SPINNacle

- Newsletter from SPIN Chennai July ‘11

Issue 07

From the President’s desk

Interesting Links

Inside this issue

PMI Chennai Chapter events

Visit : PMI Chennai

> From the Editor’s Desk

> Proceedings of

SPICON 2011- Day 2

> Interview

> Voice of the Community

> Brain Teasers

Need of the hour - Improve the Operational efficiency

Dear SPIN Members,

As per Business Standard Research Bureau report, the wage cost of the top-10 IT

companies in India has grown by an average17 per cent over the last three years, more than the 10-12 per cent growth in most other industries, and it is impacting the bottom line. The same has been acknowledged by some of the industry leaders as well. This means, there is no economic rationale to hire in India and it would be cheaper to hire in alternate locations such as Mexico or Philippines which are fast emerging as cost-competitive centers.

It is time for the Indian IT organizations to analyze their productivity and identify areas of potential improvement which include building operational efficiency . The Nasscom-McKinsey study looked at the basic voice processes across business services and found a wide variation in platform costs, with the top quartile players operating at 46 per cent lower costs than bottom quartile players. Moreover, top performers are seen to continuously improve their operating costs with time, while the industry average operating performance is seen to decline.

That’s a wake-up call for many Indian IT companies and an opportunity for quality professionals to improve the efficiency by bringing the usage of non-linearity with levers such as:

Optimizing Labor demand supply Management

Improving the Resources like Hardware, Computers utilization

Optimizing the Seat Utilization which includes working from Home option

Improve our Productivity levels in line with the Best in class (Benchmarks)

Hard hitting times and recession times are the ones where the Quality Professionals can really excel and prove their mettle. Art of execution turns out to become science of execution with the most optimized performance only when the environ-ment is demanding. Quality Professionals are the enablers to design the most optimal framework of operation to bring in high operational efficiency and thereby more value for money

With Best Regards,

Chandrakumar Raman

Establish a leadership forum for open exchange of software process improvement experiences and ideas

Promote achieving higher levels of process maturity and software quality .

SPIN Chennai

Our Mission

eWIT

Visit : http://ewit.co.in/

CSI Chennai Chapter

Visit : CSI Website

Previous SPINnacle issues

Newsletter 1

Newsletter 2

Newsletter 3

Newsletter 4

Newsletter 5

Newsletter 6

Page 2

Welcome to the seventh issue of SPINNACLE. Coming as it does after the previous issue of SPICON Special, this is

now relatively a quiet period! The innovations in the Software Process arena – which was the theme of SPICON

2011 – have had some origin from the Manufacturing arena. Be it the very concept of “process” and

“repeatability” or be it the application of SQC principles, software process has almost always had some prece-

dent from the manufacturing industry. The latest in this trend is Lean Software Development. Taken from Lean

Manufacturing, the whole idea is to minimize – and even eliminate waste. The motivation for this comes from

the increasing amount of money spent on software maintenance that is nothing but re-work, resulting in waste

of original work. Furthermore, a lot of time and effort goes in waiting for tasks that do not contribute to the final

outcome. Lean aims to cut down all these losses and raise software development to new heights of efficiency.

Fittingly, in this issue, we have a lot of focus on Lean Software Development. The interview with one of the ex-

perts in this arena underscores the importance and prevalence we will see on Lean Software Development over

the coming years. Much has been said about Agile Methodology. An appropriate combination of Agile and Lean

methodologies coupled with tools like Six Sigma can be expected to usher in a new era in software process man-

agement. We do hope to see more of these in the coming issues of SPINNACLE.

Happy reading!

