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Comprehensive and Detailed Test Report Makes Lot of Sense
A comprehensive and detailed test report preparation during test phase of a newly developed product as mentioned in an earlier post here, makes a lot of sense in ensuring availability of light at the end of tunnel names as project management. Each phase of a project right since its inception is like a tunnel where at the beginning of your journey of that phase, you are never 100% confident for its timely and accurate closure. After all, projects, for years, have been a great topic of discussion and there is no company in the world that can claim this figure of 100% success in all their projects. There are always a number of hidden and visible threats to a project that could fall in the bucket of anticipated ones, or the ones emerging as a shocking surprise at any moment of time during project management.
Each test case must be given an equal amount of attention and the recording of results of test cases and test scenarios is quite important. All test cases do not result positive and same is true for vice versa. Hence it becomes important to record flaws encountered in the Bug Report in a clear and sensible manner so that least amount of time is spent by development team on understanding the bug and more time goes into fixing of bugs. At times, test team, in an attempt to show bigger count of bugs in their test report (so as to reflect higher amount of efforts gone in testing, which obviously is a misconcept) record multiple bugs for the same error thereby duplicating the reporting of bugs. A thorough inspection of Bugs Report is therefore important before handing it over to development team for fixing of bugs.
Ensure Complete Test Coverage For a Product
It is important to ensure completeness of testing for any new product built based on the customer's business requirements. These business requirements become the basic source for defining development requirements and subsequently testing requirements. Testing is as important phase of any project as the development. In fact every phase of a project in project management has serious impact on any next phase of the project. Based on business requirements and subsequent logic being built in the application by development team, Test Team prepares test cases to ensure complete coverage of testing of the product. These test cases have to be extensive, exhaustive and meaningful. Test environment, test bed and testing strategy have to be strong enough to ensure meeting of customer needs as per customer's expectations and not as per development team's wishes.
Any changes happening in the code during or after completion of testing, which could derive out of various reasons, must ensure retesting and that too in exhaustive manner, without bothering about the change in logic is small or at a large scale. For this purpose it makes a lot of sense that development and testing go hand in hand till the product ripens to its final shape and becomes ready for deployment. Test scenarios have to be properly aligned with the exhaustive test cases built. Equally important is to observe the pass and fail result of each test case. A small gap here could cause a big trouble later.
That is why documentation and recording is necessary. It becomes handy at a later stage too for reference purposes, as and when any need arises to refer to it.
Introspective Aspects Of Complete Coverage of Testing
There are many ways to ensure complete coverage of software testing as discussing in my earlier post here. Let us revisit those ways and introspect a little more on the same. A careful inspection and selection of activities is a must to ensure adherence of process, procedures, policies, methodologies and completeness of testing of any new product during its built or after its built. Or it could be equally important for a newer version of an existing built that has already been released to customer(s). First and foremost is to ensure complete understanding of business/ customer requirements and then the business logic built in the product to cater to these needs. A gap in understanding of these requirements and subsequent in slippage in complete coverage of product testing could lead to a big disaster post release of the product not only in terms of money and reputation but also in terms of acquiring new business or keep holding the existing ones.
Documentation here has a bigger role in terms of – first, drafting these requirements in a crisp elaborating manner, and second, getting a sign off from responsible authority from customer. Engagement of quality team right at this stage ensure smooth closure of later stages of the project. While development team meets to discuss these requirements to draft out their development charter, plan and broad level design. The requirement document must be given as an additional copy to testing team so that they find out points of discussion for any clarity required from analysts or customer. It makes sense obviously as it is the testing team that gets into the shoe of customer to see the behavior, flow and functionality built. As a development charter and plan is built, a similar charter and plan is important for testing. Test strategy is an integral part of this. Test Methodology, test schedule and requirement of testing tools needs come out of it that define the scope of testing and building of test cases.
8 PMI Certifications To Choose From As Per Your Fitment In Project Management
Based on your interest qualification and career goals, there are 8 different certifications offered by PMI. Each certification is an independent entity with no linkages or prerequisites among each other. Check them below:
Project Management Professional (PMP): A well acknowledged and widely recognized certification that is having demand globally can be a great booster for your career in Project Management. Project Managers with this certification have definitely a higher recognition and importance than the others, who don't have it. It is an excellent opportunity for experienced project managers to acquire this certification to get a clear cut edge over their peers and get their presence felt on a global front. It also provides an altogether different horizon to master project and team management.
Program Management Professional (PgMP): A higher level of certification for the project managers falling in the category of senior project managers (or those aspiring to become senior project manager) who are currently managing multiple teams and multiple projects. Specially designed certification enables senior project management professionals to gain an in-depth insight to manage large and complex projects, in multiples.
Portfolio Management Professional (PfMP)SM: This higher level certification helps in gaining skills in portfolio management and mastery in handling multiple portfolios.
PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP): This certification is meant for experienced project managers who are following agile methodologies or are at the verge of getting into it so as to manage projects with Agile approach.
PMI Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP): This is a special certification to build competence in managing risk portfolio in project management by means of assessment, analysis mitigation and closures of risks in a project or multiple projects.
PMI Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP): This is an excellent certification for project managers who need expertise in scheduling & planning of projects.
OPM3 Professional Certification: The certification helps in aligning experience of a project manager with the practical knowledge gained during the journey of project management so as to maturely manage multiple projects.
9th Annual Conference CAST2014: The Art And Science Of Testing
If you are among software testing professionals, practitioners, consultants, managers, scholars, researchers, students or developers; and are around New York during 11 to 13 August 2014, don't miss opportunity to attend the 9th Annual Conference on Software Testing, CAST 2014 with a theme of "The Art and Science of Testing". It is being organized by Association for Software Testing (AST) since 2006. The unique feature of this conference is about its sessions where each of the sessions is run in two flavors – the first half is taken by the speaker who is master in the subject area and the other half is and open session to facilitate attendees for questions, discussions etc.
Some more unique features of CAST sessions is that it is for professional and learners in software testing field and is run by experts and masters in testing field with a sole purpose of improving and optimizing software testing and enhancing its learning to all attendees. The model of this conference is to share in an interactive manner, conduct discussions and run Q&A. It is a time when expert professionals, authors, blogger and other related personalities interact with each other.
CAST 2014 is being co-chaired by Anna Royzman and Keith Klain. The first day is set for Tutorials of full day duration to be conducted by experts in their respective areas. Next 2 days are for interactive sessions.
EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference 2014: Diversity, Innovation, Leadership
If you are around Dublin, and belong to software testing community, mark your calendars to attend EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference 2014 during 24th to 27th November 2014 at The Convention Centre, Dublin. The beautiful theme this year is Diversity, Innovation, Leadership. The deadline for submission of application for speakers and active workshops was till 14th February 2014. Notification of Acceptance is on 21st March 2014.
Program is chaired by Paul Gerrard. Paul is associated with EuroSTAR event since 1993 when the first event was organized for the first time in London. Here is the video in which Paul talks about the forthcoming event.
Test Strategy Is A Must Before Team Starts Testing
A test strategy is a must to be in place before the team starts testing on a software project. Though the template and components of a test strategy may vary from organization to organization and also from project to project within the same organization, there are certain important aspects and key elements that need to be integral part of a test strategy. The careful insertion of these key elements in your test strategy will definitely ensure higher level of optimization of your time, resources and money spent on the whole exercise.
Testing experts need to expertise in learning the strategic as well as practical approach towards software testing. Keeping a benchmark helps in improvisation in your above approaches. As a single project management methodology does not fit well for all kind of software projects, same is the case in software testing. Your test strategy, test cases and testing methodologies, test estimation and exhaustive risk management would vary depending on these factors.
A clear cut roadmap to drive your software testing is important not only for crisp functioning within the function but it also give a clear insight about the function to management and other stakeholders. For any new testing technology that you plan to introduce to your management must have a business case in place.
Planning to attend STP Conference Spring 2014?
Software Test Professionals (STP) Conference is happening this spring during 14 to 17 April 2014 in New Orleans, LA. It is like a must attend conference for all professionals who are connected to testing phenomena, directly or indirectly, for the purpose of getting lot of insight, learning and knowledge on the subject. One of the benefit that you get while attending such a conference is to meet and talk to your peers, seniors and legends in software testing. You get to know lot about what is happening in software testing from the horse's mouth and this way you understand the new things happening out of your own pond.
Networking done during these conferences with like minded professionals helps you in many ways so as to help you in improvising your career goals, finding out new techniques for testing your apps, discuss about latest tools, ongoing and upcoming trends in testing, existing processes and their optimization, insights in other industries and so on. There are 6 tracks finalized so far with a number of sessions in each track. So depending on the choice of your areas if is important to tick mark which tracks or sessions you would not afford to miss in case you are planning to attend this 4 days conference. The detail of tracks and sessions can be found here.
Three Demanding Areas In Mobile Technology
Coming years are usage of mobile technology in the corporate word – to cater to their desktop/ enterprise apps on mobile platrofrm so as to provide the versatility and freedom to use it anywhere, anytime with least amount of gadgets requirements. In today's scenario, everyone is using a smartphone that is quite capable of running an application. Most of us are already using many of those applications already on our phones.
