$/ do |expected_text|
assert { @google.results_contain? expected_text }
end
# etc...Each of the Given/When/Then calls is a step definition.
============================================================
When there’s a matching line in a Cucumber test, the step definition gets executed.

Cheers
Basharat

Visual Studio 2010 with C# 4.0 beta version is out

2010-02-26T18:52:00.000-08:00

Integration of SharePoint development envir. in VS2010 is excellent & futuristic. Drag & Drop data binding for WPF applications is solid. Some cool features which I like are

1.SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010
Visual Studio promotes rapid SharePoint development by providing such features as advanced debugging tools, IntelliSense, statement completion, and project templates. Visual Studio also takes advantage of advanced .NET Framework-based tools and languages.

2.Core Coding Experience in Managed Languages
Visual Studio 2010 is an exciting release in managed languages and tools. Visual C# and Visual Basic languages continue to evolve towards feature parity, strive to simplify programming and deployment with the Microsoft Office APIs, and allow easy interop to dynamic languages. Visual F# is a new programming language which combines functional, object-oriented and explorative programming to provide a succinct, expressive and scalable language for .NET.

3.Parallel Computing
The Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework 4 and the Concurrency Runtime for Visual C++ 2010 enable developers to leverage parallel computing. By using these frameworks, developers can write parallel applications that will scale efficiently as the numbers of cores and processors increase. By avoiding the complexities of thread-focused programming models, the new parallel libraries simplify the production of parallel code and enable developers to more easily take advantage of parallel hardware.

It also includes CTP of C# 4.0. While C# 4.0 does not represent a radical departure from the previous version, the C# 4.0's features that I like

1.Named and Optional Parameters
2.Dynamic Support
3.Variance
4.Conventions

Named and Optional Parameters
Support for optional parameters allows you to give a method parameter a default value so that you do not have to specify it every time you call the method. This comes in handy when you have overloaded methods that are chained together.

Dynamic Support
It is a common infrastructure that will enable all .NET languages, including C#, to optionally resolve names in a program at runtime instead of compile time. We call this technology dynamic lookup.

Work on support for dynamic lookup was begun in the CLR, but soon became part of the Dynamic Language Runtime, or DLR. The DLR provides the infrastructure on which a common set of dynamic tools can be built. For instance, the DLR provides the infrastructure for both IronRuby and IronPython. It will be the infrastructure on which the C# team implements dynamic lookup .
Support for dynamic lookup is already available in Visual Basic for .NET, it was called "Late Binding".

Basharat

Drupal - Why I liked it more than Sharepoint?

2010-02-26T18:48:00.000-08:00

I like SharePoint and having once common tool for us to work is always appealing , but its lack of compatibility with non-IE browser is a show stopper for us.
Using Drupal looks very appealing to me , doing one time uploading of the documents to Drupal is not going to be a big deal. The pros for using Drupal seems to align quite nicely with our basic business requirements, see below

Drupal is open source , no upfront cost
Excellent Cross-browser compatibility
Excellent Revision Control (Version Control)
Implementing is much faster, Also we can set our own CMS very quickly
Highly Customized Security permission system
Third Part Integration
Performance
Advanced URL Control
Ease of implementation and Use - I am using it right now.

Cons for Drupal : Instead of using Sharepoint , we will have another tool.

Basharat