The Editorial Team, SPINNACLE

Events Round-up

SPINNacle

From the editor’s desk

SPIN Talks Other Associations

Managing Challenges in establishing large accounts and its impact on delivery -17 Jun 2011

Usage of Lean tenets in Application Management Services - 18 Jul 2011

eWIT Role Model Series Lecture by Prof. K. Rajesh-wari - 24 June 2011

BSPIN Annual Conference - 8th & 9th July 2011

Classes on CISA Exam Review Course - 30th July 2011

Page 3

Navyug Mohnot of QAI spoke of the opposable mind and deliv-ering systematic and structured innovation. The essence of what he said is summed up below. Innovation is very much like the quality journey Indian IT industry went through during the last two decades. Establishing lean and effective processes have enabled organizations have adequate time to look at innovation. However, looking at the statistics, out of 3000 innovative ideas, only about 10% get submitted and about a handful go through development and finally only one or two succeed commercially.

Then he spoke about the opposable mind that synthesizes a so-lution out of two contradictory ideas citing several examples and

how to develop such integrative thinking. Looking at the what (Offering), who (customers), how (processes), and where (presence), the opposable mind can be developed, he said. He concluded saying, for the execution of in-novation to happen, several aspects such as staff skill development, organization structure, knowledge manage-ment and developing a business ecosystem are important.

Second session for the day was the panel discussion on ‘How to identify opportunities for innovation ?”. Panelists included Navyug Mohnot from QAI, Pavan Soni of Wipro and Gaurav from Feedback Consulting. Rajamanickam of SPIN Chennai moderated the session.

Pavan spoke about the science of innovation. Invention com-bined with commercialization becomes innovation with the catalyst of creativity, he said. He spoke about the six principles of creativity : (i) creativity is about postponing judgment; when you postpone judgment, one can create as many solutions as possible (ii) the medicinal effect or the best ideas are born at the intersection of two different industries (iii) look at non customers (iv) be ambidextrous or exploit the present and explore the future (v) open innovation and (vi) attract unreasonable people. Navyug spoke about incre-mental innovation happening in large organizations whereas radical, transformational innovation happening at

smaller organizations who are keen to grow faster or some-times survive competition. He said idea generation has a lot to do with sublime energy in an organization. It happens mostly at the cross section of different disciplines. He also spoke about how organizations institutionalized this process through portals, incentives etc. Gaurav felt that innovation is about adoption of invention or when it impacted people’s lives positively. Need gaps or opportunities drive innovation. Idea management, filtering ideas, mentoring, funding of ideas and rewarding system are the steps for institutionaliz-ing innovation.

Tathagat Varma of Yahoo India spoke on Innovative IT project management practices. He highlighted the changes in the industry from yesteryears in terms of knowledge worker management, gender equality, virtual teams, diversity at the work place, users of software being of any age, cycle time reduction with respect to prod-ucts, reduction in hardware costs and the world being the customer. That necessitates the need for innovation at light speed. Pillars of an organization are the people, process and technology. Varma pointed out the need for a tighter alignment of these three components for successful execution of projects. He stressed the need for bet-ter program management. He concluded saying the project management practices should mirror the real world.

SPINNacle

Perspective—Proceedings of SPICON 2011—Day 2

Page 4

… Contd—Proceedings of SPICON 2011— Day 2

Innovative Software Engineering Practices was what Vijayalakshmi Gopal of TCS spoke on. Cycle time reduction, software building not being exclusive to only software engineers has brought in newer challenges. She spoke of the importance of Reuse. Automating processes, capturing enough information on that process and making the data available for analyzing is the approach that would help, she said. She recommended building a product using 80% of reusable code and 20% customizable code and upgrading these reusable constantly.

Watts Humphrey award winners namely R Srinivasan of Ramco Systems, Elizabeth Koshy of iGate and Manjusha Gupta of Cognizant Technology Solutions presented their papers.

Bhaskar of Business Zenz, spoke about the People practices that drive innovation. Citing several interesting examples, Bhaskar elaborated on the drivers for successful innovation, namely, mo-bile work force, diversity, invigorating environment, resources, role modeling, empowerment and recognition. He stressed on the need to have a risk taking mindset in managers for successful inno-vation. Panel discussion was moderated by Rajasree Natarajan of CTS.