Enterprise apps need a little extra attention in terms of development, quality and security. If an enterprise app is required to be made available on mobile phones of the employees it becomes a complex requirement in terms of the deployment looking at the number of variants of the OSes being used in the mobile phones. Mobile application development and deployment is not as simple as a Windows platform Client-Server application or a web based application. Testing becomes a major area in mobile apps development and deployment. Take for example any legacy application running in your organization that needs to be deployed on mobile platform and it has to be available on every employee's mobile phone irrespective of its operating system. The same enterprise application is now required to be produced in a lighter version so as to support its deployment on mobile phones.
Quality becomes apparently a big task when it comes to testing of the functioning of same app on various versions of phones using various versions of the same and different operating systems. Simply deciding on moving an enterprise app to mobile platform without building up a strong development, deployment, testing and security team within would be a problematic affair.
Focus More On Mobile Apps: Development and Testing
2014 would be a year to focus more on development and deployment of mobile applications in corporate world all across the globe. Corporate are seeking an absolute confidence in using their enterprise software apps on mobile, at least to cover the core business part. Confidence is definitely required on three major fronts before taking mobile apps to a level of enterprise business – development, quality and security. the way requirements are increasing day by day to build mobile features of the business apps that are running in the organization, it is becoming important to understand the increase in demand for mobile apps developers and testers.
Smartbear conducted a survey among 1000+ developers and testing community to find out the extent of focus on mobile apps on a global arena and came out with following results as stated in the infographic.
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Recall Of 2m Vehicles of Prius by Toyota – A Software Quality Failure
Each software built is associated with some stakeholders and audience. The higher is he number of audience, meaning the number of users, the higher is the risk. Risk goes in many variants of two main components – money and reputation. It impacts on financials, business, customers, stock price, sales, revenue and many more factors.
When it comes to a world class leader in manufacturing of vehicles, the stake and risk increases manifold. As per a news item, recently Toyota had to recall almost 2 million newly launched Prius hybrid car from the market due to a bug in the software embedded within the vehicle to perform certain functions. We all know the complete lifecycle of a software. It goes through various phases – requirements, development, deployment, launch etc. In between there are certain stages where quality has a major role to play which impart in depth testing of the product. Testing is critical in many aspects.
Prius is the latest generation of full hybrid electric car produced by Toyota for its mid sized segment customers. It was rated as one of the cleanest vehicles in the United States based on its smog forming emission technology. The latest recall that happened early this week was due to a glitch in the software because of which the gas electric system of the car was automatically getting shutdown. The recall has happened in many countries including Japan, North America, and many places in Europe. Toyota is a company that is heavily dependent on technology for their manufacturing process. Besides having highest level of quality control mechanism in Toyota manufacturing plants that is manged via Software Quality Management (SQM), they use Prince2 and CMMI to a large extent for their software applications used for the development and manufacturing processes.
Part 2/2- 9 Negative Traits For A Project Manager To Avoid
This post is in continuation to my previous post on the same subject. In last post we discussed about 4 suicidal traits that could close the gates of growth for a project manager. Let us look further at the rest of 5 negative traits which the writer Abhinav Pandey has recommended to follow in his new book 9 Don'ts To Success because the DOs don't work published by Grapevine India.
The 4 traits discussed in previous post are: Distraction, Mistakes, Fake, and Lies. Here are the rest of traits below:
5. Arrogance: An arrogant project manager will be difficult to adjust in a project. This trait might be useful to follow for an artist or a film actor who is on the peak of his career and can dictate his terms from there but not for a project manager by any means.
6. Risks: This is the only point that I agreed to the author that a project manager must follow. There again, the project manager has to be smart enough to understand the difference between a calculated risk and blind risk. He must be able to assess the risk factor in the risk being taken.
7. Negative Thinking: It will lead to nowhere if a project manager starts following this trait.
8. Flamboyance: This again would be a disastrous trait if a project manager starts following it.
9. Manipulation: Agreed! But not to full extent. This is the second trait in the whole list of 9 recommended by the author. I would say a project manager can be manipulative but has to be careful enough in playing his cards. A positive and sensible note is important in this music played (if at all!) by the project manager.
9 Negative Traits For A Project Manager To Avoid – Part 1/2
Thanks to Abhinav Pandey for compiling these 9 traits that we would be discussing below in his new book titled as 9 Don'ts To Success because the DOs don't work published by Grapevine India. I was wondering after reading this book whether these traits recommended by the author to follow would work for a project manager in his success if he starts following them, and the answer was a big NO that came from within. Let us see why these traits would not work for a 5. project manager in making him more successful in his ventures:
1. Distraction: Would distraction from customer, customer requirements, business needs and project management help a project manager in achieving bigger goals than what he is able to achieve by focusing on these.
2. Mistakes: Which organization will accept a project manager making mistakes too often and that too repeatedly the same mistakes. Probably none. Taking risk is different from making mistakes. Having a watch from various stakeholders on the project, it is something a project manager can never afford.
3. Fake: How a project manager can act fake is not clear. The author opens this chapter with a statement that artificial flowers last longer than the real ones. But then worldwide real ones are preferred over the artificial ones. Moreover "fake" in no sense mean "artificial".
4. Lies: No point in discussing. If a project manager starts following this trait, that would be suicidal for his career.
Part – 1/2: Next 5 traits discussed in following post…
Quality Is Synchronization and Unanimous Consolidation
One absolutely important role of Quality function which is not there in written in their agendas anywhere but which is always done by them is to take all stakeholders in sync and perform a consolidation of product unanimously before letting is QC cleared and okayed for release to customer. Why is it so important for them to engage all stakeholders and win their confidence is very crucial to avoid any confusions and conflicts occurring at a later stage after the product has been released.
Testing criteria must be made very clear and the exceptions highlighting is most important factor stating what is not under the scope of testing. Scope of testing has to sync well with the exact business requirements for which the product has been or is being built to cater to its needs. Getting into the shoe of end user and looking at the product functionality and usage as per his perspective is also very important factor for quality function.
Quality Cannot Happen In Isolation
Imagine a scenario when quality is sitting in isolation with no information about what projects are in pipeline at what stage and what is the plan of things coming into their kitty for testing and QC approval. Gone are the days when this used to happen. Quality has to be part of all stages of Project Management now. Right time to allow them to peak inside the door is Business Analysis stage when a team of business analysts is about to sit with the business stalwarts of customer business for finalizing the business requirements and current scenario. A quality gut at this stage if is part of the team can start absorbing the right kind of energy to drive it till the final stages.
Quality guy might have different set of questions in mind that could be raised during analysis stage. If he is not part of this stage and later gets a document of analysis and requirements from BA team, it might be a postmortem and might not simulate the queries from Q perspective that could have arisen during real scenario, provided he be the part of it. Similar kind of scenarios where QC team gets isolated (or is made to do so) is the development phase when developers are discussing, developing and performing unit testing.
A Quality person at this stage equally engaged in all kind of developmental and requirement discussions could act as a boon for the product as the absorption of crux of customer business is already settled in his mind and during final QC testing all this wisdom could become handy.
5 Factors Causing Panic During Testing Phase
Projects do get delayed mostly as per their plans due to various reasons. But mostly the major brunt is to be absorbed by testing. Reasons for this could be many but important to learn is to cover the testing team with a shield so that none of this kind of panicking pressures penetrate and create chaos in testing phase. Some of the known factors causing pressure on testing phase are:
1. Wrong Planning: Initial planning if not reviewed on a regular basis is definitely going to cause its impact somewhere.
2. Customer Demand: At times there are factors at customer end that compel them to redefine their timelines of go-live of running project for which the pressure is put on project team. Development takes its own sweet time and so does the testing but usually pressure of such kind fall on QC to squeeze their timelines to roll out testing in a quicker manner.
3. Development: Delay in development completion could squeeze testing phase timelines thereby eating out their calendar dates planned to go for testing.
4. Unplanned Shortfall: Shortages that occur suddenly during running phases cause severe impact depending on the resources or persons that vanish all of a sudden from the scene.
5. Other Unplanned Priorities: A suitable time allocated for testing might get sacrificed for some other unplanned but critical activity that jumps into the team's pocket.
Quality Is Not Speed To Deliver
If you feel that speed produces better results, you are wrong and carrying a misconception in mind. Speed in lack of proper direction and predefined or planned results is always a disaster. One has to be very clear what results are in demand while carrying out testing of a product. That is where a structured and planned testing comes into picture.
At times, in presence of high pressure due to multiple projects running at the same time, each with a timeline to launch, which mostly contains a number of constraints of time and resources; the pressure jumps on to the bottom line to fasten their work and deliver fast. Under pressure, a Test Lead might direct his test team members to perform the testing 'quickly' to meet their deadline. This might happen due to various reasons, a wrong planning, a pre-pone launch request from customer, a delay in development, a shortfall in manpower and resources than original plan, another priority eating out the allocated time and so on…
But everyone in the team especially the middle and top line must understand that putting the bottom line under extra pressure will never lead to quick and accurate results. Speed often compromises with the accuracy…
Quality Is A Tool For Human Mind
Before talking about procurement of tools to manage quality of a product whether through QC (testing during development, post development and UAT – user acceptance testing), one must thing about the human brain that is going to drive these testing and while running these tools. It becomes important to know the quality factor lying in the brain of each of the member of quality team or testing team. Quality has to come from mind and once that stage is acquired that each brain engaged in testing of a product is a quality thinker and quality doer, it is never attained with the help of market tools for generating test environment, test cases, simulation, load or stress scenarios.
