Gary Allison's Leadership Blog

Tomorrow I’ll be presenting to the Texas Community College Teachers Association on this post’s subject.  I’ve posted the slides on slideshare for reference.  I’ll be sumarizing a few of the more salient points in an upcoming blog post.

Do you know what this is?

load AX, BX

Then chances are you know how computers really work, and chances are you are, what’s the word, old?  I’m currently working on a presentation for an upcoming conference that describes how Software as a Service, cloud computing, and web services are changing the landscape for education.  The thought occurred to me recently when working on the outline of the presentation that many of today’s computer science students have no idea how computers really work.  Systems level knowledge of programming and operating systems seems to be arcane. Maybe that’s good in a way.

No you can build full-on applications in scripting languages, deploy them in the cloud and not worry about load balancing, firewalls, and nusiances like memory management.  Maybe in 10 years, developers of the future will laugh at us when they recount, ” yea, you used to have to write applications in this complex language called Java, now you just drink it, ha, ha, ha”.  I used to laugh at the PL-1 and FORTRAN programmers.

Maybe this is good.  Now, developers can focus on solving business problems and spend less time on the nuainces of programming.  Or, maybe they actually have less control and are forced into the confines of what is offered in the toolbox of Google, Amazon, Salesforce and the like.  And, since soon they will lack any real systems development skills, maybe they give up all chance of getting outside of those boxes?

Tomorrow, I have the opportunity to speak at an Rally customer success tour at the Renaissance.  Tonight, I am reflecting on the leaders I have a privilege to serve with on the panel, Israel Gat, Jack Yang, Torsten Weirch, and Eric Huddleson.  These gentlemen are all significant leaders in the Austin Community and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

I’ve chosen the topic of “Agile in the Large” since the real power of Agile is evident when you turn loose the teams to run at their full speed in a self directed agile process.  Agile gets really interesting with development teams over 50, and also holds its most promise.  We believe that the best way to scale a team and continue to deliver successful software projects is to build it as a set of Agile teams.

Here’s few things we’ve learned along the way.  Interestingly enough, in comparing notes with the some of the development leaders at salesforce.com, it seems they have learned many of the same things.

• There’s no replacement for a great technical leader in the Agile team – effective team leads are priceless.  You should always be growing and recruiting for leaders.
• Great Product Owners are hard to find.  I have the pleasure to work with some of the best, but to scale the teams, you need more.
• An Agile team must be composed of all the skills they need to produce a shippable result.  In our case, it is the product owner or manager, usability, dev team, QA team, and tech writers.
• You run into problems when you depend on other parts of the organization that may not be Agile.  Just for an example, if you have a supporting organization that is still working on the Hero principle, or the waterfall process, there is going to be trouble.
• Tool support is critical and everyone must adopt. For large teams, roll up views and quick reporting is absolutely essential.  Rally gives us this capability.
• Test automation is absolutely key to keeping the product shippable.  As each sprint there is significant new functionality being delivered, the QA team must at the same time deliver automated tests so that doing regression testing onthe whole product is a swift process at the end of the release.  There’s just not time to regression test the whole product.

We have even been able to extend Agile to expose our feature teams to end clients through the Rally Agile tool.

The 30 day experience of a life without windows is off to a fast a furious start.  Some early conclusions are clear.  If you are a technophile, read on, otherwise stop and head to Apple and buy a Mac.  (Does anyone like the new MacBook Pro keyboard?  What were they thinking?)  Still Apple is the only way to go right now if you are not seriously technically adept.

Installing Ubuntu was very easy.  First though, you have to convince Windows Vista to free up some disk space so you can shrink the Windows disk to make room for your Ubuntu disk partition.  This should be easy in Vista with the first version of Windows that includes built in tools to allow you to shrink a partition.  But, like the IRS, there is always a catch with Vista.  It just doesn’t work.  You have to jump through many hoops because Vista writes certain system files at the end of the disk and then tells you you can’t shrink the volume.  Here’s a great write up on the many, many hoops you need to jump through to eventually convince Vista to turn loose of some disk space.  Aarrrggh.

Once you convince Vista to resize the partitions, you will still have a huge chunk of free space left on the Windows disk, but you can then at least create the Ubuntu partition.  The Ubuntu install instructions are very straightforward on what to do.  (again, if you aren’t pretty tech savvy, buy a Mac, you’ll be happier any way).  At the end, you will be able to boot Windows or Ubuntu Linux.