Panel members included Bhaskaran Srinivasan of Business Zenz, Rajaram of Infosys, Tathagat Varma of Yahoo

India and Pannirselvam of CTS. The approach taken by the

moderator by asking probing questions to the panelists

helped cover all possible questions audience might have had

at the end of a two day conference. Responses that came out

from the panelists have been summed up. Key guiding princi-

ples for an Innovative organization is the vision from the top

management. Once the vision is in place, all other things

namely, infrastructure, processes, culture, rewards and recog-

nition can emanate. Outcome of innovation should be meas-

urable ; it could be : patents, development of customer co-

creation centres, revenue, asset efficiency, impact to cus-

tomer, their margins etc. Good innovation models need to support innovations coming from anyone, and it has

to be bottom-up. An organization can claim to have an innovation culture when at least 30% of their products

sold are not more than three years old or when an inventor cannibalizes his own idea within a specific time, or

when an organization can stand behind failures and encourage their employees to continue innovating.

SPINNacle

Page 5

Interview on Lean and Agile Practices — Mr. P. Grant Rule

Grant Rule is CEO Software Measurement Services Ltd. <www.SMSexemplar.com>. He works to improve working lives thereby achieving more effective outcomes. A Founding Partner of not-for-profit Orchestrated Knowledge <www.orchestratedknowledge.com>, co-founder of the Rightshifting Network (with Bob Marshall), he started in IT in 1972. Grant’s practical ex-perience covers development, process appraisal, measurement, CMMI® and lean-agile think-ing. An authority on FPA and estimating, Grant was an early adopter of Chief Programmer Teams, iteration, and other ‘agile’ techniques. He introduced public training in CMM® into England and served on IEEE Software’s Advisory Board for ten years

How can lean thinking and agile practices help in achieving effective solutions?

Change is natural and inevitable in the business environment today. Change challenges organisations to create and effectively leverage know-how and intellectual property, so existing products and services can be kept up-to-date, new ones invented and market share expanded. The ability to avoid waste while responding with flexibility and speed is essential. Software systems that support the concept-to-consumption value stream must flex to adapt to the needs of the organisation’s stakeholders. Whereas mass production has excelled at making standard products available to a mass market, consumers now demand mass specialisation.

This is where lean thinking excels. The whole focus of lean-agile thinking is upon stakeholder value: understand-ing it, creating it and deploying it as fast as possible.

Lean is less concerned with doing things in a prescribed way and more about how quickly the outcome can be achieved. It is the sustained capability to focus efforts on the ‘single useful next step’, to deliver features stake-holders value, quickly, without error that is attractive.

What cultural shift or change is required in the organization to adapt to agile practices? The biggest threat to a successful lean-agile enterprise is the predominating mindset. Lean agility involves a change of mindset; it is ineffective when ‘bolted on’ to business-as-usual. Agile practices aim to deliver value to stakeholders, so it arrives in the hands of users, where it is needed, at the time and in the sequence to be of maximum utility. To achieve this, an end-to-end view of the organisation’s value stream is necessary, to coordi-nate across functions. The ideal process achieves ‘single piece continuous flow’ – the antithesis of ‘batch and queue’. The necessary cultural shift transforms the mindset from ad-hoc reaction to events towards a holistic, even a chaordic (a system of governance which has a blend of chaos and order. The word was coined by Dee Hock, the former CEO of Visa Credit card Association) appreciation of value creation. It requires a willingness to progress by many small steps, rather than by revolution.

To maximise effectiveness, the cultural shift involves three transitions through four mindsets

A. from Ad-hoc to Analytic; B. from Analytic to Synergistic/Holistic; C. from Synergistic to Chaordic.

Each cultural transformation affects the whole organisation and presents a distinct chal-lenge.

When can a project adopt agile methods? Are there any criteria? Agile should not be considered as a method, as a collection of procedures, a series of steps, or a set of tools. Ag-ile is a way of thinking, a mindset, a systematic approach to problems. Local optimisation is a trap. To avoid falling in, to get the benefits, executive management must be engaged in the transformation. Executives must foster the new mindset by insisting decisions are made only on the basis of objective evidence, by encouraging team to obtain the necessary data and know-how through experimentation (e.g. using thought-experiments, prototypes, pilots, etc). “The role of the manager is to stop team making deci-sions based on too little evidence.” This is a key to the capability to Improve Effectiveness.