A test team member has to clearly understand that unless Quality does not become a tool for mind, it has no meaning and the member himself loses his own weightage in the scenario. If there are more doubts in the mind of tester regarding product, it is evident that the product testing would not reach to a justifying stage and the testing phase is definitely leading to a bug prone product.
Quality Is Objective
Quality is objective. It is measurable. It can be seen, felt and measured. Teams working on testing of a product know well how to measure the testing effort and quality imbibed in the product. A straight measure of quality in a product is the encounter of bug in the product post its release. Multiple bugs detected by multiple users in live environment is definitely a disaster for the product. A straight question raised in such cases goes on the role of quality testing team and their efforts.
Test cases, test bed, testing efforts is all what counts in the measurement of testing in efforts to produce a bug free product to go live for end user and business environment. It is very important to engage test team members right since the inception stage of a project so as to avoid any confusion at a later stage that will definitely lead to time loss which is a big factor in a project. Projects do get delayed but the intelligence required to manage a project is to ensure delays caused by unnecessary and unwanted activities.
How To Handle Multiple Project Pressure and Conflicts
Another very interesting question asked is as below:
When handling multiple projects simultaneously for multiple vendor portfolio, how would you address conflicts if happens between testers/test leads or any two cross-sectional QA leads due to project stress? Also, how should one manage the current critical project deadlines if you are being given an ad-hoc high priority work on top of the existing ones?
Having a scenario of managing ongoing multiple projects simultaneously for multiple vendor portfolio is not something new that is encountered by project managers. Seniority of a project managers comes along with wisdom that comes with experience. Right on day one a project manager does not know how would he handle such kind of situation when his environment and ecosystem demands for heterogeneous deliverables, for heterogeneous stakeholders with heterogeneous list of top priorities and tremendous pressure. Conflicts and clashes becomes frequent occurring events under such circumstances when all teams and team members are under time and delivery pressures. Imagine a real life matching scenario when common resources are being used by two QA leads for two different projects falling under the same project manager and different project managers.
A concrete work plan with deliverables for each project by each member with exact timelines is very important. Only hitch in this kind of condition is the unplanned absence of any critical team member.
An ad-hoc priority on top of existing ones – all with squeezed timelines of delivery is another issue. To handle this it is important that such in-bouncing priorities which are totally unplanned must come through a common route and that route is strong enough to take a call what to compromise in lieu of what. In parallel to this, what is being compromised needs to be informed to the respective stakeholders, which is the responsibility of this common route. Let this common route be Project Manager.
Quality Is A Mandate
Quality is not a "one department" or "one person" baby in an organization. It is a mission that has to be followed by each and every person of the organization working at any level right from the office boy, pantry boy, helper, up to the top most level. Quality can not speak different languages or having different meanings in a team, project, or the organization. It is a culture. It is a definition of life within the organization.
Quality has to be built on regular basis. It is not like a building of the organization that is built and you start sitting and working inside it. It is a building of indefinite size, indefinite scope but with a clear cut, crisp, measurable and adoptable mandate. It cannot be enforced to anyone. It has to be exemplified and demonstrated by each and every brick in the wall – meaning by each and every person in the organization. Quality in a never ending journey but on a definite path and a definite target to achieve.
If above level is achieved in any organization, there can be no hurdle in its way to reach at the top.
How Do You Define Quality
Following was the question I was asked today by a Doctoral Candidate in Educational Technology & eLearning today.
When it comes to leading a huge QA team such as your position, how do you define 'quality'? Why 'quality' matters to you?
(QA professionals are asked by the organization/customers during every project as how they would define quality. Do quality differs in each one's perspective? Because, not everyone view in the same way. What would be your input on this?)
My answer to this question could lead to many posts. In a summary my answer would be as below that I would be elaborating further in next few posts to come:
1. Quality Is a Mandate for me without which no individual, no process, no business, no product, no project, no function and no organization can survive in today's competitive world.
2. Quality is Objective and has to be defined in a clear cut measurable manner. It cannot be a subjective manner. It is a tool to draw out best possible positive results to meet expectations and timelines.
3. Quality is a TOOL for Human mind and not a tool to be used by a human mind. It has to be in the blood of a person to live with all the time.
4. Quality is NOT Speed to deliver a product where while delivering it compromises by any means. It has to be a balancing act between Delivery and Awareness of Completeness.
5. Quality cannot happen in Isolation. It is a team work – inter and intra both.
6. Quality is Synchronization and unanimous consolidation.
Would be taking it up further in my next posts.
My Top 10 Posts Of 2013 On Project Management And Quality Assurance
The list of my top 10 blog posts on Project Management and Quality Assurance are as below:
The link for these posts is: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/
- What is a Testing environment for software testing?
- Twelve essential Steps of Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC)
- 10 Skills to make a perfect Project Manager
- Ten Differences Between Project Manager and Project Leader
- 5 essentials while building test environment for software testing
- Eight Goal Settings for Software Developers
- Eleven Skills For Product Manager To Win Over Any Situation
- Five Excellent Quotes On Quality
- Project Task Prioritization With Eisenhower Matrix
- What Is ETL Testing – An Overview
Top 5 Projects In Demand During 2014
5 type of projects will be in high demand during 2014 as listed below:
1. Education: Projects based on education delivery in a smarter way will be for asking globally.
2. Retail: Systems to make retail business more comfortable, versatile and widely acceptable.
3. Security & Privacy: Demand will be high in making systems more secured while keeping privacy intact over the internet/ cloud.
4. Health: Global health management systems will be high in demand.
5. Governance: Management of public utilities, systems and facilities in an automated secured manner.
Top 5 Priorities Of A Test Lead For 2014
The success of a project is driven by the teams that work on it. Besides various other factors and logistics, it is always the team that matters most because static and non living things do not think and act according to changing environment and conditions but it is the human mind that has an ability to work efficiently even under stressed and constrained conditions. That is why the people factor remains on top always.
For Test Lead top 5 priorities on card for the year 2014 would be:
1. Requirements: Understanding of customer and business requirements beyond what has been documented by the analysts will be very important. It will be good if QC guy gets a chance to walk through the business process of the customer thoroughly.
2. Documentation: Documentation includes a lot and means a lot for QC. Right from test case building, test report, bug closure report and so on.
3. Experience: Testing is one expertise and business knowledge is another. Former comes from learning and education whereas latter comes from experience and wisdom. A tester needs to have both these expertise in a balanced form so as to align both the roads properly.
4. Team: Management of team, allocation of resources and retaining the best of resources is an art that needs to be learnt and managed.
5. Learning: Learning is a process that needs to be built in a structured manner. Learning must come from each project, each success, each failure and so on.
Top 5 Priorities Of A Project Manager For 2014
Learning keeps on adding 'value' ingredient in the professional life of a project manager. Project manager has to be a quick learner and grasping agent to get the crux of matter so as to adopt enhanced process of managing his projects. Every project brings in a new bouquet of learning. The shortfalls and failures bring in a determination of not repeating the same in next upcoming projects. The successes carry on with a message of maintaining the same in forthcoming projects.
Let us look at the top 5 priorities that would be on cards of a project manager during the year 2014:
1. Requirements: Focus will be there to grab business and customer requirements as crisply and elaborately as possible. Requirements and business processes do not change on daily basis once they get established and optimized. During such changes happening there would be a risk of changes in the requirements but then it has to be handled in a matured manner.
2. Documentation: Documentation has been a consistent pain for project managers at the time of project crunch and hence needs to be managed appropriately.
3. Reviews: Project progress review control mechanism need to be redefined with customer as an active participant in all review meetings where the requirements and progress is to be discussed. The process of project review has to be more transparent for the benefit of all by engaging all stakeholders.
4. Closures: Each closure has to be signed off in a structured manner so as to ensure compliance to customer needs.
5. Teams: It is not difficult to get best of the people but to retain them is. Focus on engaging your team members beyond work prepositions so as to have an emotional tie up with the organization and work.
An Ever Growing Tussle Between Product And Quality Leads
For generations there is a fundamentally ongoing fight between the product team and the quality team of any project. This is a generic fight for which there has not been a solution found so far. The fight is as below.
Product manager and his team always think that their product is fantastically built as per customer requirement with 100% requirements business needs met while building it. And the product is bug free. They further have a mindset that the product when goes to quality for internal testing on a test bed similar to live environment, the testing team takes extra long time with an intention of overstretching the whole exercise of testing just to maintain their importance intact. According to product team 90% of the bugs are either unnecessarily listed to build the test report long with large number of bug findings or the similar kind of bugs are repeated for the same purpose.
