Do What Matters

One of my colleagues asked me a couple of days ago, what if the effort we are putting with changing strategies and taking calculated risk does not produce the desired result. This is a classic problem in decision making process which the famous management guru Peter Drucker called "The Right compromise". We have to start with what is right rather than what is acceptable ! Every decision we make has to meet its boundary conditions and we always have to make compromises at the end. But if we can not distinguish between right compromises and wrong compromises we are most likely to make wrong compromises at the end. To put this into context of the question that was asked, I will take Testing as an example. Boundary conditions of a software testing project are defined by uncovering quality bugs in the product and the confidence to release it to the customer. When we do not see the result that was expected, we make decision and as discussed above if decision was made with right com...

On September 20, IBM announced the acquisition of Netezza a data warehouse appliance company. Delivering high performance analytic solution using appliance approach is made possible using a commodity chip technology called FPGA. I did not know the use of FPGA in data analytics/query processing, until this Thursday, when I was talking to one of my colleagues and mentors at work. This made me more curious about the architecture of Netezza appliance and use of FPGA in general. What is FPGA and why is it popular in large data streaming? As it stands for Field Programmable Gate Array, the FPGA chip can be programmed by customer after manufacturing. They contain Programmable logic blocks capable of performing combinational logic. Since high performance business analytics means operating on very large data sets, traditional warehouse systems struggle to move data in low latency from disk over network. The Netezza appliance exploits the use of FPGA to filter out extraneous dat...

Yesterday BMW announced its Mini EV scooter in 2010 Paris Auto Motor show. The buzz was that it is iPhone ready  which actually let you connect your iPhone to it and use as a console to operate the scooter electronically. Looks glamorous too... Anyway, thats not the point. The point is that we the public are easily convinced by these big Car manufacturing companies that all of their electric substitutes are zero emission or emission free. But is it a valid case... It is zero emission only if the electricity generated is zero emission. This prompted me to do some digging on the source of electricity in this country. You will not be shocked but surprised to know that majority of electricity used in this country is generated using fossil fuels; almost half using coal (Source: Department of Energy website ) Only one fifth of US electricity is provided by Nuclear power. The picture on left shows the different sources that produced electricity we use everyday. Pow...

On the occasion of International Peace day, this article is a must read for all of us. http://www.wikihow.com/Live-in-Peace

As a QA manager, I have to constantly evaluate the most fundamental aspects of testing in my project that is finding bugs in the code. What if you implement the well designed and created test plan and still do not find bugs. Or you simply encounter resource and time problem, where early detection of bugs is much more important than following the process finishing the automation for example). I talked about exploratory testing in one of my previous posts. Exploratory testing is a informal testing which is totally different from the formal testing paradigm where emphasis is on reuse such as acceptance and regression testing. Ad hoc testing is considered by many as aimless black box testing approach, but its contextual. In many situations ad hoc testing can be very useful. So what is an ad hoc test? An ad hoc test is a case which you run only once unless it uncovers a bug. A primary goal of ad hoc testing is to uncover a new bug in the product. If exercised by highly experienced tester ...

Did you know that you could use google search to calculate trigonometric function, convert units or simply do arithmetic functions. Take a look at few examples and try it out: http://www.google.com/help/calculator.html

Japanese government released its foresight survey in June which basically is the futuristic view of a panel of 40 scientists. In past these foresight survey has been very accurate. In 1997 these futurists said that Internet based phone service would be available in 2003, the same year Skype was debuted. Here is the current foresight survey taken from Popular science magazine: 2020 - Thin flexible electronic displays will replace newspapers. 2022 - Synthetic blood will make blood donation unnecessary 2023 - Any cancer will be cured by medicine 2025 - Electric cars will go 310 miles in a single charge (In fact with rapid enhancement in Lithium Ion battery technology, this could be possible in next 6 -7 years.) 2026 - domestic humanoids (intelligent robots) will do house chores 2028 - Television will produce smells and tastes to every living room 2030 - Artificial Intelligence will be able to form opinion on books, movies and art 2031 - Earth orbiting space vehicle will offer sigh...

I have seen many videos on how to party and network, but first time I came across a video to teach you how to be alone. This is by fiilmaker, Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis. Also you may be interested in reading a NY Times article about giving your brain a needed downtime.