SPINNacle

The biggest threat to a suc-cessful lean-agile enterprise is the predominating mindset.

Page 6

Stakeholders first need to appreciate the principles of lean thinking: Understand value from the stakeholders’ perspective; Honestly analyse the complete set of process steps currently performed; Organise value to flow to stakeholders without interruption, at the pace demanded; Enable stakeholders to pull value from the system; Continuously seek perfection – adapt to change. These principles are widely applicable across functions and industries, in organisations of all sizes, in both the commercial world, and the not-for-profit and public sectors.

Could you explain the different types of estimation that can be applied for agile projects? Estimation is “the calculated approximation of a result which is usable even if input data may be incomplete or uncertain”. From the viewpoint of the executives, managers, users, and consumers, the purpose is to predict when de-

sired outcomes will be achieved, at what cost. From the perspective of the designers and developers, the purpose is to predict the effort necessary, the

number of people required, and other resource requirements. Software development is a process. It has inputs (knowledge, effort, money, time) and outputs (deliverables, de-fects, new know-how). Effective estimating is based on observation of the relationship between the outputs and the inputs used to create those outputs. One popular technique involves the use of ‘story points’ and ‘planning poker’. It combines decomposition of needs into ‘minimum deliverable features’ (MDF)… expressed as ‘user stories’ …with a variant of Wideband-DELPHI, a consensus-building technique. Unfortunately, this approach is entirely developer-centric, producing an estimate only of the effort the developers expect to expend. ‘Story points’ are relative, purely local, focused on measures of input (i.e. effort, experience, skill, etc), and non-compliant with accepted standards. They are akin to mediaeval measures of length, e.g. the ‘span’, ‘cubit’ and ‘clothyard’. Story points cannot be used to calculate productivity, velocity and defect density. This ‘cottage industry’ approach to measurement does not reflect the core objective of lean-agility – to under-stand stakeholder value. Businesses need reliable, comparable management metrics to ensure value for money and accountability for development costs. Useful sizing and estimating methods must be applicable at the level of an individual MDF, with means for aggregating the sizes of groups of user stories. This makes it dif-ficult to use top-down cost models (e.g. COCOMO.II.2000, SLIM, NPR, Seer, PERT, CPA). These were conceived for the ‘big design up front’, batch & queue approach. Similarly, sizing methods such as IFPUG and NESMA function point analysis require an analysis of the data content of the system, in order to identify Internal Logical Files (ILF), External Interface Files (EIF), and the File Type References (FTR) made during transaction processes. This makes it impossible to assign a functional size to an indi-vidual user story without first creating a ‘big design up front’. The COSMIC FPA method however, satisfactorily resolves all these issues by design (see Q5 ) Cosmic FPA is a measurement method to arrive at the size. The cosmic measurement standard is defined as the size of “data movement”. The size is calculated with the data movement types Entry, Exit, Read ,Write Types.

Can COSMIC FPA be applied to agile projects? Yes. An official ‘Guideline for Sizing Agile Projects’ is about to be published by COSMIC. The COSMIC method has been explicitly designed for use with a wide range of software types. It is applicable irrespective of the way the software development work is organised. It can be used to determine a size for each individual user story. The sizes of all the user stories in an epic or theme or sprint backlog can be aggregated. The COSMIC concept of a ‘functional process’ is congruent with the concepts of ‘user story’ and MDF. So COSMIC integrates easily into agile requirements practices. If the team employs user stories (or use cases, kanban cards, or some other way of capturing and decomposing requirements) then, using just the information they must in any case obtain to understand and respond to the requirement, the developers can assign an appropriate size value to each story.

SPINNacle

Businesses need reliable, compara-ble management metrics to ensure value for money and accountability for development costs.