Impact Of Changes In Requirements And Commitment On Project Delays
For a successful project, the credit goes to the whole team. But for a project delayed or failed the one man in crisis is the project manager. Whatsoever the reasons may be for this delay/ failure but it is the project manager that has to bear the brunt. Let us look at the topmost reasons that cause project delay or project failure:
1. Change Management: The initial requirements from customer leads to development but as the work progresses, fresh requirements or changes in the existing requirements keep pumping in from customer end. There is no wonder about it to happen and one should take it as a natural phenomenon. After releasing their initial set of requirements, customer think tank keeps pondering over what else could be achieved which lead to these requirements. Critical part is to grab these requirements with a positive note, analyze well and segregate these requirements to two parts – to be added, or to be reverted back to customer with a justification for not adding it.
2. Commitment: For business critical apps development there is a deep rooted commitment required from each section, from each of the stakeholder. If that does not happen, there are chances of missing some important handling in time that could lead to a big disaster if raised at a later stage. It has been seen that if customer key users are not engaged well in time initially during the development phase for clearing off units built have higher risk of facing major setbacks in progress of project.
Pitfalls of Project Managers Changing Jobs In Short Duration
It is very interesting to note that there is a group of project managers who do not stay in an organization for long. They set a rule not to stay longer than 2 years or so. Or maybe the rule gets imposed on them automatically due to their own pitfalls to enable them to keep surviving in the ecosystem. Let us look at what makes it happen in case of such project managers. The main factors could be their
These guys are not fundamentally strong in their project management skills. They appear to be confident and strong get goers in their talks but not in their walk. They talk high about their past achievements which probably they have never achieved in reality. They are good in ensuring management about their capability in handling any kind of tight situations and tough projects but in actual they have their plans of exit at right moment well in advance.
They will not be able to run projects well and that will apparently start appearing after a short while. They would spend their intelligence not in learning business, processes and procedures; but on how smartly to shift cap to one or the other instead of owning it. Logically at the point of insertion in the beginning itself should raise eyebrows of the management for such candidates who have appeared for candidature with a track record of spending not significant time in their previous organizations.
How Much Tech Savvy A Project Manager Should Be?
Keep pace with the Technology: The way technologies are changing at a very fast pace, it will be foolish to stay with your legacy technology running for years whereas the world is adopting newer technologies for the similar kind of projects. There is no doubt that when the existing technology was selected, it would have been a state of the art and latest of the technologies kind of solution. But remember that over a period of time, technologies get faded away in wake of newer, robust and advanced technology entrants.
Remember that development for all business apps start with a prerequisite set of requirements basis which timelines and plans are built and team sizing, resources etc. are set. Once this business requirement is converted to an app, it is released on Test Server, Staging Server and Live Server respectively for QC, UAT and go-live in the same pattern. Gradually when this app is handed over to end users on go-live environment, the app usage starts triggering along with the desired business results chickening out.
But story does not end here. New requirements that either go to changes in existing functionalities or new functionality built keep pouring in there by reshaping the size and environment of your existing app. That is where your awareness towards newer technologies to manage and control any kind of crunch in the existing one, is very critical.
3 Fundamental Pillars To Drive Your Project To Success
Methodology & Approach: Every project does not fall in a generic project methodology. It is important to understand the type of project before making it enlisted under a particular project methodology. For this, based on the projects undertaken and new upcoming ones, relevant project methodologies to be identified and defined. Right project methodology helps project manager and other teams to ensure following right processes and documentations for each project phase in that methodology. A new project marked in wrong methodology could lead to extreme level of confusion and thus leading to failures.
Issue Management: Issues are integral part of any project arising during any of the phases of a project. Taking issues in a lighter way could lead to losing the right direction of a project and hence getting it derailed from its progress track. A single issue management charter with process driven approach with right & understandable definition of issue, its categorization, its severity and its closure with identification of 'who' is responsible for closure of issue, is very important. Any issue, howsoever small, could lead to a big disaster. A regular review is a must.
Communications: Be it project management, team management or issues management; nothing will move in right direction, if inappropriate or incomplete or missing communications happen during a project. Project manager must ensure to graduate each of the team members and team leads on how to handle communications and its importance. Right kind of information, to right people, at right time with right kind of actions required must be a set protocol of communications. For example, if a piece of information is just for the sake of information, or an action is required, along with its criticality, should be the right approach to manage.
Meaning of CTTR In Project Management
Project Management mainly comprises of converting customer requirements and business needs to an application so as to enable customer in running its business in a much smoother and error free environment. It needs to be imbibed of business processes, workflow (if required by customer) and minimization of manual interventions to a maximum extent. Any business process that speaks about business enhancement, improvisation and optimization by transforming it from manual to automation enabled through coding needs to be thrown into a dustbin.
Timelines of a project are mostly defined as per customer guidelines. At times it is important for a customer to get a solution within a stipulated time frame if the app is related to a pre-scheduled launch in a big way and the app is going to play a major role in that particular launch. Usually a project where customer has no say in desired results' release timelines especially when it is a customer sponsored project, it is definitely a major glitch. Either the requirements are not serious or customer has no intentions to pay for the product later.
CTTR is Customer Time To Release which means the timelines defined by the customer regarding release of product. All project timelines, budgeting and allocations are a total derivative of CTTR.
All Projects Face Budget Constraints
Budget for any project is allocated right at its initiation phase. Budgeting includes lot of factors but the main factor remains customer defined timelines. Keeping this target defined by customer in mind, a backward calculation is done and accordingly time allocation to each phase is done, team sizing is defined and resource planning is done. After all it is customer that matters the most.
Well, it does not mean that there is a scope of comparison even if this backward calculation is being done. Two prime factors that play a major role in this whole game is quality and finances. Budgeting beyond optimum level and compromising with quality of the product will mar the beauty of product and impact on business badly. When timelines are shorter there is another way of pulling your socks and not letting you beaten down. It requires higher level of skilled task force, error free tools and rich experience to win over in such kind of wars.
3 Critical Weapons For Winning A Battle Called Project Management
If you really want to be a successful project manager you need to acquire following three powerful weapons so as to be a winner all the time whether the conditions are favorable or you are travelling in rough seas. The teams that are formed usually have all mixes of human beings having different styles of working and delivering results in different fashions. Overall momentum is something which need to be maintained all the time to race along the ticking clock. The three important and potent weapons that can help you are as below:
Skills: You need to have high quality project management skills to win your battle. If you are leading a team of unbeatable and brave soldiers but lacking the same in you, would not lead you to a winning situation.
Tools: Whether it is project management tools, bug tracking tools or incident recording tools – you need to assess your needs and acquire these tools accordingly. Overstuffing yourself beyond required commodities will lead to a burden on your head. But vice versa also holds equally good meaning if you are underestimating your needs and go for the battle along with your team with shortage of armory, your defeat is sealed right in the beginning.
Experience: Guys with rich experience under their belt and laurels shining on their shirts are always moral boosters in the teams. Hence it is important to have such guys, at least one in each team to keep overall tempo at high pitch all the time.
Why Date Constrained Projects Go Uncontrolled?
It happens at times when you have a mission critical project with tight timelines from customer that increases its stake manifold, for which you place best of your teams comprising of high skills and experience, and on top of it you provide state of the art tools to tackle all kind of situations; and still the timelines are not met and things go out of control. It is always important to go for a deep analysis for such kind of failures to such an extent that the shortfalls are identified with their core reasons; and are sidelined once for all, for all forthcoming similar kind of projects.
It is well said that disciplined approach and hard work pay well in comparison to merely hard work. Well defined processes and procedures play a major role in this. If these are in place, it makes your tasks easier in managing and guiding your teams. Since there is no differentiation among teams and the standard procedures apply to everyone, irrespective of who and what, the same procedures need to be followed.
Growing these skills is as important for immature teams, as is for matured teams to keep nurturing and excelling in these.
4 Takeaways From PMP For Project Management
PMP is a good source in two aspects. One, it gives you a great insight on how to manage your projects in a more efficient and risk free manner. Second, if you appear for its exam and qualify, you get a universally accepted accreditation that is highly appreciated worldwide. PMP (Project Management Professional ®) offered globally by PMI is a boundary free certification. During your learning towards PMP you learn a lot about project management something that you have never learnt before or come across during any other kind of learning towards project management.
Four takeaways that you can be assured of during your learning of PMP can be listed as below:
1. It provides you a well-organized and highly structured method of managing your projects and related activities. The inbuilt flexibility enables you to design your project management methodologies as per your company's requirements.
2. You get empowered and leveraged to take full control of your project(s) and mitigate risks anticipated in advance (or those come in the way in an unannounced manner). Your learning gets enhanced to enable you to plan, execute, monitor, control and steer your projects in a professionally organized manner without getting drifted away from best practices being followed across the globe, similar to your industry.
3. You get an enormous amount of knowledge on understanding gravity of documentation required for your kind of projects running in your organization. It helps you in planning and controlling scope, teams, financials, schedules/ timelines, quality, risks and closures in a way so as to assist you in achieving higher level of success in any kind of projects undertaken.
