Henry

No Rules!

Destination

Impossible!

Miracle!

Something

Business = Knowing Customers

The business equations are changed; the success is no longer driven by fundamental values, virtually every product is matching each other in terms of technology, quality and price. The only thing, which can make the difference is, the way you interact with customers.

The best of interaction can happen only by knowing the person better.

There are fundamental questions, need to be addressed before, you start developing customer focused CRM applications

We Are Not Our Users

In a recent article, Scott Berkun describe the kind of thinking that's missing, when designing softwares

We develop inbred thinking in this industry. We spend most of our time with people who scored over 700 on their math SATs, we know people involved in IPOs and stock options, and we work with folks who take computers apart for fun. We forget that the people within our industry are very different from the rest of the world. That's why going into the usability lab or a focus group seems like a trip into the twilight zone. It seems like those users are in the minority, visiting us from some twisted and slower universe. The reality is this: We are the overwhelming minority. Those visitors in the usability lab are the majority, and they are the folks using our products and paying our salaries.

There is no substitute for watching someone use something you've built. It's the only way to see how your intended goals match with the reality. Would you want a surgeon to operate on you without examining you before as well as after the surgery? Would you want a building contractor to remodel your kitchen without discussing your plans and making sure you got what you needed? Good craftspeople want to understand the world in which their product will be used before building it. We have the amazing power to create things, and it's easy to fall into the trap of building things that appeal to us as creators, instead of things that will appeal to our customers. There's no way to know how biased you are without working through usability engineering and other forms of customer feedback. You must spend time with users throughout the product cycle, repeatedly refreshing the team perspective on what you're building and for whom.

New World!

Each morning is the open door to a new world - new vistas, new aims, new plans, new thoughts...and whether one is twenty, forty, sixty, or eighty; whether one has succeeded, failed or just muddled along - life begins each morning! - L. M. Hodges

Evolution Delivery Methodology

Development processes are evolved over years, waterfall approach no longer in practice, we are evolved into so called iterative methodologies where change in requirement are accepted, but still, there are delays, development failures, dissatisfaction of customers.

All these continues, because of scheduling and estimating the development and delivery as sequence of phases, all these phases are continues process, never going to be in the state of completed, a constant change will be there as a iteration. This can be solved only by scheduling, estimating and delivering applications with the set of feature it is going to offer, something like, in the first phase we are going to deliver this set of features, in the next phase, we are going to deliver this set, etc, Evolution delivery is the process of delivering software in small, incremental stages. An initial prototype, subset of the software is build and tested. New features are added and existing features refined with successive versions of the system. The prototype evolves into the finished product. You can see this approach in the whole Microsoft product range, they start with the functional prototype, then they release the product just to be in that domain, then they start adding features one by one and dominate the market in few versions. This what happened in Microsoft Office, Money and of course IE.

Fault Tolerance in Application Logic

Since the computer systems are doing a import role in the today's business world, the need for maintaining the application in active state, becomes very crucial, if you look at why our systems fails, they are designed to operate in a sequence, as a sequence of steps, from booting sequence, to complex business logics, we are following the same logic, if any thing gets failed in the middle, everything gets failed.

Multiple routing should be implemented in every aspect of the system, we already achieved this multi routing options, in server level, especially, load balancing web and application servers, cascading, replicated databases and application servers.

We have to follow the same approach in writing business logic also, failures in the business logic should be considered as partial success, the options to resume/continue the sequence once, the raised failure is resolved.