Did Microsoft Acquire Wand Labs for Talent or Technology?

While the whole world was talking about Microsoft’s famed acquisition of Linkedin, it quietly acquired yet another company- rather small in size called as Wand Labs.

In order to understand the specifics behind this acquisition, we would need to reverse jog our memory a few months back to Microsoft Build Conference. In this conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella laid out the vision of something called as “Conversation-as-a-Platform”.

Last year, I did write a bit about how future of IT will more depend upon how invisible it will be for the users. The crux here being that eventually technology will become so seamless that it will weave with our very fabric of existence, so much aligned with our lives that we wouldn’t even know it existed. When we reach that stage of maturity of technology, the current means of interacting with technology i.e. through keyboard or mouse or stylus or any other physical means with exist but will become unpopular over a period of time. When that happens, Microsoft (and a lot others) believe that we will interact with technology with language, with the power of spoken words- as we do as a second nature when interacting with humans. This future transformation is best put-forward by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert when he argues-

The current Web is “pull-based,” meaning we visit websites or download mobile applications. The future of the Web is “push-based,” meaning the Web will be coming to us. In the next 10 years, we will witness a transformation from a pull-based Web to a push-based Web. When this “Big Reverse” is complete, the Web will disappear into the background much like our electricity or water supply.

Nadella’s vision of “Conversation-as-a-Platform” calls for three “actors” as was framed in Build 2016 conference 1) People 2) Personal Digital Assistant 3) Bots.

Simply explained, People are conversation starters, Digital Assistants like Siri and Cortana understands people, their habits much like personal assistants (using AI, machine learning) and Bots integrate with digital assistants and help do very specific chores like booking a ticket, ordering food etc.

Satya Nadella believes puts Conversations-as-a-Platform in the same category of breakthrough innovations of the past like the graphical user interface, the web browser and the iPhone-driven adoption of the touchscreen. And Microsoft is not alone in the game here. We have Amazon Echo (Alexa), Facebook Messenger (which as per the recent news supports ~ 11000 bots) and Slack (something I need to explore more). I am awaiting my Echo device that I recently and luckily have won in a contest in my organization to experiment more.

Again, this gets me curious on what has made such big organizations bet so big on messaging apps ?
A comprehensive data would serve me better here but if i need to make an educated guess, the success of apps like WhatsApp has made every organization stand-up and take notice. Just look at the amount of time and attention we spend on WhatsApp (or any other competing app) every day. Every organization is trying to see what more can they do with this massive user attention. Bots seem to be a natural way to add more value to that user attention span by making it easier for users to do more tasks and further making them hooked.

So where does Wand Labs' offerings aligns with Microsoft's vision?

The technology that Wand Labs (was still in beta when acquired) offered revolved around questioning some key assumptions around the usage of mobile phones-

What if your apps could all talk to each other?

What if you could let your loved ones borrow your services like you lend them your credit card?

This shortcoming as shared by Vishal Sharma, the CEO of Wand Labs in a talk to backchannel.com explains the motive behind his start-up-

Back when the desktop ruled, there was a single comprehensible hub that provided access to unlimited content and activities — the browser. People typically used it with several tabs open and painlessly shifted from one task to the next. “But the minute we went to mobile, the browser failed,” he says. Living in a browser world was like residing in a contiguous continent. But now we live in a land of a thousand islands — those apps we keep installing — and keep hopping from one to another. And good luck if you try to share what’s inside one of those apps — in many cases even if your recipient is using the same app, he or she can’t do what you can, because your stuff is (understandably) protected with a password.

So Wand is meant to be an super application that acts much like browser did for desktop and helps turn an island of app into a continent of sorts where there are ways established for apps to talk to each other via its advanced messaging technology.

While Microsoft’s current bot technology and framework helps people talk to phone to get specific work done, the way Wand possibly adds value is that it augments this vision further by enabling various apps to exchange information with each other and lets users share app features with other friends.