4. You get well equipped with the tools and techniques to monitor the timelines of your project in a proactive manner with an advanced way of getting you informed about any contingencies prone to occur during project lifecycle.
Capturing Customer Requirement Is Mandatory To Get Signed Off
Capturing business requirement is a cumbersome process in many aspects. For some it might become difficult to capture concrete requirements if business is not process oriented and documentation centric. In such conditions there would be as many statements misaligned with each other as many mouths. Each member engaged even in a similar or same process might talk differently regarding the same process which could lead to a big confusion. In such conditions everybody would be eager to speak but nobody to vet the stated requirement.
In certain other conditions, systems in place could be too cumbersome that your timelines for closure of requirements capturing would definitely get shattered. Here, in this case, you would be running after the process owner, who would be rich in process knowledge and practical experience, but he would not be able to give you substantial time to help you in capturing requirements in multiple runs.
Requirement capturing goes useless if there are some ambiguities or misalignment that stops it for sign off. It is important to opinion from everyone who is part of a process in the organization and then a proper alignment needs to be done, if required, by involving top management into it.
4 Types Of Discussions To Conduct While Capturing Customer Requirements
Customer requirements never get finalized in one go. It takes multiple meetings and discussions to understand, draft and finalize so that it gets signed off and final nod to move ahead. The discussions that are held in this regard are primarily of four types. As listed below, these four types generally go in the same order but there are instances when in between one type get intermingled with another type. It also happens that during same discussion more than one type of discussion takes place.
One needs to be smart enough to differentiate between the type of discussion and thereby understanding the gravity of matter and level of documentation required to be performed. First type of discussion is General Discussion. Normally all initial discussion would be of this nature. This could also be treated as ice breaking as two different teams from different agencies are sitting across for a serious matter for the first time. This type of discussion would not be very crisp and conclusive.
Second kind of discussion is Scenario based discussion. The team expert in processes and procedures would showcase all possible scenarios so as to provide the other team an insight of the business requirements. Here – documentation needs to be very detailed and accurate so as to capture and understand business scenarios.
Third type of discussion would be Data Details. For a better understanding of scenarios discussed in other meetings, it is further explained with the help of actual business data or sample data simulated so as to build respective scenario.
Fourth kind of discussion would be Process Details where the business process is explained in detail. Important point is to study business process, data details and scenarios so as to find out and get resolved, if any ambiguity or misalignment occurs among the three.
Test Cases Base – Customer Requirement or Development Requirements?
I recently met with a test team with an excellent performance record. For all the applications where it had given a green have a track record of zero major bug encounter post its launch and 100% customer satisfaction with timely sign off. Definitely the credit goes to this test lead and his team. It was a point of curiosity at my end to know what was their process and methodology to give such a tremendous performance.
Their logic was very clear and crisp. The team lead had made a rule that during all customer requirements capturing by business analysis team – one QC member will be part of the team. Customer requirement finalization doc once signed by customer would be shared with testing team. The testing team, on getting customer requirements documents, would immediately start building test cases where on the other hand, requirements have reached to development team for preparing development plan, testing plan and release date.
While the development team is busy with meeting with their timelines, test team members had a clear cut charter of brainstorming and finalization of test cases built on the basis of customer requirements purely.
Project Plan and Project Plan Monitoring Are Two Different Entities
Project Plan is a onetime activity as and when a new project comes up. Project Manager or Project Lead prepares a project plan for the complete project while earmarking milestones to be achieved thereby measuring project movement towards its closure. Well said and done, if an organization or project team lives on this project plan till the completion of project without measuring the actual achievements scored at a shorter and prescribed frequency, it could lead to a disaster.
That is where project plan monitoring comes into picture where during regular project review meetings the initial plan is measured against the actual tasks completed at their stipulated time. It is a well-known fact that a delay in meeting one deadline for release of a milestone or completion of a task has recursive negative impact on project overall. That is why a regular review is very important and a dashboard where plan versus actual timelines against each task is shared with all relevant stakeholders.
Teams engaged in more visibility feel more satisfied and get an automatic momentum and thrust to meet their timelines.
Changing Paradigms Of Project Management
Project Management, over a period of time, has become more optimized by means of evolving mechanisms. On the other hand Project Leaders and Managers are being asked to accept more challenges in terms of faster deliverables with higher amount of accuracy, managing frequent changes in customer requirement, while focusing on cost reduction. Cost reduction can happen by way of upgrading team members' knowledge, using minimally required resources and managing attrition.
Attrition eats away a big cost. If talented and well groomed team members leave organization in between a running project, it takes a lot from various angles to manage the show in order to meet customer's quality and timely delivery requirements. Innovative ideas like BYOD, centralized printing/ scanning resources, grooming team members for multiple tasks/ areas etc. are being implemented to optimize resource planning and management. For upgrading domain based knowledge of various team members regular training are must. Training without evaluation and monitoring can become a useless activity.
If with the increasing tenure of team members in the organization, a focused approach is maintained to prepare them to manage other domains where they have no expertise but which are critical for organization, it becomes quite helpful for the project manager in managing them by reallocating in case of a crisis. Times are gone when for critical areas dependency stays on a single person in the organization. That is the demand of time and also a requirement of certain standards where you are required to make organization more system dependent than person dependent.
Cloud Computing And Project Management
As and when pressure related to revenue streams builds up on any business, it automatically drills down to project teams. The project manager comes under scrutiny in terms of managing the same along with supporting aggressive business growth by driving deliverables faster for running projects without failing to address customer's changing environment and requirements. Newer technologies like cloud computing, these calls can be taken up to mitigate the risks arisen by creating and delivering value addition by making technological boundaries limitless, speeding up deliverables and creating a new domain pool within the organization skilled to manage it.
Personal, private and heterogeneous cloud platforms can help in tackling these situations by making the deliverables to be used by end user/ customer as-a-service thereby helping customer in spending less and enabling themselves with delivering faster and lowering timelines by means of reusability and optimization. Fear of cloud is vanishing provided adequate security measures are embedded in the system so that the customer feels confident including large, medium and small organizations. There are a number of information systems experts in the market to understand an organizations business requirements and providing them appropriate knowledge of positive and negative impacts of cloud computing.
Organizations who have taken a lead in adopting cloud computing for their internal environment or external customers can be taken up as example and benchmark. Case studies can help in such cases to build confidence for the organizations who intend to take new initiatives in this regard.
6 Golden Tips For Project Managers To Tackle Changing Business And Technology Scenarios
1. Connect with thought leaders in global and local arena to learn about latest business technology trends. It is also important to understand the innovations taking place in latest technologies like cloud computing, mobility and analytics.
2. Collaborate, participate and get involved in latest discussions, forums, and expert columns to get the insights in successes and failures of these technologies related to mobile, cloud and analytics.
3. Without such engagements, a business or project manager can't initiate a blueprint for his organization or customer regarding transformation proposed in terms of adaption of newer technologies and the optimization and benefits offered in return.
4. There is always a gap between current and future needs for any organization of any size. A time to time introspection is must to understand whether enhancement in legacy applications will suffice to cater to newly arisen business needs or there is a need of altogether new systems to manage and sustain business growth.
5. By getting insights about futuristic applications and technologies, business growth strategies can be well managed by creating competitive advantages and providing higher thrust to business.
6. Always strive for solutions that carry built in best practices relevant to the business – whether it is in house driven project or an outsourced one.
Some Learning For Business And Project Managers
It is very essential for Business and Project Managers to anticipate the pulsation and hence determine how newer technologies are emerging and marking their impact on businesses across the globe. Newer solutions could help them in tackling legacy driven systems' issues and streamlining the business in a better way. There are case studies and global consultants available in this regard to teach on how business expansions can be well managed by imparting technology knowledge so as to enrich business processes.
Understanding of latest technologies, learning to explore them so as to understand where all and to what extent they fit into the business scenario and how much enhancement is provided, is an important initiation in this regard. Initiating adoption of newer technologies without any fundamental research can lead to a fluke resulting into a huge waste of money, time and resources. Fast changing business dynamics thereby creating critical situations where legacy systems come to a standstill can hit and ruin a business very badly. Timely interventions to get familiar, therefore, with latest technologies become quite crucial for the organizations.
Currently running legacy systems do not guarantee to sustain any business' future needs. And that is why collaboration, decision, adaption and operation need to be introspected from time to time. If this is not done in a regular manner, a business will never get an opportunity to explore latest technologies, innovations and solutions.
Five Security Measures Required In Adopting Cloud Technology
1. Study the Industry: If it is decided that the organization for adaption of cloud technology, it becomes important to learn most commonly practiced data security controls in local and global environment.
2. Understanding of best practices in a newer technology is as important as knowing about the area where you are planning to buy a house. Be assured that you have enough knowledge about your business requirements and the best practices available in the arena for an effective data security strategy.
3. While learning about the global standards and practices, ensure that you have ample number of case studies, specially related to your industry to understand the key challenges that were faced by them while they were implementing data security strategy.
4. Selecting a vendor is a tough call in such cases. You need to select the best of the available vendors providing such services in terms of established one having minimal failure rate and higher rate of success in deployment/ serving. Also check the leaders in this field.