Page 7

Collecting measures of effort and time expended, and counts of defects detected, provides the means to derive metrics for productivity, velocity and defect density. COSMIC FPA – ISO/IEC 19761:2011 – is an internationally recognised standard method, available since 1998. It satisfies the developers’ need for a method to estimate ef-fort per requirement while fulfilling the ‘customer-side’ desire for objective management metrics.

How can ROI be measured for agile projects? How does COSMIC FPA help achieve it? Return-on-investment (ROI) is the ratio of money gained or lost relative to the amount of money invested. Sounds simple. But an organisation can obtain an ROI on software only when that software is deployed and put into operation – only when value, for which they are prepared to pay, is delivered to the end consumers. Select-

ing what to develop, in what order, is key. When a value stream is truly agile the most valuable requirements are prioritised, developed, deployed and put into use in a continuous flow. The organisation makes only a series of small investments and is able to reap a return from each newly de-ployed feature. Risk is minimised. Feedback from operational use guides selection and deployment of new features. By providing developers with a sizing and estimating method that is applicable to functionality at any scale, the COSMIC FPA method enables Product Owners to evalu-ate the likely size and cost of a new concept compared to its expected worth for stakeholders. Then it lets the Product Owner evaluate the cost- and time-to-develop for each required feature.

What is your advice to the community on the need of size estimation for projects? The ability to estimate within known degrees of accuracy (in or out of range) and precision (coarse or finely grained) is crucial to a development organisation’s capability to manage risk – one reason why organisations covet agility. Estimation enables one to avoid over-commitment. The funds and time businesses have available for investment are always limited, so they need effective means to estimate early using uncertain and incom-plete requirements. Product Owners need early estimates of effort, cost and time to prioritise, on a cost-benefit basis, the items

selected for a sprint. They need more detailed estimates of the costs of their selections as each user story is brought to the ‘ready to develop’ state.

Developers similarly need to evaluate their process performance so they can avoid over-commitment in any sprint. This is crucial if developers are going to fulfil the agile goal of delivering work-products that are ‘done’ in each sprint.

What do you consider to be the key challenges facing IT professionals today? Rightshifting Effectiveness across functions and at all levels of the organisation requires:

Leading a change of mindset. Observation suggests some 75–80% of organisations would rate less than 1.5 on a 0–5 point scale of effectiveness, where ‘effective’ means ‘achieves their stakeholders’ de-sired outcomes’. Yet 20–25% achieve a performance up to 4 or 5 times ‘the norm’ of ‘1’. Because most people spend most of their careers in less effective organisations, they do not realise what can be achieved. They are content with ad-hoc behaviour. Transformation of this mindset presents the biggest challenge.

SPINNacle

When a value stream is truly ag-ile the most valu-able requirements are prioritised, de-veloped, deployed and put into use

Page 8

Organising the system of work. Prof. Deming showed us that performance is a characteristic of the system of work, and that individual workers are constrained within it. Senior managers are responsible for the design of the end-to-end value stream, for the vision, goals and strategy. They establish the organisation’s mindset, cue behaviour, promote an evidence-based approach to problem-solving – or the reverse.

Problem-solving using evidence. Wishful-thinking is probably the most pernicious cause of project failure. It is compounded when decisions are made based on unsubstantiated opinion or bias. The cure is adoption, at all levels, of a systemic approach to problems that requires decisions to be based on factual evidence and quan-tified data.

Engineering effectively. There is a considerable divide between customer expectations for IT, and IT profes-sionals’ understanding of stakeholders and value. Neither big-design-up-front nor serial-fix-on-fail bridge this divide. Conversely, lean-agile engineering, with cross-functional collaboration, deferred commitment, set-based & test-first design, rapid feedback and incremental deployment, have proven significantly more effec-tive, wasting fewer resources, and building more sustainable relationships.