I wasn’t quite able to try Wand to add my experience here as the service is shut now but will be eagerly waiting to see what Microsoft eventually does with it. I will particularly be interested in understanding the enterprise use cases such technology can support.

so why did Microsofy eventually acquire Wand Labs ?

To understand this, I will look back at Satya Nadella's memo to Microsoft employees post Linkedin acquisition where he shared the factors he keeps in mind while taking acquisitions decisions-

Given this is the biggest acquisition for Microsoft since I became CEO, I wanted to share with you 

how I think about acquisitions overall. To start, 

I consider if an asset will expand our opportunity — specifically, does it expand our total addressable market? 

Is this asset riding secular usage and technology trends? 

And does this asset align with our core business and overall sense of purpose?

Companies do acquisitions for various reasons, prime of them usually being make them more profitable and adding additional revenue streams like the last acquisition that I assessed. But this one seem different as Microsoft seem to have taken an early beta player (with possibly no revenue of its own). Its prime motives could be two-fold-

1. As evident from Nadella's memo- this posssibly helps be more relevant by being adept to technology trends.

2. Again from Nadella's memo, something that aligns with overall sense of purpose.

3. Getting great people into its talented work-force.

.              

2    What are your thoughts ?

Further, I will be looking forward to further assess a recent acquisition in enterprise space. Do watch this space for more updates.

My Advice to the Class of 2016

I had a chance last week to interact with the campus grads. joining my organization. It was more of a fun event with the Engineering Directors and towards the end, each Director was asked to give some piece of advice to the engineers on the first day of their jobs. There were some brilliant pieces of advice given by my colleagues and I did share few points from my side that I intend to share here. By nature, I am not the one to initiate giving advises unless asked. This is certainly not because I don’t want to help people but more so the realization that the engineers who have cleared such stringent selection process are smart and can be trusted to seek help when they need. Other aspect that I am mindful of is also that unsolicited advice (that’s given without being asked) is usually ignored and tends to project the advice-giver as someone superior, which I certainly not want to be seen as.

Here are my piece of two advises (given I had 2-3 minutes to talk) I gave to class of 2016-

Snapshot “First day of the Career” mindset:

As you will start working from next week, you would be dealing with Virtual Machines and Containers while working on engineering tasks. One of the interesting features that Virtual Machines and Containers have is creating infrastructure is the snapshot. The snapshot feature is most useful when you want to preserve the state of the virtual machine so you can return to the same state repeatedly.

Unfortunately our minds do not have snapshot feature and I would have so dearly liked it to have. But hypothetically if it had snapshot feature, I would have requested all of you to take snapshot of your current mindset, and asked you to retain it for future.

Being at your situation years back, the first day a job mindset is something like-

1.       All of you have a Beginners mindset. You are not afraid to try anything new and also not bogged down by thoughts/processes of the past.

2.       You have a positive fear that is leading you to think that you need to do well in your jobs.

3.       Passion to do well for yourselves and the organization.

4.       Very high energy/enthusiasm and motivation.

I bet to you- if you are able to retain this mindset every day, every hour till the last day of your career- you would have surely achieved something significant in your lives and careers. Just try and snapshot and use this state everywhere, especially when things aren’t working for you.

Software Engineering is a Team Game:

Second point, I believe all of you are special and very talented to have been selected to drive Citrix’s future. All of you would be looking to contribute individually towards the success of your respective products and Citrix. One thing that I wanted to share with you was to never forget that Software engineering is a team game. In order to win this game, in addition to being very strong Individual contributors, we need to be world class team players.

I admire Rahul Dravid as an outstanding Cricket player, but more so for his selfless display as a world-class team player for Indian cricket team. He said in Harsha Bhogle’s book-

“the team is like a pot. Some people put into the pot, others draw from it. Who puts in and who takes out depends upon the people as well as the moment. Ultimately, a team that has more people putting in rather than taking out is a happy team, a team more likely to win.”