5. All said and done, having techies within the organization who understand the technology architecture and solutions for data security is again a must. External agencies can support and deploy to whatever extent, having someone at home who understands the crux is essential.
How Cloud, Mobile And Social Technologies Adoption Impacts Business
Every technology adoption in a business is seen to be on the positive side of its ROI. ROI includes tangible and non-tangible gains, both. There are various factors kept in mind by any business planning to adopt any, two of them, or all the three technologies to enhance their business. Few core factors can be taken into account are being discussed below.
Lower Capital and Operational Cost might not hold good in all adoptions as initial adoption of any new technology required both but it can be well balanced with the projected returns.
Innovation: These technologies require lot of innovation and ideas to establish. New paths need to be invented to acquire more customers, create customer delight and build larger volume of prospects.
Simplification of Processes: Core business processes take a steep change with adoption of these technologies.
Role of HR: HR has to play a major role in mobile and social technologies adoption. They become the strategic partners in a big way for these two technologies adoption in the organization.
Transformation: It demands a major change in functioning and processes of the business.
Evaluation and Assessment: A continuous evaluation and assessment process has to be in place while and post adoption of these technologies. There has to be a process to get feedback from customer and other stakeholders to ascertain the value gained.
Recruitment: Acquiring altogether different employees expert in these technologies to give it a thrust in adoption and fetching results out of it.
Security: Last but not the least, the most important factor – Security, needs to be handled and managed in an entirely different fashion in these scenarios.
Three Technologies That Revolutionized Businesses In Current Decade
Technology advancement is a continuous process. The three major technologies that have revolutionized the current decade are Social, Mobile and Cloud technologies which have impacted businesses in a very big way. There is no business these days which is untouched by the heat of these three technologies. Some businesses especially the large ones and those which are conscious about their outreach to last mile of consumers/ users have already taken the lead and taken initiatives to deploy it and delve into it in a larger manner.
Getting into any technology requires a structured planning and methodology. Without a proper planning or going into it without an organized manner can rather lead any business into a negative mode. There need to be appropriate policies and procedures in place along with a large amount of brainstorming to move ahead in adopting any or all of these technologies. All three technologies play a major role not only within the organization but in the outside world also among all stakeholders – be it prospective customers/ employees /.partners, or existing ones. For example regarding the security of information has to be taken care in a broader way to cater to multiple platforms, multiple devices and other needs.
These technologies are definitely making a big positive impact on the business provided these are handled with care. The investment in these technologies has also to be worked out in a sensible manner by taking care of various options available in the market otherwise a big investment might result into no end results.
Demand Of Quality Professionals Is On High And Will Remain So
Quality is a lot more that identifying and controlling defects. With increasing dependencies on business applications be it on server, mobile or web; is demanding more and more professionals who are capable of this paradigm shift and are intelligent enough to accept the challenge. One of the major areas to be focused in Quality is about understanding of existing processes and efforts towards their enhancements and optimizations.
Business software application is a basic requirement of any business these days. Businesses are emphasizing more on automation, consolidation and integration. Innovation and improvement is always welcomed in this field. With the exponential increase in software industry in the global arena, emphasis on quality needs, its optimization and adherence to processes is becoming more and more important.
The software industry is growing steadily with clear cut demarcation of boundaries. The applications are being built keeping in mind to cater to global market rather than the local area. Because of this fast growth in software industry, there is an increasing demand of quality professionals which will keep increasing in coming years.
Business Needs More Serious Quality Professionals Than Developers
There is a huge shift in mindset regarding scope of quality in software industry. Given the fact that dependency of business is increasing on applications, the adverse impact of any flaw bypassed during quality might impact business heavily. A small transaction leading to a wrong calculation due to a bug could cost a high amount to the business. Quality therefore has a higher amount of significance in today's scenario.
Development process is supposed to ensure complete adherence to customer requirements and business alignment thereby making it useful for customer else there remains a never ending fight between the customer and delivery organizations regarding the gaps left un-addressed. Even if there is some gaps remain in the final deliverable and those 'asked for'; it should be closed at the earliest with mutual consent. This can happen only when the development team gives some valid reasons for not filling those gaps due to what so ever constraints and customer agrees to it. Hence due to this higher stake of correctness of coding adhering to customer requirements, it becomes very important for quality to pitch in and ensure a zero defect product.
There has to be a good balance between coding and testing throughout the development cycle. For this, a tester's knowledge about requirements and product in questions is as critical as it is for development team.
Three Focus Areas To Deliver A Healthy And Delighting Product
Software industry depends highly on quality of product. Bug encountered during and post production but before launch always cost in terms of time and money. Fixing a bug might take a small chunk of time but retesting again is a time consuming job which is required to ensure the impact of bug fixed should not degrade or put a negative impact elsewhere in functionality or business process. Quality again has to play a major role but the onus lies on development team also to ensure a bug free 'bug fixing'.
Three important acts to perform during product development in a continuous manner can be listed as below:
1. Reviewing Process: Regular reviews, on one hand are quite important; and on the other hand, it is also important to keep reviewing the processes defined for development and testing of a product. The team, process and timelines need to be aligned tightly so as to ensure no leakages during development or after the release of product.
2. Customer Requirements: It is not a one-time exercise to capture customer requirements and then start development in closed doors. This will always lead to failures and disasters in the short and long term, both. It is very important to keep customer engaged during every iteration, internal releases, and milestones completions.
3. Best Practices: How so ever best your practices may be as per your claims, but there is always a scope of improvement, without any doubt.


text:
St. Cloud Blue Sox Headed To Aurora, Colorado
The St. Cloud Blue Sox 11AAA team is headed to Aurora, Colorado next week to play in a USSSA Global World Series. This has been in the works for the past 2 months but after the tragedy that happened early Friday morning at a movie theater in Aurora my feelings have changed.
Wild Road Tour In St. Cloud Today
The Minnesota Wild Road Tour will be stopping in St. Cloud today from 11am-1pm at the MAC. Current Wild players Nate Prosser and Jason Zucker and the radio broadcast team of Bob Kurtz and Tom Reid will be on hand for the event
Vikings Have An Agreement With U of M
The Vikings have a struck a tentative agreement with the University of Minnesota on how much the Vikings would pay for use of TCF Bank Stadium while the Vikings Stadium is built near the Metrodome.
St. Cloud NWL Team Has Chosen Name
The St. Cloud Northwoods League team formerly known as the River Bats has chosen a new name, logo and mascot.
Crowd Comes To Twins Winter Caravan [GALLERY]
The Twins Winter Caravan stopped in St. Cloud Wednesday night at Rivers Edge Convention Center. Current Twins players Denard Span, Ben Revere and Rene Tosoni were here along with former Twin Tony Oliva, broadcaster Dick Bremer and mascot T...
Ponder Passes Concussion Test; Will Start
Viking quarterback Christian Ponder passed his concussion tests Wednesday and practiced in full and is expected to start at quarterback for the Vikings Sunday against Chicago
Peterson Tears ACL, MCL In Left Knee
Viking running back Adrian Peterson suffered a torn ACL and MCL in his left knee in the 3rd quarter when he took a hit directly to his knee...
Revere, Span Coming To St. Cloud For Caravan
The Twins announced their plans for the Twins Winter Caravan in January. The Caravan will stop in St. Cloud on Wednesday January 25 at the Rivers Edge Convention Center (St
Ponder, Peterson Both Practice Friday
Viking quarterback Christian Ponder and running back Adrian Peterson both practice on a limited basis Friday and both are listed as questionable for Sunday's game at Detroit. Po
SCSU's Underwood Is Coach Of The Year Finalist
St. Cloud State football coach Scott Underwood is one of 5 finalists for the Division II 2011 Liberty Mutual Coach of the Year Award. Underwood led the Huskies to their 2nd straight NCAA Division II tournament appearance this season and finished with a 9-3 record
Broncos Edge Vikings 35-32
The Denver Broncos beat the Vikings 35-32 Sunday afternoon at Mall of America Field. Christian Ponder threw 2 interceptions with his 2nd allowing the Broncos to setup the game-winning field goal as time expired
Viking's Peterson Listed As Doubtful
Viking running back Adrian Peterson is listed as doubtful by the Vikings this week with a high ankle sprain and isn't expected to play at Atlanta this Sunday...