How can developers provide an effective, integrated service to business customers? Developers who appreciate lean-agile thinking can provide thought leadership to their business colleagues. They can assist the transformation of the organisation’s mindset by engaging with executives to achieve a more effec-tive system of work. This must be cross-functional. Local optimisation within the IT group is insufficient. IT professionals can learn to communicate effectively in the language of the business domain. The focus on stake-holder value involves listening, understanding and interpreting requirements. And testing that understanding via feedback. IT is becoming less about technology and more about effective design and the user experience. Business can be profitable and create shareholder value only if it satisfies consumer demand and helps them achieve their out-comes. So developers must maximise the business users’ ability to deliver value to the end consumer. “My cus-tomer is my client’s customer”. Developers can consciously create new know-how that will enable the business to address future requirements. That know-how can be connected to decision points embedded in the system of work. To achieve this, developers must understand their organisation’s strategic goals and all their stakeholders. Only then can they effec-tively align their activities. Multiple stakeholders generate a variety of requirements. Developers, and the Product Owners for whom they work, must employ whatever techniques they can to improve the elicitation, analysis, understanding, communication and fulfilment of requirements. Progress is a coin with two sides: continuous improvement on one, measured feedback on the other. The meas-urement scale provided by COSMIC helps people to be objective, improves visibility, facilitates communication and enables change to be evidence-based. This is one reason why I emphasise the ‘analysis’ aspect of COSMIC Function Point Analysis and recommend measurement is integrated into the day-to-day development activities. As Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin said in 1883, “…when you cannot measure *what you are speaking about+, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind…”.

SPINNacle

Developers can con-sciously create new know-how that will enable the business to address future requirements

Page 9

India Nirman Sangh - Helping people help themselves…

If you give fish to someone, we can appease his hunger for the moment. But if you teach him fishing, it would help him for life. On similar lines, India Nirman Sangh has been func-tioning helping many rural, tribal folks to improve their living by helping themselves. India Nirman Sangh, has been working for women’s development in the hills around Kodaikanal and Palani for the last seven years, in close co-operation with the Gandhigram Trust.

They have formed and are supporting three hundred Self Help Groups among the women in these villages. Each group consists of between twelve and twenty women. Hence a total of around 4000 women are members of our groups. So far, INS has facilitated loans worth more than six crore rupees for our groups from various Indian banks.

Over time, the groups have taken up local issues such as sanitation, drinking water supply, the problems in the local ration shop etc. and using their collective strength they are often able to bring about dramatic changes. They also ensure proper implementation of government welfare schemes and collectively resist both goondaism and police high handedness. In 2007, they voluntarily came forward to implement a government scheme to build toilets for each home and completely eliminate open defecation. So far, more than 600 home toilets have been built by these groups under these government schemes

Some of the groups have also started tiny businesses – running grocery shops, ration shops, tea shops, distilling and bottling eucalyptus oil, processing and packaging Kodaikanal coffee, manufacturing inexpensive sanitary nap-kins and running a carpentry workshop. India Nirman Sangh incubates these businesses and helps them run prof-itably and professionally.

They have an ambitious plan of building short stay homes for abandoned people.

India Nirman Sangh is entirely funded by donations from supporters and contributions from the persons in the Self Help Groups.

If you want to know more about what they do or if you want to support, you can contact Mr. David at dbarunku-mart@yahoo.co.in.

SPINNacle

Voice of the community

Page 10

Rattle your Brain!

Identify the correct Quality related word from the jumble word . The clue is given on the right side for the words. Some of the clues are related to real life

1. ULTYQAI SRCASAUNE - Bread and butter 2. ALTQUIY OTOCRNL - A tick mark 3. OLAETLGT - Pay charges 4. ATOKHREBHGURH MMEOPRETIVN - one of the method to bring change 5. RPLASPOO EWERVI - first step in the life is checked 6. CROJPET NOTAINIITI - Starting point 7. ERVSECI VEELL RTEMEEGAN - Team comply to it 8. LEPISCA UEASC - Unusual event

Answers to the Brain Teasers of Issue 06

FMEA - Failure Mode Effect Analysis MEAN - Average of a set of values LOC - Lines of code DOE - Design of Experiments CODE FTE - Full time equivalent MODE - Most frequently occurring value in a set of given data TOC - Theory of Constraints FEA - Finite element analysis ELF - Early life failure

SPINNacle

Brain Teasers

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— Sify Software Limited