General

Wish you all Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

ashvil_d@yahoo.com — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 22:18:42 GMT

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat Of peace on earth,
good-will to men!
~Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

From our family to yours on this Holiday season ...

We wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Warm Regards,
Eva, Orina and Ashvil

DNN Blog via Live Writer

ashvil_d@yahoo.com — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:23:53 GMT

Thanks to the efforts of Don Worthley in creating a module that supports the metaweblog API, folks like me can post using Windows Live Writer to DotNetNuke blogs.

Since I am not a fan of the online web editing capabilities of web browsers, this is great news. They also have a free community edition.

Welcome Eva, Goodbye sleep

ashvil_d@yahoo.com — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:48:49 GMT

Last month Orina and I welcomed Eva to our lives and gave up on sleep :-)

She is our bundle of joy and her smiles make our tiredness disappear.

It's amazing how your lives changes after becoming parents and we are still getting used to it.

Controlled failures – Letting someone fall of the bike

ashvil_d@yahoo.com — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 13:49:00 GMT

Sometimes the best way to convince someone that their way will not work is letting them fail early without any major impacts.

In my first job in the early 90s, Microsoft shipped a version control called Delta with MSDN. It was not really good and did not have any Developer tool integration but it supported basic version control features like Check In and Check Out and it was free with MSDN, so I did not have to go through an approval process to get it.

Delta provided some basic features and I and my team was happy using it compared to the previous option of using nothing.

One of the developers in my team was very unhappy that he had to ‘Check Out’ a file before using it – This meant that he had to switch to Delta from his C++ editor and check out and come back again. So he decided to just change the read only attributes of the file and continue working. He explained to me that since he was the only person who owned that file, it would not matter.

This was an accident waiting to happen. Even if you are the only developer, you will want to pull up an older version to compare the changes to figure out why - what you did today broke something else.

Sure enough a week later, he came to me one evening and told me that he messed up and wanted to go back to an earlier revision of the file but since he was not using Delta, he ended up wasting the entire day trying to backtrack his changes. Sheepishly, he admitted that he had learnt his lesson the hard way and would always use a version control system.

[If there is any one from the Microsoft Delta team reading this, then it is nice to know that however feature challenged Delta was, it convinced few folks that versioning was important]

I suppose I could have taken a heavy handed approach and told him that the policy was to use version control or else but that would not solve anything. I still do this and it confuses the folks sometimes but it works.

Letting people fail in a controlled environment is the best way to learn – if they are not willing to listen. After all that’s how most folks learnt to ride a bike.

Tenets of Transparency for everyone

ashvil_d@yahoo.com — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 02:00:00 GMT

Eric Sink has a great article on Tenets of Transparency for ISVs.

You can extend this to individuals in any job role. The more transparent you are, the faster you can get your work done.

Start with a simple exercise, before attending any meeting, send an email documenting your expectations for that meeting. You will be amazed how quickly the discussion moves forward.

A short marketing survey on Ashvil.net

ashvil_d@yahoo.com — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 09:09:00 GMT

If you have been reading Ashvil.Net or have subscribed to my RSS feed. Please take some time to help me understand why you read my blog by taking this survey, powered by nsurvey.org.

I plan to use this information to help me understand my audience better and fine-tune my articles, blog and presentations to my readers.

Thanks,
Ashvil

Software Pricing with Eric

ashvil_d@yahoo.com — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 04:45:00 GMT

Eric Sink has a good article on product pricing strategies on MSDN. It is a must read for anyone in the software business. If you are developer and don’t understand software pricing you will have no idea how commercially viable that widget you are developing is. Pricing is a complex issues and this article covers that all the main points that drive it.

One of the issues I have with the article is his example of setting a price point for a commercial version of Firebird. His argument of pricing it higher is not in line with his company’s pricing of Vault compared to VSS, Perforce, etc. Actually Perforce adopts his model but it’s pricing is out of reach for many developers.

One of the stupidest things to do is to price higher than lower. If you price lower you will lose money but gain customers and market share. You will find that customers want to spend money with you after they trust you. Take a leaf out of the Component software vendors – Sell cheap then you can charge for Enterprise support, Source Code, Subscriptions, Training, etc. Enterprise customers love to spend money with companies they trust.

The other thing I disagree with is to raise prices till the whining is just right. Whining customers don’t evangelize; they don’t act like sales people for your product. There are better ways to charge people who want to pay more and still include people who want to pay less.

Eric’s article is a good start but the best place for you to get your pricing strategy is talking to your customers.

