Gary Allison's Leadership Blog

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.

We just returned from Smith Point Texas where we witnessed feats of ordinary heroism that warrant recording here.  Lets start with Fred, president of the volunteer fire department, and his wife Jennifer, who the next day after the storm return to Ike’s bullseye to assess the damage, and took pictures of everyone’s home and posted it on the web so that all the neighborhood could see the condition of their home.  And Fred, heeding the calls of a desperate voice far off in a quagmire of mud dredge up from the bay and deposited all over Smith’s Point by Ike, found and rescued a man who floated on a tank 11 miles from Port Bolivar.  Fred and Jennifer are a force at the Fire station every day, handing out meals to those returning to dig out.  Did I mention, Fred and Jennifer’s home is a total loss?

And Louis, tirelessly helping neighbors rework broken pipes so that they can get water flowing again in their homes.  And Ben, fixing, hauling, and building everything in sight, for anyone, even though he doesn’t have a home there.  And the countless trucks of linesmen from Virginia, North Carolina, and Michigan, who had new lines up and power flowing after a week back to the remote community of Smith Point.  And the stories go on, and on, of neighbor helping neighbor to dig out of 8 inches of mud in their homes, hauling out water heaters, washer, dryers out of yards, cutting up fallen trees, hauling away dead cattle, and searching for lost memories among the flotsam.

The American Red Cross has won everyone’s heart in Smith Point.  Their providing of meals, MREs (boy have these improved since I was a child in the Air Force), and clean water.  I am a donor for life at http://www.redcross.org.  In our little neighborhood, probably 1/3 of the houses are simply gone without a trace, boats are everywhere, the woods are full of homes demolished in Crystal Beach or Port Bolivar, no one escaped unscathed.

More than anything, the story of Smith Point is a story of a community drawn closer by tragedy and adversity.  A story of human determination and the quiet, resolve of Texans picking up the pieces, helping their neighbors and starting over.  It makes you proud to be an American.

Recently, we evaluated several Agile Project Management tools.  Having used XPlanner for years, it was time for a change.  XPlanner is great in some ways – fairly lightweight and easy to use for developers.  It really falls apart though when you start to consider multiple agile teams working together to deliver a release.  It is just really problematic to get a group view of where you are, what progress is being made by the team, and where the hot spots might be.  To accomplish this, you need to drill into the details of every scrum team and study the metrics / charts.  I even went so far as to change the source code to build a dashboard – that’s when we started to approach diminishing returns.

The other shortcoming of XPlanner is the management of the product backlog and release planning.  Yes, you can work around this, but intrinsically, the tool does not support building a backlog and then moving stories into a sprint.  Yes, this can be done, but it is arduous.  The interface also is stuck in Web 1.0 land, making data entry into a form submit after form submit affair.

So then what?  Surveying the market and talking to many of my longtime friends developing software with agile process, we quickly build the short list to replace XPlanner. We looked in detail at Rally, VersionOne, and FogBugz.  Though FogBugz had some very interesting capabilities around predicting the accuracy of estimates, it didn’t really seem to support agile planning methodologies and the scrum process.  Also, though the predictive capabilities are interesting, this really isn’t a huge benefit in my opinion if agile is really used and you know your people.

So, it was down to VersionOne vs Rally.   Both companies did extensive demos for our leadership team and key stakeholders.  Both tools intrinsically are built around the scrum agile process.  Both were priced around the same level with VersionOne being just a little less per seat, per month, but Rally matched and beat this price point in our negotiations.  The huge gaping hole in VersionOne for us was that it really didn’t assist with resource planning at all.  That is, they don’t enable you to enter the amount of available resources in terms of hours, days, etc, and then in the planning cycle show you where you are in using those hours as you take stories from the backlog and add them to the sprint.  Both tools track burndown during the sprint of course, but only Rally lets you know if you are planning too many stories in the sprint.  Even XPlanner supports this, so it is a big miss for VersionOne.  We can only assume they are working to add this capability.

Also, the rollup reporting for an entire release is more powerful and flexible in Rally.  This was a big plus for us.  To be sure, Rally isn’t super sophisticated in resource planning.  It doesn’t allow the individual team members enter their availability and then sum it up for the sprint.  (I would like this feature – I need to add this to the Rally Community.)  Rather, it just allows you to add the total number of hours available for a sprint at the beginning of the planning cycle.  How you figure this out is up to you.  After you add the total number of hours available, it shows you hours remaining as you add stories.

In coming blogs, we’ll talk more about the pros and cons of Rally as a Agile management tool.

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.

The Third Sin of Software Projects is failing to understand its all about the people – attracting, retaining, and helping the best software development professionals available to succeed. The people on the project are the key determining factor of success. Let’s look at a few of the key factors in what we need in our people.

Productivity – you’ve probably read that top notch software developers are 2x – 5x more productive that the average developer. I’ve lived it and can attest. It’s not that the best will write 2 – 5 times as much code; it’s that they either can achieve the goal 2x – 5x more quickly, or just simply solve problems that others find unassailable. When I was early in my career I had the good fortune of working with just such a superstar: Brian. While I could hold my own in some of the most difficult projects, I could also see that Brian was simply a brilliant developer. He was simply world class, solving the most challenging issues and making it seem almost effortless. What if you could build a team mostly of this type of person? You could do anything! (FWIW: this also opened my eyes that I needed to focus my career on an area where I felt I could truly excel – leadership.)

Motivation – Software professionals are different than many other professionals in what motivates them. They are motivated by working with other smart people, working on challenging problems and cool technology, and by achieving a level of success personally and technically. (This last one is a complex subject as there are as many meanings of success as there are different types of people in software development). As leaders, we must understand that software professionals are motivated differently, and try to understand what success means to each person in our team.

Teams – In addition to having the most productive and motivated professionals, we need to be able to have them work effectively in a team. Dysfunctional personalities, poor attitudes, or weak contributors will torpedo a team very quickly. Any of these attributes in a team member negates all the positives above. Take a developer who is tremendously productive and knowledgeable, but just has a very negative attitude and they can drag everyone else down, kill cooperation and communication, and single handedly cause a project to fail. Conversely, a team that is made up of top-notch people that are motivated, focused, and check egos at the door can turn out the most innovative solutions imaginable.

Trust – finally, the key essential ingredient in the organization that makes it all work is trust. People within the team must trust each other to deliver, development must trust product mangers, teams must trust their leaders, and all the way through the organization. Very recently, I’ve heard about a situation where a new leader came into a development team and half the team left the company. It’s safe to say that more emphasis on building trust was needed! A subtle implication of trust is that integrity is required for trust to exist. The best companies I’ve worked with have a deep appreciation for all these ingredients, starting with the CEO. Those that don’t will fail.

In this business, we are all subject to schedule pressure which is essentially market pressure. This pressure is often real, coming from executive management, the board, or investors. Despite this, there are some necessary steps in the development process that can seem expedient to skip that in many cases, just shouldn’t be skipped:

• Prototyping the UI and getting feedback and buy in from Marketing and target customers. In the rush to get to market, we can easily skip this one. After all, once the design is done and the developers are implementing, its very expensive to change. Also, when working with new technologies, you don’t always know up front what is possible in the UI.
• Throw away the prototype. Its tempting to keep the hastily constructed prototype and evolve it into the final product. Especially when considering the need to prototype to explore UI options and technologies, this early deliverable is critical but also a mess under the covers. Learn from it and toss it.
• Internationalize the code and externalize strings up front. Its tempting to say “we can do that later”. Later is incredibly expensive. In our globalized world, most commercial software must be internationalized – design it in.
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