Xebia Blog

Last week Viktor Grgic explained Unclear ownership / Project based funding. This week we’ll continue with #1 - Ignoring culture when introducing SOA.

SOA is an approach. The culture aspect of introducing a SOA is important, but it seems that companies want to invest in tools and not in people. In order of making this SOA to work they force their employees into this new way of thinking/acting. Often this leads to resistance which undermines the SOA goals. In this part we will look into ignoring culture when introducing SOA.
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Filed under: Architecture, General, SOA
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Great Indian Developers Summit was held from may 21-23 at Banglore, India Around 3,000 developers attended it. This is supposed to be the biggest developer's summit so far in India.
http://www.developersummit.com/
Climate was very good in Banglore despite the summers in India. Many reputed speakers around the world were there to give their presentations. It was like a kick-off before a champions league final , huge number of attendees, huge auditoriums, all set for a great summit for first time in India.
Sponsers included some big brands like Oracle, Msdn, Nokia, Adobe, Amazon, Yahoo, Infosys etc. The facilities were excellent and very well arranged and organised. Abhishek, Ganesh, Saket, Sunil and Vivek represented Xebia at the summit. Here goes the summary of the 3 days that we have been there.
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Filed under: General
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Summary

Systems integration within limited timeframes is not mainly a technical art. It is a matter of social and organizational skills. Work on the touchy feely side, and tech will follow. “If you don’t manage the above factors well, you will be in for it anyway, no matter how cool, flexible, state of the art and gorgeous your technology.”

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Filed under: General, Project Management
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Bart Guijt and Robert van Loghem brainstorm about Enterprise Micro Blogging. (aka Twitter for the Enterprise)

What lead to the idea and what are they planning? Well, they plan to create a product called Roopr -> http://www.roopr.com

So head on over to the show page or subscribe to our podcast!

Filed under: General, Podcast
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In my every day work I encounter numerous management styles, ranging from HR-managers doing operational management and vice versa, to managers thinking that “divide and conquer” was a phrase written by a manager and is applicable on groups of employees. I am not saying all managers are bad at there job, certainly not, I am saying that management is one of the professional areas that is relatively easy to get in to but extremely hard to perform well. (more...)

Filed under: General, Project Management
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It has been a hectic week at Xebia India. The Agile NCR conference (first Agile conference in Northern India) was in full preparation. The Ansal Institute of Technology (AIT) graciously hosted the conference on the university grounds and Xebia was the main organizer in cooperation with ASCI.

Just a few highlights of a day filled with high quality talks:

A gripping keynote was delivered by Pete Deemer to kick off the day. Basically Pete warned us for the hardships of Agile adoption by discussing his top 19 lessons of Agile adoption at Yahoo! and other companies. While some companies experience a delight when implementing Agile others have a very hard and frustrating time and don’t reap the full benefits. His 19 lessons were geared towards making sure you fall into the positive category.

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Filed under: Agile, General, Scrum
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Well, this blog is not to tell you to resign from your current job , but the intention is to share some points that you should consider before you quit a job.
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Filed under: General
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A couple of weeks back I was at the TiE Summit 2007. There I could hardly find anyone who was not interested in the mobile space. Mobile phone space definitely is something which cannot be missed given that today the number of mobile phones far out number the number of personal computers. Also, with each passing day they are getting better memory and better computing power. It would soon become a necessity for all major e-commerce sites to offer their services over the mobile phone assuming that they are not already working on it. Apart from this there is a lot of potential for specific mobile phone applications which would help the consumer do better personally and professionally.

Almost coinciding with the mobile space euphoria, Google released Android. It is a a fully integrated mobile "software stack" that consists of an operating system, middleware, user-friendly interface and applications. The important objective is to deliver a vastly improved web experience on mobile devices, equal to what people can experience on a desktop computer, in contrast to the limited functionality on today's mobile phones.

At the TiE Summit I also heard many speakers saying that “portal is dead.” The next technology wave is dependent on the platform. Many applications and services would be built depending on the platform and a business would be successful depending on which platform does it align with. So if you align on the Android platform then assuming that Android is successful, you could be successful as an Android service provider, Android powered device maker etc etc. HTC would be launching Android powered phones in 2008.

Given all of the above I decided to check out the Android offering over the weekend and here are my initial findings
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Filed under: General, Java
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A good team can make or break the success of a project. Where does this success come from? Is it the way of cooperation or is it the mixture of the right personality types in a team? Do you pick the right personalities and make them work together or does it happen naturally?

Different personality types contribute to a successful team. Although behavior can differ from a personality, it forms a base of behavior people feel comfortable with. Knowing your personality type can help you understand what makes you tick. This self-awareness is an important factor in being successful. In general a personality type will define 1) your flow of energy, 2) how you take in information, 3) how you prefer to make decisions, 4) the basic day-to-day lifestyle that you prefer.

Many methods can help discover personality types. Myers-Briggs type indicator, (i)DISC assessment, Enneagram of personality, etc. supply tests in order to figure out what personality type people have. Some of these methods need intensive testing, and are therefore hard to apply without doing the actual test. However some of the elements of a type can be noticed without intensive testing. For instance the way people get their energy. Do they get their energy from within themselves or from external sources? Do they absorb information in principles or in details? Are they comfortable with scheduled/structured or open/casual environments? Knowing these preferences it will be easier to approach and work with other person.
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Filed under: Agile, General
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Most of the times we are content that our code is of the right quality, if somehow, we manage to get the Static Code Analysis (SCA) tools like Checkstyle, PMD etc. report less number of severe violations. As an example if we see that the class is big in size then we conveniently split it into two or more classes to get rid of the violation. The tool is happy and so are we and most of the times that is the end of the story.

However more frequently than not getting an SCA violation is the start of the story. If you start associating the question “Why' with every SCA violation found then the real reasons start unfolding.

This is similar to the way we resolve impediments on an Scrum project. The impediments rarely represent the isolated incidences of inefficiency. Rather, most of the times they are a part of a larger problem. The way to work out an impediment is fix it so that the team can work effectively and then to look at the root cause which caused the impediment so that the main cause can be fixed. This is called “Bottom-up process re-engineering.”

Similarly the way to work out an SCA violation is to remove it so that the code looks clean and good and then to hunt for the real cause.
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Filed under: Articles, General, Java, Quality Assurance
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