So, please do remember this. As this quote says and I figured out personally by experiencing- one of the great ways to being a world-class team player is focusing on giving back to the team be it knowledge, a helping hand and voluntarily finding opportunities to help. Give back more than what you take from your team members.

School/College tests usually do not measure:

Creativity, Vision, Teamwork, Integrity, Grit, Passion, Empathy, Loyalty, Endurance, Humility, Compassion

But your success in organization will more depend upon how you master these skills in addition to technical skills. So, while you chase your individual glory, please remember that- individual successes alone don’t make organizations great but when team succeeds, organization succeeds.

What advice would you give to smart engineers on the first day of their jobs ?

Is Salesforce's Acquisition of Demandware a mutually beneficial one?

I started my career with contribution to a massive CRM based product and contributed towards it for more than 3 years. So it is safe to say that my last stint with CRM software was way back in the past. In that sense, this blog (about Salesforce acquiring Demandware for $2.8 bn- both CRM related companies) was not a default choice for me to write about but something still got me interested. Sharing some of my reasons here-

1. I was in one of the meetings recently that CEO of my current organization was hosting. A question came up about his philosophy around acquisitions. He said that his guiding question is- "What would we do to make them (the target company) better?". In saying this, he shared this example of Salesforce and Demandware acquisition, which got me curious to explore further.

2. Another coincidence, I was reading this book currently- "Behind the Cloud", which tracks the amazing story of success of salesforce.com.

3.I was recently discussing with my college friend on his idea of starting a podcast to study recent technology trends. We got to discuss a bit about studying technology acquisitions as a way to understand the direction our industry is headed.

4. Lastly, I had a good run while doing the technology journalism for techwell.com and during that stint, almost a year back or so. I did write a good lot about acquisitions happening at that time.

So, let’s look at some of the specifics here- starting with the core reason of existence of these companies.

Salesforce.com's customer relationship management service is broken down into several broad categories: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud, App Cloud, and IoT with over 100,000 customers. Salesforce.com was the first cloud-based enterprise application company.

Demandware is a software technology company providing a cloud-based e-commerce platform and related services for retailers and brand manufacturers around the world. Demandware was founded to provide a hosted service that would enable companies to develop and manage easy-to-use, customizable e-commerce websites, rather than building a site from scratch.

Given the similarity in the delivery models i.e. Software-as-a-Service, Demandware's acquisition allows Salesforce a direct entry into lucrative digital commerce market- which apparently was a missing piece in its portfolio.

So this raises a question- Why would Salesforce really have to target digital commerce segment?

A simple answer- because its competitors already have a presence in that segment. As this Forbes article suggests, 

SAP and Oracle have already ventured into the e-commerce domain through their acquisitions of Hybris and Art Technology Group, respectively, so the Demandware acquisition should help Salesforce continue to compete with its rivals.

As this graphic from the same Forbes article suggests, Salesforce has a steady lead over its competitors and this acquisition should further help them augment that lead.

In all, this acquisition will help Salesforce fill a major product gap and form a new product "Salesforce Commerce Cloud".

So, will Demandware really gain from this acquisition ?

On a lighter note, yes- they will gain $2.8 billion :-). But more seriously, the answer lies in the leveraging the success of Salesforce's Customer Success Platform. As this news suggests-

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud will be an integral part of Salesforce's Customer Success Platform, creating opportunities for companies to connect with their customers in entirely new ways. Salesforce customers will have access to the industry's leading enterprise cloud commerce platform, and Demandware's customers will be able to leverage Salesforce's leading sales, service, marketing, communities, analytics, IoT and platform solutions to deliver a more comprehensive, personalized consumer experience.

Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison who originally mentored Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. The book "Behind the Cloud" talks about how Ellison allowed Benioff, then an Oracle Executive, a rare privilege to start-up and work on Salesforce while being an Oracle employee. Interestingly, Salesforce.com proved to be the case of child exceeding father's achievements as it created a new market of online enterprise software and became an undisputed leader. Now, Oracle is playing a catch-up game with Salesforce. Larry Ellison was recently quoted to be bullish about reaching the $10 billion mark, a first for cloud based software company, even before Salesforce. Such competition makes Salesforce's Demandware acquisition even more strategic and necessary for retaining the future leadership of the company.

Further studying this acquisition from Product Strategy perspective, there are 2 strategies that appear on surface. One is that of product differentiation and other that of product expansion. The case of Salesforce acquiring Demandware seem to be more of the latter. This acquisition is not really a solid differentiation for Salesforce as its competitors are already invading that space. As the book- "Product Strategies for High Technology Companies" states-

Create and launch a continuing series of products that open new markets and fuel rapid growth. This is the dream of most high-technology companies. Expansion into the new markets is sometimes necessary for survival.

The book further states the case of approaches followed by Lotus Development Corporation and Microsoft in 80s. While Lotus achieved immense success with its 1-2-3 spreadsheet application but it remained vertically oriented, achieved its growth with variations around one successful product. Microsoft's strategy, on the other hand, contrasted with that of Lotus as it pursued a strategy of growth by expansion into related markets (OS- client, server, Browser etc.) .

Taking a cue from this example, it is probably in the best interests of future growth and survival of both Salesforce and Demandware that they operate under a single direction and help each other grow.

Please do share your comments regarding this analysis.

Coming up next is a bit of commentary around Microsoft's recent acquisition. And no, its not about Microsoft-Linkedin.

Stay tuned!

Fundamental Lessons I (re)learned from a Public Spotfix Activity

The last week was a memorable one for me, truly memorable. I was part of a group of volunteers from my organization, in collaboration with Ugly Indians, helped rescue a filthy part of our city and made it liveable again.
From Wikipedia - The Ugly Indians (TUI) are an anonymous group of motivated volunteers who clean Indian streets.TUI calls cleaning the street "Spot-fixing". TUI chooses small segments of road each week to clean: pavements piled up with plastic, defaced walls, footpaths rendered unusable by potholes as spot-fixing places. All tools, materials and instructions are provided on the spot. All spot fixes are self-funded and volunteers are requested to make a contribution towards material costs.

The Spotfix area chosen was at the start of Ulsoor Road, which is one of the prominent areas around the heart of city of Bengaluru. This Spotfix area we chose is surrounded by Army establishments. This event was scheduled from 7:00 AM to 10:00 AM everyday from 24th-May to 26th-May.
This picture depicting before and after situation tells a lot about the transformation that was achieved in a record time of almost three hours by 40 plus volunteers-

As amazing as the transformation looks, we couldn't think but admire how much could we achieve in so less time. Before we started the volunteering act, the representative from The Ugly Indians during the address to the team said this- “How much work can you get done in 3 hours?”. He also referred to us in corporate life having been a part of many multiple hours meetings that achieved almost nothing productive. And he said that today, you will be surprised at what you will achieve as a group if you just stick to the tasks and work hard at achieving them.
When we looked at the place after the event, I personally didn’t believe that we would be able to turn it around I just 3 hours as well as it eventually became.
Bill Gates had once said “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” What this group of volunteers achieved in three hours was pretty much reverse of what Bill Gates seem to have been suggesting in this quote. We actually underestimated what we could achieve in a short span of three hours.

This transformation wasn't just physical in nature as it helped transform my mind and thoughts a bit and helped me relearn some of the aspects about leading the life, that i share below-



When faced with a mammoth task, always first look to break it into manageable chunks-
This is what Ugly Indians team seemed to have done when they came up with everything possible for this project ready. They had broken down tasks to the level of granularity that each person knew what was supposed to be done. Overall tasks that got accomplished were- cleaning the filthy areas (pulled 2 trucks worth of garbage) during shovels, brooms etc., painting of walls after brushing and cleaning, painting the pavements. All this couldn't have been done without simplifying the visibly complex chore into the chunks that each person could singularly accomplish.