subset: commoncrawl


text:
man pursues stand-up comedy encouraged by his fellow garbage man. Though his friend, who accompanies him on accordion, continues to tell him how great he is, he actually stinks. When the "comedian" grows a third arm out of his back, the friend uses this twist to get him signed up with a sleazy talent agent, and it begins to look like his career is on the move, even though his girlfriend has left him.Resumen IMDb.com
|Nombre del documento
|The Dark Backward - Sub.srt


text: I was wondering if a change of date for Stars Of X would benefit anyone. I know Saturday nights are usually occupied ahead by plans of going out and such, I also see comments that posting Saturday night that people read Sunday. Would people prefer a different date? and also time? what do u prefer? When replying please vote on what day and time u would like it to be posted. I would prefer to avoid Mondays nights as people are on here waiting for RAW (unless people would read Stars Of X waiting for RAW), Wednesday is reserved for Warzone. Here is a form for you guys, highlight, bold, color the choice you prefer Day i prefer it to be posted: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday Time Of Day I'd prefer: Morning, Afternoon, Evening How I'd prefer it to be posted: All together, Segment by Segment Pay Per View Date: Sunday, Different Day (please post which day) Improvements for Stars Of X: Respond to members comments (commentary would quote members posts about Stars Of X or any Stars Of X star. Superstars could also address them) Competition for leak results (winner of contest gets a show PM'd to them before it is posted) Member storyline contribution (members could pm storyline ideas. Of course these should be from the more avid readers who are up-to-date and read weekly) Any other suggestions: Post here any suggestion you have for Stars Of X


text:
The problem with great evil is that it always rests on human frailty.
Review: God created all things according to His own moral character. Reality itself is consistent with God's personality. Second, He created a universe that rests somewhere within Creation as a relatively small part. It also responds to His moral character. Then He created us humans as the agents of management with a built-in awareness of His character, same as the rest of Creation.
Somewhere in our response after everything was established, we chose to rely on our human intellect and talents. Granted, we were given these things to help us obey, but the ultimate question of what is and is not morally right is beyond the intellect. Only the heart-mind can handle this question, and whatever it was we get from the narrative of the Fall, we must understand that mankind made a choice to assert intellect over the heart. Sadly, that means the heart becomes silent and mind is left to face the task of living and making sense of our fallen existence, and it cannot possibly discern the true nature of things. So relying on human reason is, by definition, a rejection of God's character.
You can read the rest of this message by clicking this link to Kiln of the Soul blog.


text:
Couple hits the streets to help homeless
KERRY O'BRIEN: A recent landmark report from the Bureau of Statistics reveals there are more than 105,000 homeless people in Australia.
Two remarkable people trying their best to alleviate the crisis are Jeff and Alina Gambin.
They work tirelessly, seven days a week, feeding the homeless and helping them back onto their feet.
For this, they're not paid a single cent.
Nor do they receive any government assistance.
Their sole motivation -- a simple desire to help the less fortunate.
Jacinta Tynan reports.
JEFF GAMBIN: We're going to have five acres of market garden, five acres of an orchard, and I want to turn this into YOUR boutique vineyard.
You're going to have five acres of vineyard.
JACINTA TYNAN: Jeff Gambin is promising these men their own utopia.
It may sound far-fetched, but it's a gamble the men are willing to take, a far cry from their own lives sleeping on the streets of Sydney.
KEVIN HAYES: I was just a wreck after the break-up of the marriage.
I was -- I lost a brother through cancer and just one thing led to another.
JACINTA TYNAN: Kevin Hayes, a former storeman and volunteer firefighter, has been homeless for three months.
For him and hundreds of other people, Jeff and his wife, Alina, are a lifeline.
KEVIN HAYES: Well, there are other organisations that do supply the food, but they don't have the personal contact like you do get with Jeff and Alina.
JACINTA TYNAN: Jeff used to be a chef and restaurateur.
Now he and Alina have made full-time work out of feeding the homeless, cooking for 250 people every night in their own small kitchen.
JEFF GAMBIN: And the most important thing is we never, ever give them anything that we wouldn't eat ourselves because what they eat is exactly what we eat.
JACINTA TYNAN: While the chicken simmers, the couple do the rounds of local patisseries and take-away shops, stocking up on leftovers.
Apart from these offerings, everything they provide comes from their own pockets.
They've even mortgaged their apartment.
How much time do you dedicate to this?
JEFF GAMBIN: Oh, all the possible time, other than sleeping, I would say.
ALINA GAMBIN: Our day starts at around 10:00 and it probably wouldn't be earlier than about 3:00 when our heads finally hit the pillows.
JACINTA TYNAN: Jeff hasn't missed a day in seven years, serving anyone who turns up from the back of his car.
ALINA GAMBIN: Some of them have already told us, "Do you realise that this is the only meal we're getting?"
I guess there's always the scavenging and there's always some way of doing it, but let's face it, that's a question of dignity there as well and we'd rather not see them do that.
HOMELESS MAN: Do you want me to tell you something?
You're a good bloke, man.
JEFF GAMBIN: Thank you.
HOMELESS MAN: Not many people would do that today.
JEFF GAMBIN: Hang on, hang on -- it takes two to tango.
JACINTA TYNAN: It was when Jeff was down on his luck himself that he made the commitment to help those less fortunate.
A homeless man offered him his only blanket and Jeff vowed to return the favour.
He started out feeding just seven people and soon word spread of his generosity.
Alina went to help after she heard about his work on the radio and they've been a couple ever since.
Why do you do this?
What do you get out of it?
JEFF GAMBIN: Oh, a great deal.
ALINA GAMBIN: We get a lot of satisfaction, I know that.
JEFF GAMBIN: Either that or we must be mad.
ALINA GAMBIN: Must be mad.
JEFF GAMBIN: As most people say.
There are no strings attached.
We want to be their friend.
I am everyone's friend.
I've also been told I'm dad, I'm grandad, I'm uncle.
Alina's mum and aunty.
And we have to be that.
I mean, that's our family.
We laugh with them, we cry with them.
We enjoy with them.
It's a great family, I feel.
CRAIG RICHARDSON: I like to think of Jeff as my father, not as a friend.
I like to think of him as a father, someone who has brought me --
..not actually brought me into this world, but brought me BACK into this world, like, given me a second chance.
GARY BENTER: Jeff turns up here on his own bat.
He turns up here with his wife every single night.
There's not a night they have off and they turn up on time.
Everybody knows that he's going to be here.
And the food, I can say, would be equivalent to the Hilton.
JACINTA TYNAN: But it's not just food on the menu.
Jeff and Alina also aim to break the cycle of homelessness, getting people back on their feet, often finding them work and somewhere to live.
And now they're able to offer the greatest incentive -- a 10-hectare block of land on the outskirts of Sydney, donated by the Sisters of Mercy.
Most of these men haven't worked in years, but now they have the opportunity to establish a market garden and, for the first time in their lives, have a stake in a business.
Gary Benter is one who's anxious to make the most of it after living on the streets for two years.
GARY BENTER: It's great now that we've actually started and we're on the land.
We've seen it's more than just a dream -- it's a reality.
DON SMITH: One thing I like about Jeff and Alina, one thing that I've noticed, is instant action.
He doesn't sit back and wait for things to happen, or whatever.
When he says something's going to happen, it happens very fast.
JACINTA TYNAN: Don Smith is also ready to rebuild his life, starting with the farm -- as far away as he can get from the city streets.
JEFF GAMBIN: This is going to be a wonderful, wonderful place.
And in 10 years time, in 20 years time, if more projects like this continue, we will not have those masses of people on the streets, and that's my ultimate dream, is to walk through Martin Place one night and not have to feed anybody.
That is the absolute dream.
Transcripts on this website are created by an independent transcription service. The ABC does not warrant the accuracy of the transcripts.
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Reviewed By: DL on 8/2/17
I've used some type of mirror for over 40 years. This is by far the best one I've ever used.
Efficient Velo Tools' Safe Zone mirror is over 2 inches in diameter with a 4.5-inch arm. This results in an excellent rear view and hardly any of the neck craning. Equally impressive is how easy the Safe Zone attaches: simply zip tie the mounting bracket to a helmet rib and you're good to go. The mirror's cool ball-and-socket arm design lets you easily position the mirror for the best view. Shorten it by snapping it apart and together; remove the mirror from your helmet the same way.
100% Made in USA, all parts sourced within 30 miles of design and assembly facility
Easily installed (and reinstalled on other helmets) with a simple, versatile zip tie mounting system
Unusually robust construction (a hallmark of all things EVT)
Adjustable, stable, stay-put huge 2.25" mirror
Sleek, injection-molded components
Incredible 5 year "no-fault" warranty
Reviewed By: DL on 8/2/17
I've used some type of mirror for over 40 years. This is by far the best one I've ever used.
Reviewed By: Dan Pengra on 7/12/17
I love this thing. It took a few times wearing it to get used to it but now I can't imagine being without one. It gives me a good, clear view of the road behind me and has really helped keep me safe, especially when negotiating traffic for a left hand turn. The only downsides are the time it takes to get used to it (about 3-4 rides) and it's expensive relative to other mirrors.
Reviewed By: Paul Yoder on 2/20/17
Great mirror! It works very well and gives more view of everything I need to see behind me
Reviewed By: Dave Burgason on 9/14/16
Love this mirror easy to adjust, tough, great field of view. It's nice when your purchase turns out to be this good of a product
Reviewed By: Bob Nolan on 8/22/16
What is good about this mirror? Large mirror, stays where you position it, no vibration. The downside? It is a bit heavy, so my helmet wants to tip forward if I don't keep it tight.


text:
Popular movies week 14 November 1965
Here's the list of the most popular movies in the week 14/November - 20/November - 1965. Do you remember Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard or The Sons of Katie Elder starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Martha Hyer ?