Good Interviewing

ashvil_d@yahoo.com — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 01:41:00 GMT

It’s amazing how interviewers ask stupid questions that do more harm than good. Good interviewing is a science that we can all learn and it is the first step to building a good team.

The first step to being a good interviewer is to realize that the candidate is also interviewing you silently. The purpose of the interview is two fold – evaluate that the candidate is a good fit and sell him the job.

Most folks believe that the time to sell the candidate the job is after you decide if you want to hire them. This is a bad choice because if the candidate is not sold right from the start the chances that he/she will perform to their best potential is low. A motivated candidate who wants to get the job will try to sell themselves better than someone who has no idea what the job involves.

The best way to start and interview is to sell the company and the job position and then ask the candidate if they are interested in it. One note of caution – Be honest. Hyping up the company and the job position or hiding information is a bad idea. Once the candidate becomes an employee, they will know the truth. It is a bad idea to hire an employee under false pretences and then wonder what when wrong.

Once the candidate expresses their interest, go ahead with your interview process. Make sure that interview is tailored to the job position. But whether you are looking for a CEO, program manager or developer, there are common attributes you should be looking for like honesty, decision making process, intelligence, hardworking, teamwork, match with the current position, etc.

I focus on asking these type of questions

What interests you about the job and drill down
See what kind of research the candidate has done about our products and market
Talk in detail about their past projects and rationale behind decisions
Find out the processes and methodology they are familiar with
Talk about interaction with their teams
Talk about the other professional interests beside their job
Ask them questions in their line of expertise that make them think and come up with solutions

And here is what I don’t ask them

No puzzles, trick or hack questions
No questions on syntax where the answers can be found in the manual
No hard or nasty questions
Never appear disinterested in their answers
And no illegal questions

Let me take a minute to explain the rationale behind not asking certain questions. The interview environment is a stressful one. Hack questions like what does the complier do in this situation does not makes any sense. Atleast reword the question to ask them what would you do if you were the complier writer. What decision would you make.

Puzzles test the ability to solve a problem given a set of artificial constraints. But you don’t need to create artificial constraints when you have a set of real world constraints. Instead of a standard puzzle like dividing the Pirates Treasure, consider talking to the candidate about real world issues you are facing and ask them to solve it.

Asking syntax questions where answers are in a manual makes no sense. With information on your fingertips, the answers are always a click away. Obviously asking questions that are illegal, immoral or uncomfortable are just going to make the candidate negative about your organization.

One of the most important things is check if the candidate understands how to make decisions, how to stand by them and how to implement them. You need to find out if the candidate understands they are there to solve a problem for their customers and how to go about it. Asking the right type of questions will significantly increase your chance of finding the right talent to lead you to the path of success. Ask the wrong ones and you will wonder why good folks don't turn up for your interviews.

Testing Environments Without Trashing Your Machine

ashvil_d@yahoo.com — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 00:05:00 GMT

Testing with different configurations is an integral part of the QA process, but time and energy is consumed configuring and managing these environments. Ben Waldron has written an article demonstrates how the Virtual Server COM API can be used to create an automated application testing environment using Virtual Server 2005. It improves developer productivity by simplifying the provisioning and management of testing environments.

If your application runs on Windows, you need to take a look at using Virtual PC and Virtual Server 2005 as integral part of your QA environments.

The importance of Mentoring

ashvil_d@yahoo.com — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 23:32:00 GMT

One of the most important skills, a manager needs to have is to be able to mentor the team. Unfortunately, if you ask most software professionals if their manager is a mentor, you will get a laugh.

Good Mentors are natural leaders and mentoring is an art that they practice. They realize that in addition to getting the job done, they are also responsible to their team. They believe that they need to encourage their team members to grow and take steps to encourage that.

At i3Connect, I encouraged my team to write articles, post to public forums, give back to open source projects, give presentations (both internal and external), think on their career development paths, etc. Ameet, one of our team members with just one year of experience, was actually a project guide to final year CS students. Due to lack of resources, we could not send anyone to paid conferences but would encourage them to attend free conferences in Mumbai or on the web. Mentoring was one of the main reasons our attrition rate was so low, even with all our financial constraints.

A good mentor should create the right team culture by

presenting a vision, describing the planning process and showing leadership.
empowering the team to experiment
being goal-oriented and focusing on team performance
building a team of smart, dependable team-players.
using the individual strengths and talents in a team activity
being flexible and responsive
being able breakdown communication barriers
and being able to recognize and celebrate team and individual accomplishments

As a manager there will be always be another deadline and another crisis. But working with your team is more than that. Set aside time to look at the rainbows and to connect with each person on the team. Understanding them is the first step to being a great mentor.