When working in a team, focus more on giving back-
There were several instances where people just volunteered for the tasks without being told. I could see when some people were tried after hammering, digging the surface and resting- the other set of people just took over from where the previous set of people left, without being asked. That is the essence of true team work- understanding the pain of team members and silently offer self to the cause of helping others without expecting a sense of reciprocity.

Focus on Work, not who gets the credit:
 The Ugly Indian's guiding philosophy is summed-up in this Hindi language phrase- "Kaam chalu mooh bandh", which means- Stop Talking, Start Doing. And that is exactly what happened during those three hours. One of the most beautiful feelings that i encountered during this whole act was people just didn't worry about who got the credit. Everyone was so engrossed in getting the tasks during, almost in their zone, that helping others almost became a second nature for these 3 hours that we spent there. It was so refreshing to see "will i get credit for my work" mentality taking a backseat.

Do the difficult, more often:
We should find ways to squeeze in few difficult tasks, the tasks that we have never done before in our work days and life in general. Most of the folks who participated today hadn’t done spot fixing before, but at the end- almost everyone were happy seeing the outcome. All the participants felt happy going beyond their own comfort zone and achieving something tangible.

Focus on work, not on distractions:
The Ugly Indians representative, earlier in the day, shared that sometimes few folks who see people work in public try to rebuke and make comments. Given that it’s a public activity such reaction, though unwarranted, is somewhat not uncommon. He suggested us to just stay focused on work and politely ask the people to join and help make city clean. Though there were few people we encountered who acted like this, most of the passerby thanked us for our act of selflessness.

Book Review: Agile Product Development: How to Design Innovative Products That Create Customer Value

I picked up this book to gain a rich, practitioner’s perspective on the art of product design and development. I call this art because as any true science would propagate, there is no single way to develop the products that customers find valuable. Knowing Tathagat and having followed his work closely over the years, i knew that this book will have practical insights. The insights that are not overly academically oriented and are sought with rich practical Tech. industry experience that Tathagat brings to the fore.

After having read through the book, i can very convincingly say that- it was a time well spent reading the book. It was a time well spent on learning. It was a time well spent on getting that additional 1% perspective that can make a true difference to build products that positively influences the customer's experience.

Let me first say what this book is not. This book is not a primer on best practices. Infact, the way it is narrated- it mostly rejects the notion of best practices. Rather it preaches practitioners to be adaptable to situations and evolve the methodologies. Towards this, it gives insights into various frameworks, methodologies that can be leveraged based on the contexts and limitations under which given projects are being executed. This thinking is quite in alignment with the spirit of Agile manifesto.

Secondly, this book does not over-glorify any single phase of the entire process of Software development. It covers virtually all aspects of building (does not cover marketing/selling) products including Product management, design, development and testing. I could see this balance beautifully maintained throughout this book.

Thirdly, this book will not make you expert in each of the different phases in product development as quite visibly, that's not the intention here. But it gives you an end-to-end perspective of the entire life cycle of building the product, which not many books (atleast in my viewpoint) provides.

In order for me to convey what this book is all about, i would better say it with the quotes from the book that i shared (as tweets) while reading this book. Some of them are as below-

- Deliver Not documents … but the software! #AgilevsWaterfall

- Work estimation is not a mechanical activity. If anything, it is a social activity.

- An old saying goes that walking on water and working on product requirement are very easy— if only they were both frozen!

- Human-centered design is a mindset that recognizes we can build better products by learning from our users.

- “Design is a popular subject today...in the face of increasing competition, design is the only product differentiation"- Deiter Rams, 1976

- "Develop customers in a similar fashion as we develop products—start with several hypotheses and rigorously test them..." - Steve Blank

- At last count, Google had done 178 acquisitions, Yahoo! 112, Cisco 170, and even a company as young as Facebook had done 53 acquisitions.