Next challenge is VPN – an indespensible necessity in the corporate world.  I could never get the Cisco VPN client to work, though it seems it works for most people in my googling.  I kept getting “Remote Peer Not Responding” blah blah blah.  Thank goodness for this post that shows how set up VPNC.  It worked perfectly the first time and everytime since.

Since your network probably has files shared from Windows servers, you’ll need to get to them too.  Here’s how to do that.

But the big one is Outlook.  The corporate world still largely revolves around the Exchange server.  Connecting from Linux is somewhat of a challenge.  If you are a light email user, and don’t have a complicated calendar, try the Evolution client that is built into Ubuntu.  It is a mail/calendar/contacts client that connects to the Outlook Web Access service on Exchange.  For very light duties, it seems to work ok.  It didn’t work for me at all.  It hung, stalled, and just generally ground to a halt no matter what I tried.  The only real option out there is Outlook for dealing with Exchange.

A pretty good solution here is Crossover – a program for Linux that emulates Windows.  These have been around for years and are getting to the point they actually work – mostly.  Under Crossover, you can install a variety of Windows programs, including believe it or not Office 2007.  It actually works.  Mostly.  More on that later.

All over North Austin, the new Microsoft “Life without walls” billboards have popped up.  You may have read before in my blog what an awful experience I have had with Vista, clearly one of the worst experience I’ve ever had with a piece of software.  I even went so far as to by a MacBook Pro last year and absolutely love it!

Still there is this issue with the Vista laptop on my desk at work. Its on my desk because that is the only place it consistenly works.  Mobility is not something you want to experience with Vista. Unreliable wireless and endless frustration with VPN make it just not worth the pain.

So I was inspired by Microsoft’s billboards this weekend.  Life without walls to me means Life without Windows.  I’m going to see if it is possible, in a business world ruled by the Microsoft Exchange Server.  This insidious strategy is definitely to be admired.  The truth is that most businesses run on Exchange for their email and calendaring solution.

So, this is my inspiration from the Microsoft sloganeering – I am going to see what it will take to have a life without windows.  within 30days, I hope to be completely switched over from Vista to Ubuntu linux.  Can it be done?  Its not a slam dunk – surely there will be challenges.   More to come on these pages…

At the Dreamforce, everywhere you looked, there was the ubiquitous “No Software” logo.  It was even embodied in SaaSy the Salesforce mascot who was frequently on stage with Benioff.  I found it quite illuminating that so many of the sessions I went to were about Building applications with Apex, Salesforce’s Java-like programming language, and the new Visualforce presentation language, akin to java server pages.  There was code everywhere.  Even at the Monday Night Sites competition where contestants had 2 hours to build the coolest Salesforce sites page they could.  Boy, it sure looked like we were all programming.  Hmmmm….  I use an IDE to write code like software, there’s objects, classes, and simple inheritance like software, it even has bugs like software!  Smells a lot like software to me.  I think software engineers are safe.

What it should say, but this would be problematic for their sales, is no IT.  That’s what Salesforce really enables – no IT infrastructure, at least in the traditional sense.  No application servers, no databases, no backups, no security auditors.  Host your business email and calendars on Google domains and no Microsoft Exchange.  I assure you Redmond is damn worried.

So, here’s my new suggested Salesforce logo.  What do you say Marc?

This week finds me at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce show where a number of very interesting developments are coming to light.  In Marc Benioff’s keynote yesterday, he emphasized the role of cloud computing in the future of all application development, throwing jabs at Microsoft all along the way.  Benioff cast the cloud into these sets of services:

• Amazon is the server plumbing and storage – their EC2 elastic computing cloud providing all the virtual servers you need while S3 provides boundless very low cost storage
• Google is the Microsoft Office and Sharepoint alternative, offering shared applications like calendaring, documents, and spreadsheets, with the capability to share all three, plus adwords that can feed into salesforce leads
• Facebook offers the social graph where new applications can leverage and integrate to spread virally
• Salesforce’s force.com is the application layer to develop business apps and tie all the above together on every platform, mobile to all browsers

This staking out of claims on the cloud computescape is a fascinating thought to me.  While I’m not sure that all other other companies would agree with the above positioning, there has never been a more exciting time to be in software development – the cost  of building a truly scalable application that can service tens of thousands of users  is truly in every developer’s reach.  I woke up at 1 am this morning with my mind racing about how the applications I and others could build!  This clearly has implications for global software development, lowering the bar for anyone in any country who has a great idea to build it out with a small team and bootstrap an effort self funded.