What else happened in that week of 1965?
Discover what the world looked like on:


text:
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Sunrise Medical Quickie Spirit 470
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Pride Mobility Quantum Q6 Edge
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Invacare Action MVP
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text:
Versatile All Blacks prop Ben Franks is tipped to join British club London Irish after this year's World Cup.
Reports in the British media have linked the 30-year-old to a shift north as part of what is expected to be an exodus of ageing All Blacks stars after their attempt to defend the World Cup in England in September and October.
Props are in demand in England. Former All Black John Afoa is on a $1m-a-season deal with Gloucester, and Franks' ability to play on both sides of the scrum increases his value.
Franks has played 41 Tests for the All Blacks since 2008, although 35 of those have been off the bench, another sign of the Hurricanes front-rower's value in covering the demanding tighthead and loosehead positions.
The All Blacks management have encouraged their ageing players to make early decisions on contract deals to avoid distractions closer to the World Cup and during the tournament.
London Irish's props stocks are headed by Irish representative Tom Court.
The club has strong Kiwi connections in former Blues five-eighth Chris Noakes and Scotland's rising New Zealand flanker, Blair Cowan.
The news of Franks being courted by the club comes as London Irish seem resigned to losing their Australian coach, Brian Smith, who is keen to return home to pursue opportunities in Super Rugby.
London Irish guaranteed their English Premiership safety with a last-gasp win over Exeter last weekend.
Smith had envisaged leaving at season's end but there is speculation his exit may be fast-tracked by London Irish management.


text:
After Webrip by scene group MLS few days ago, here's CDrip V0. AS usual Plan9 release includes proof, enjoy !
Twin Shadow - Confess [2012] [Album]
MP3 V0 (VBR) / Scene
Twin Shadow is the stage name of American musician George Lewis Jr. Lewis was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Florida, before eventually relocating to Brooklyn and adopting the Twin Shadow moniker. In 2010 he released his debut album Forget, produced by Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear. The album has been described as "steeped in 1980s new wave", "building from streaks of haunting synth textures" and "hazily new wave-tinged pop". Twin Shadow was the Rolling Stone 'Band of the Week' on October 7, 2010.
01. Golden Light (4.37)
02. You Call Me On (3.31)
03. Five Seconds (4.20)
04. Run My Heart 84.38)
05. The One (3.18)
06. Beg for the Night (3.42)
07. Patient (3.25)
08. When The Movie's Over (3.58)
09. I Don't Care (2.47)
10. Be Mine Tonight (8.49)
Download File
Download from Extabit Putlocker Uploaded.to Netload turbobit


text:
"Right leg amputation Pine Cottage Colman Hospita l Norwich"
About: Colman Hospital Colman Hospital NR2 2PJ
Posted by Newman (as ),
Thank you for the care and help shown to me during my recent stay at Pine Cottage, Colman Hospital in Norwich. Loss of a limb is a life changing experience, a big hurdle to overcome at any age both physically and psychologically and I can think of no better place to start this new journey.
For many older patients who may have been reduced abruptly to total dependence on others this can be a frightening experience needing special nursing and rehabilitation skills. My time at Pine Cottage, in a positive and caring environment and ongoing support through the re enablement programme has been an education in how a dedicated team can combine to help individuals literally 'get back on their feet. '
Thank you again. I feel very fortunate to have met the right people at an important time in my life,
Response from Christine Little, Patient Experience Lead, Norfolk Community Health and Care NHS Trust 12 months ago
Thanks so much for your lovely comment about Pine Cottage. I know the team will be thrilled to have your feedback and to know what you experienced is exactly what they strive to do to help people re-enable and adjust following limb loss and the hurdles this brings to overcome.
I will make sure I send on your comment to the team and share within Norfolk Community Health and Care NHS Trust
Best wishes
Christine Little
Patient Experience Lead
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The construction of the Istanbul Disaster Prevention and Education Center in the Bakırköy district offers the possibility of redefining the territory in this area of the city. It is the perspective of GVNM Arquitetos that they should not extend the logic of the surroundings, with high independent buildings that do not establish relations between each other and do not create an urban fabric. Therefore, with the intent of consolidating the existing fabric and to depart from the image of the nearby constructions, their aim is to create a space and a building truly unique and singular, closer to a natural construction than of an urban structure. More images and architects' description after the break.
Gvnm Arquitetos
Disaster Prevention and Education Center / GVNM Arquitetos
07:00 - 2 December, 2011
http://www.archdaily.com/188650/disaster-prevention-and-education-center-gvnm-arquitetos Alison Furuto


text: So I've found that my lack of affection is an issue and guys have lost interest because of it. I'll give hugs but I'm not spontaneous with kisses or touchy feely, it isn't in my nature. Although I'd love to be an affectionate person with my partner at least, how do I go about this? I'm quite a shy person and even when meeting people in general it takes me a while to warm to them.


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Born in Bilbao (Spain) in 1976, Ainara LeGardon was vocalist and guitarist of the Spanish rock band Onion from 1994 till 2003.
Ainara LeGardon's solo debut was "In the mirror", considered one of 2003's best albums in Spain by the media. This album featured Chris Eckman (The Walkabouts) on the production along with other guest musicians as Joe Skyward (Posies, Sunny Day Real Estate, The Walkabouts) on bass. It was released in Spain by Winslow Lab (Ainara's own label) and distributed by Dock. Read more on Last.fm
Tracks: 9
Tracks: 9


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LYNX Express
|Courier service
|Nuneaton, United Kingdom
Key people
|David Burtenshaw (Chief Executive)
Number of employees
LYNX Express was a courier (parcel delivery) company operating principally in the United Kingdom. It was acquired in September 2005 by UPS.
The company's history dates back to the nationalisation of the British Railways after World War II. Each of the pre nationalisation companies had formed a local delivery network, based on lorries and vans, to extend the railway to the customer's door, thus enabling parcels and light freight to be delivered in the control of the railway company.
In 1955, these services were amalgamated to form a division of British Road Services, known in its shortened version of BRS Parcels.[1]
National Carriers was the name given to the amalgamated companies that concentrated on rail transport, while BRS Parcels became Roadline
The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher privatised these services in 1982, making shares in the newly formed National Freight Corporation available to employees at a price which proved to undervalue the company when they were floated on the stock market.
National Carriers and Roadline were merged and operated briefly under the name National Carriers Roadline, before settling on the name LYNX Express Delivery Network. This remained the company's full title, although it was popularly shortened.
Following a reorganisation, rationalisation of core business interests and rebranding exercise, National Freight Corporation, by this time shortened to NFC plc, merged with Ocean Group plc and became known as Exel plc and Lynx Express was seen as outside its main area of concentration.
It was the subject of a management buyout from Exel plc in June 1997.[1] The newly independent company was subsequently renamed LYNX Express.[1] LYNX Express became majority-owned by Bridgepoint Capital.[1] In January 1999, the company acquired British Rail's remaining local delivery asset, Red Star Parcels.[2]
In September 2005, LYNX Express was acquired by Atlanta, Georgia based UPS for £55.5 million (US$97.1 million). At the time, LYNX Express was one of the largest independent parcel carriers in the United Kingdom, with sales of $295 million (£170 million) for the financial year ended 2 October 2004.[3] The company was subsequently integrated into UPS, and the LYNX brand disappeared.
- ^ a b c d Gordon Mustoe, BRS Parcels Services and The Express Carriers
- ^ Lynx Express acquires Red Star
- ^ UPS to acquire LYNX Express Atlanta Business Chronicle, 25 July 2005


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ATLANTA — Republican U.S. House candidate John Stone filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Friday about the campaign finances of rival Eugene Yu, whose spokesman denies any wrongdoing.
Stone relied on a story from Morris News Service that reported on questions about the source of more than $700,000 in loans Yu has made to his campaign. The questions arose because his personal financial disclosure did not include that much income, cash or liquid assets.
"If Mr. Yu can provide a satisfactory explanation of where these funds originated, we will withdraw the complaint," said Megan Seda, Stone's campaign manager.
Yu's campaign spokesman, Brandon Phillips, said any political newcomer can struggle with complex federal paperwork.
"Any errors the campaign committed in filing reports early on in the campaign were self-reported and corrected with the FEC," Phillips said. "However, it doesn't help when a novice candidate is not being served well by consultants trying to make a quick buck as opposed to making sure all the nuances of federal campaign-finance law are followed."
One of Yu's original consultants and his campaign administrator are heading to jail for lying to police in relation to a separate campaign in Cherokee County.
"Those people are no longer with the campaign," Phillips said. "Any forms currently with the FEC are accurate and comply with the law."
Stone asks the commission to act urgently out of concern that Yu might use illegal funds to bankroll a last-minute ad blitz. "The magnitude of these violations are such that could alter the results of the May 20 Republican primary elections if allowed to stand," Stone wrote.
Stone also pointed to reports about a donation by a corporation owned by Yu's campaign chairman, Wayne Brown of Augusta. Federal candidates cannot accept corporate donations, and the campaign took months to issue a refund.