- Agile takes the idea of a cross-functional team to a “self-organizing team” which is beyond silos, adapts itself & acquire newer competencies

- There is a saying in the Swiss Army manual—when the map and the terrain disagree, trust the terrain!

- Processes are meant to serve people— not the other way round.

- For today’s businesses, adaptation is key. Process is secondary. And the specific flavor of process is a distant tertiary.

- "Agile process" is an oxymoron

- In the past man has been first. In the future the System will be first. —Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Mgmt, 1911

- There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement, otherwise you’ve made a discovery.

- "Reality is that following an agile process, or any process for that matter, makes us “un-agile."

In all, the book is quite rich in references- some of which i read during the course of reading and few others i have bookmarked for future. This book rightly promotes Agility as a mindset and set of values and practices rather than a written-in-stone process and it makes this point very well. Already in my re-read list.

My Recent (bad) Experience of Fuel Theft by HP Petrol Pump

HP Petrol Pump at Koramangla

This is my story of catching the pilferage at HP Petrol Pump at Koramangla 3^rd Block, Bengaluru. 

Below sequence of events are from Thursday, 3^rd-Mar-2016, starting around 5:35 PM.

1.       I had visited HP petrol pump to fuel-up my vehicle. I always go for full tank while filling in Diesel and I fill the fuel roughly once per month.

2.       On the said day, Thursday, 3^rd-Mar-2016, I went to this petrol pump in Bengaluru and asked for full tank.

.       As I drive a Scorpio, my average full tank bill hovers around INR 2300-2400. This time, the attendant filled up the fuel and stopped at INR 1986 and asked me whether I want to top-up. The top-up is a term that the fuel attendants use when the fuel being put in the tank touches the nozzle. The top-up means if I want to fill the fuel to the brim. I usually say No to this request and this is what I did that day too.

4.       Seeing the bill as only INR 1986 surprised me a bit especially given the fact that Diesel price was increased just a few days back on 1^st-Mar. By this increase, I should have ideally got higher bill. Since this struck me odd, I checked my fuel indicator in the vehicle, which listed that its just about less than 3/4^th filled.

5.       The fuel tank indicator clearly indicated that my tank was not full, which I had originally requested.

Litre reading is blank

6.       I asked the attendant if there is some problem. While I was asking this, I noticed that the measure on the pump only indicated the cost of fuel transaction i.e. INR 1986 but it didn’t indicate how many liters of diesel were consumed. (see the image on the side- the litres reading is blank )

Manual receipt hurriedly created

    .       While I gave my credit card for billing, I asked the attendant on how many liters worth fuel was put couple of times. I didn’t get a clear answer. Then suddenly, one of the attendants created a manual receipt written by hand that said 41 litres and INR 1986. He probably assumed that i will take this and go.

   .       I questioned him back on why the pump is not showing the liter reading as it normally does. Seeing me question so much, they started talking among themselves.

   .       One of the guys from HP who was attending, then attached the machine to the pump where nozzle

rests and generated the printed bill for my fuel transaction. And to my amusement and anger, it showed that the diesel consumed was 33.33 Ltrs (see the image) and the actual cost of transaction was INR 1616.838

After seeing this, I gave the HP attendants piece of my mind and made sure to tell each and every person at the petrol pump who were filling in the fuel on what these guys just did to me. In all the rush, the attendants, seeing me create a scene, quietly said Sorry to me and handed over the remaining INR 370. After handing over, again said sorry to me.

It’s such a shame that fuel companies do such pilferage and have such a corrupt mindset at the grass-root level.

Just wanted to share some of my learnings from this incident in the end-

1.       Please do check the fuel pump reading properly while the fuel is being filled.

2.       Please ensure that post fuel filling the fuel pump shows both liter readings and the amount of the bill. In my case the litres were clearly missing and that would have been intentionally done.