It also means that if you were thinking of corporate IT as a long term career, you should think again.  These services are going to consolidate into a few very large providers, at the end of the day, this is good for our industry. It allows the great ideas, the great innovations to be born more quickly, removing unnecessary barriers and hurdles.

This week Apple unveiled the iPhone 2.0 device and more importantly showed the results of their SDK released just 3 months ago for iPhone. As someone who has been leading teams in building mobile applications off and on over the last 6 years, the results are really impressive. The ease of which very sophisticated applications can be ported to iPhone is astonishing. During the keynote at the WWDC, some interesting games and just amazing medical imaging applications are on display.

More than simply an interesting use of mobile technology, in my view Apple has created the first viable platform to move laptop users to the truly mobile device. They have the device, now with 3G speed, they have the platform based on their desktop OSX, and they have the developer tools and APIs to quickly build the application.

Contrast this with google’s android. Cool concepts, plenty of big budget behind it, but no devices, and with so many vendors in play there is likely to be subtle differences in implementation / compatibility. These are problems that have plagued Windows Mobile and Java 2 Mobile Edition, both of which propose to be a unifying platform. Truth is that you have to build and test for each device you intend to support. This is expensive and inconvenient as you start putting conditionals in the code for devices, screen sizes, etc. And, is it just me, or are the top folks at google starting to look like IBMers?

This is where Apple has it right, in my view – great dev tools (as Microsoft ahs clearly shown is a key part of promoting a new platform), great platform (with innovative location and push notifications), and that gorgeous device. To top it off, they have a terrific market distribution channel with iTunes. Boy, do they have this right. I’m completely impressed.

Have you heard of reverse outsourcing? Indian IT firms that built incredible profit margins on the outsourcing boom in the West are themselves headed offshore, from Malaysia to Mexico, to escape the double sting of surging salaries and a rising rupee. Tata Consultancy, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and smaller companies are stepping up acquisitions and opening more facilities closer to US and European clients to cut costs — the reason why work was farmed out to India in the first place.

Salaries of software professionals rose 18.7 percent in 2007, according to a survey, while the rupee has gained almost 10 percent this year to near 10-year highs against the dollar. That’s eroding the cost advantage once enjoyed by the 50 billion dollar information technology industry, which bills two-thirds of sales in dollars but whose expenses are almost all incurred in rupees.

Hyderabad-based Satyam has hired 300 mostly-Malaysian IT engineers to man the facility, whose workforce will rise to 2,000 in four years to cater to clients such as GlaxoSmithKline, one of its top 10 customers. Malaysia was chosen because of its “competitive cost environment”. The company is distributing work to locations where “it makes the most business sense.”

Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy, India’s top software maker, opened a centre in the Mexican city of Guadalajara with 500 employees and said it will employ “thousands more” in the next five years.

The problem here is that reverse outsourcing erodes many of the core, intrinsic values of outsourcing to India in the first place: a common language, British fundamentals of law, and to some extent the economic driver.

Wow. Things have changed. I’ve been working with Indian Outsourcers now for over 13 years dating back to those early projects at IBM. In the last two years, I’ve seen costs drastically increase and the availability of skills dramatically diminish. This is now clearly a trend from my chair and worth some serious examination in this blog. Too much to cover in just one post, this needs a bit deeper treatment.

In our world, software outsourcing has become an integral part of the IT industry. It has lived, grown and matured to its full potential. Companies that wish to cut costs look upon software outsourcing as a boon. One of the most important factors that attract Fortune 500 companies to outsourcing is the element of savings attached to an outsourced project. Outsourcers claim an average reported 40-60% increase in net savings.

Among the destinations chosen for software outsourcing, India stands as the most preferred, apart from China. Ireland, Romania ad Philippines also come into play. Clearly, the British colonization of India in the 17th and 18th century set off a cascade of domino that created the current IT outsourcing bonanza in this country. By introducing the English language and a western style legal system, the building blocks were laid to make the current attractive environment possible.