3.       Ask for the machine generated receipt. Do not go for handmade receipt.
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    Update on 13th-Mar-2016:
    Thanks to my friends in Facebook for sharing this ordeal, to my surprise, this blog eventually reached the In-charge of the petrol pump under question and he updated the following as a comment in my blog on 9th-March, 2016.
     Anonymous Anonymous said...
     Dear Mr. Anju,
     Thanks for sharing cheating incidence. I request you provide your contact number.
     March 9, 2016 at 1:37 PM


      After a few exchanges over the comments, i requested Prakash to send me an email where i sent my contact details. I received the following email-

     Prakash did diligently call on the same day and even followed-up when i was not able to receive his call a couple of times. I spoke to him around 9:00 PM or so. He said the following to me-
1. He acknowledged why he was calling me.
2. He said that he has seen the CCTV footage since gave exact time and acknowledged that some of his staff has indeed cheated.
3. He further suggested me to come over to Petrol pump. He requested to come with an empty tank and said that he will ask the employees who cheated to completely fill the petrol talk. Post that he will ask them to pay me for full tank from their pocket and will fire me post it. He said to inform me before i came.
4. Though it sounded like a good gesture on his part but it lead to some unanswered questions in my mind like-
   - If he has seen the CCTV footage, then why is he asking me to come ? He can fire the employees just based on that.
   - Why is he asking me to come only empty tank (he suggested that 2-3 times).
   - Why should i trust him ?
5. I did question whether he was not in the petrol pump when the incident happened. He said that he had gone for lunch. It again sounded fishy on why would any go on lunch break close to 6:00 PM in the morning.
I eventually decided to stop following-up due to these open questions but learned a good deal from this experience.

35 points from my talk at Amadeus Inc.

I recently had an opportunity to talk at Amadeus Inc.'s internal learning forum. I got an invite to talk sometime in Nov. 2015 but some of the prior commitments made me to defer delivering the talk till 11th-Jan-2016. In the end, I was glad that I made it and enjoyed delivering the talk, which I titled as- "Taking the Plunge- Lessons Learned in an Evolving Testing Career". It was an hour long talk that I had themed more based on my experiences. In this session, I focused on some of the mistakes that i have made in my career and shared a perspective on how not to do stuff.

I have long observed that in most of the conferences, the professionals do well to share the innovation and creative stuff they are doing. There is nothing wrong in this sharing but what i find dearly missing is that there are almost no talks focused on sharing the mistakes that professionals have done. 

I do considering sharing mistakes as an apt means to contributing back to the profession because sharing them, in a way, makes sure that the next generation of professionals won't do the same mistakes as you have done and hence leading to betterment. One day, i do hope to see a conference organized in which people just share their mistakes and talk about how they went about correcting them. Always sharing achievements and super efforts is plain boring and if repeatedly done, becomes less inspiring too. Below is the summary of key points that i spoke.

Key points I shared:

Opening thoughts:

1. Taking the plunge means-

              Venture something, commit oneself, 

              To begin an unfamiliar venture, especially after hesitating

              To decide to do something

              To devote oneself to or undertake an activity earnestly or wholeheartedly

2. Two main ways to contribute back to one’s profession,

              Do innovations and share with others

              Do mistakes and share with others.

              Having been in conference circles for a long time, what I noticed was that people are sharing their innovations but they aren't doing as much on sharing the mistakes front. I just feel that has to change for the betterment of the profession.

3. The hard thing is not making mistake and correcting it. The hard thing is making mistake, correcting it and be open, bold and courageous to share the learnings with others.

Some of the factors that makes one great- professionally:

4. Greatness in testing or any other profession is not a matter of doing exceedingly well for a session or a day or a year. It’s a career thing.

5. “Will someone else (not you) attempt to acknowledge your own legacy?

6. A viable test for greatness- "Are you the reason people join Software testing?"

Basic thoughts on Software testing:

7. No Job is inferior or superior, only our thinking is.

9. Good engineers first understand the “why” and the “what”, bad engineers jump straight to the “how”.

9. Fact: Software testing is not complete till it is communicated

10. If I want to get better at testing, I must read and apply plenty of testing books alone. This a wrong notion.

11. Learn broadly, Apply specifically

People relationships do matter at work:

12. Good relationship tip: If you want something from someone, never reach out to them for the first time when you need that very thing.

13. Good relationship tip: Use Praise genuinely, intelligently and at the right time

What trends are impacting Software testing? (Will write separate blogs to explain these)

14. Amazon makes changes to production every 11.6 seconds on average in May of 2011. Facebook releases to production twice a day. Many Google services see releases multiple times a week, and almost everything in Google is developed on mainline. Continuous delivery is the buzz word.

15. One of the main uses of continuous delivery is to ensure we are building functionality that really delivers the expected customer value. The idea is that- even if you build a project on time, on budget and with high quality, it still isn’t sure to be a success if the customers don’t consider it valuable.

16. Gmail was launched in 2004 and was in beta till 2007. Users did bulk of testing.

17. Companies doing code reviews post push to production. It was unheard of earlier but is happening now. From Quora's engineering site-At Quora, we generally do post-commit code reviews. That is, the code goes out live in production first and someone comes and reviews the code later. To give you an idea of the scale, yesterday 48 of us pushed code 187 times in total. Post-commit reviews are great since they unblock the author to push code and move on to other tasks.

18. Software testing facing pressure from Revolutionary development methods like lean start-up, Rapid release velocity like in the case of Amazon, Architecture evolution like Platform style architecture, Software appearance evolution like the advent of invisible software, And the direction from visionaries.

19. Consumers are fast taking up the role of testers.

20. Automation becoming mandatory part of test job description.

21. Will software eat software testing ?

22. What got you here won't get you there ? The skills of past that made us successful may not make us successful in future too.

23. The core question everyone should ask is- “what am I doing to prepare myself, my practice, and my company for this new reality?”

24. If the company grows, then there may come a time later down the line when the company outgrows an employee because the employee still has the same skill set that he had when he first joined. Employees need to develop foresight to avoid this trap.

Manager-Subordinate relationship

25. Manager-Employee relationship is one of the most talked about, yet ironically one of the least understood relationship. Almost everyone you know is a boss to some people and subordinate to some other. We play dual roles in the organizations i.e. that of subordinate and that of a boss.

26. The two core questions- a) What does your boss owe you? b) What do you owe your boss?

27. When your consciousness and focus in any relationship is driven by what the other person owes you that what you owe that person, that is asymmetry. Asymmetry means you are giving less than what you take out of that relationship. This asymmetry exists in most of subordinate-employee relationship and is the root cause of strife and disappointment. Hence, it is important for any good subordinate to think about the boss’s needs as much as he or she would like the boss to think of his or her needs.

28. There is a great deal of literature available on how to be a good leader or a manager but very less information that exists on how to be a good subordinate.

29. Aristotle once remarked- “The true test of a first class mind is the ability to hold two diametrically opposite thoughts in the mind and yet be able to function.”

Thoughts on Career management:

30. The most dangerous phrase in the language is "we've always done it this way."

31. When was the last time you did something that completely changed the course of the way you test?

32. Can you write your own version of “Lessons learned in Software testing”?

33. We are becoming slightly obsolete every single day.

34. "Life is on an incline. You either go up, or you come down."

35. A normal career is around 30-35 years or around 8085 days or around 1820 weekends. One of the weekends just passed by, other one is coming. Respect time and how you use it, it’s just constantly passing by. Doing more in a stipulated time leads to satisfaction, Doing less leads to regret. Choose your path wisely!