There are a number of major benefits of software outsourcing in India, including cost efficiency, availability of skilled workers, adoption of quality practices, and ease of doing business through the aforementioned common language and legal practices (mostly).

The winds of change are now blowing however. The first two of these advantages of oursourcing are fast disappearing. We’ll examine these in greater depth here in subsequent posts, but I’ve seen over the last year, a rapid deterioration of the cost advantage and skill availability in India. In addition to the supply / demand economics driving up costs, the rapid swings in the exchange rate are taking their toll.

For example, during two months last year, the value of the Rupee increased an astounding 8.5% in just 40 working days against the US Dollar. Attribute this to economic growth of an incredible 8 to 9%, a rate only exceeded by China.

This incredible economic success has had the result of making some Indian entrepreneurs incredibly wealthy, and deservedly so. But it has also had the effect of dramatically increasing costs and increased competition for skilled and experienced software developers. I’ve seen rates for well-qualified candidates now approach within 20% of a US hire. The days of the 3 for 1 cost advantage are no longer. We’ll dive into more detail in upcoming posts.

I was discussing some thoughts on the amassing of private data by Google with a colleague the other day who was not overly concerned. She did though pass along a useful plug-in for Firefox you can use to keep your searches private when using Google. It’s called CustomizeGoogle and in addition to helping with privacy issues, it has a wealth of other features.

After the one-click install into Firefox, the plugin gives you total control over your Google search experience. It can hide Google ads, give you links to the same search on Yahoo! and other engines, and provides some cool filtering features. Naturally since it is a Firefox plugin, it runs on just about any computer.

To enable the privacy feature after installing the plug in, choose CustomizeGoogle Options from the Tools menu and pick “Remove click tracking”.

Last week, the FCC auction begins for the 700Mhz spectrum to be released by current television broadcasts as they switch to all digital broadcasts next year (February 2009). Google is expected to ante up the 4.6 Billion dollars in the closed-bid auction for the spectrum which is of intense interest because of its capability to carry the high bandwidth needed for high speed internet and communications over vast distances. This means mre bandwidth and lower costs to build the network.

Google won’t be alone. The usual cast of characters, Verizon and AT&T are also expected to bid on this desirable frequency band. In a sense, Google has already won in that they have succeeded in adding a mandate to the bidding that winner must open the frequencies to all handsets and devices that wish to play. The interesting question is: what can Google do with all this wireless bandwidth.

There are many possibilities, but a few standout.
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Last week, Apple unveiled a new update to their iPhone software and it wasn’t long before the guys around the office were showing off the dazzling new mapping capabilities. Using triangulation between cell phone towers and wi-fi spots, this new update has the very useful ability to pull up your approximate location on google maps right there on the iPhone. This makes getting directions or just figuring out where you are a breeze. In my informal survey of iPhone owners, no one seemed to consider what this really means. So, not only does Google know what you are searching for on the web, knows what’s in your email if you use the “free” gmail, knows what’s on your PC with desktop search, knows what’s in your documents if you are using their new google apps, now they even know where you are at all times. For the sake of convenience and free, we seem perfectly willing to mortgage our whole identity. Interesting.

It was time to upgrade. The home PC is 5 years old. Truthfully, it probably will still serve for Quickbooks and other household tasks for another 3 years, so ok, the geek in me wanted a new PC. I had filled every PCI slot in the PC, and besides, a new computer is so shiny and cool. Now, this is where the story turns strange. For the fist time in over 20 years, the new PC I bought is a Mac.

For a little background, a few months ago I got a new laptop at work. Now, I know better, but I ordered it with Vista because the new laptop was a tablet and Vista has great new features for tablets. Folks, this is the worst operating system I have used ever. Sure, the new transparent windows are neat and the new explorer windows are definitely an improvement, but I’ve never been more frustrated. Vista is a classic story of attempting to solve a problem by accretion. OS insecure, add another layer of firewall, user annoyance, and make many device drivers incompatible. Really, I could write a dissertation on why Vista is a POS, but that’s not the point.

The point is that there is a powerful lesson here for all of us software professionals. It is a lesson I have been thinking long and hard about. The lesson is that building ever more complex solutions via accretion while delivering more problems and obstacles to users is a good way to lose customers.

Apple did something incredibly daring by
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$6 Billion? Did I hear that right? A CLASSIC column by Dvorak. This is just astonishing. The photo of Mr. Ballmer is priceless.