OMG NGA is GA

I’m so excited, 
And I just can’t hide it. 
I’m about to write and post 
And I hope you’ll like it.

 For those who are not much into abbreviations, the title states:
“Oh My God, Next Generation ALM is (in) General Availability”

And to be precise ALM Octane, the official name of what used to be known as NextGen ALM, is now officially available to the general public.

This is truly a very exciting event for me as I have so much to tell about ALM Octane and so much to brag about the great achievements made. Now that ALM Octane is out I can let go of all that information and share it.

And still I must practice some restraints and to go slowly here and not just bring out an avalanche of information. So let’s start with some introductory facts:

It is Just Awesome

Once you create yourself an ALM Octane SaaS instance (and you will, you are, you did – well done!!) you will understand what I mean by “Just Awesome”. The user experience alone is one of our greatest prides. We strive not just to provide highly rich functionality. We have put a lot of effort in making it highly usable and engaging.

- Once inside, treat yourself to our interactive introduction tour- 

It is Abundant

Already in its debut, ALM Octane offers a wide set of capabilities and rich functionality: Fusing the best of quality management and agile management tool-sets down to integrating with continuous integration (CI) tools.

- A CI Pipeline showing its executed jobs and their test results - 

It is Genuinely Collaborative

ALM Octane embodies collaboration not just by means of passing notes between stakeholders but primarily by having all assets interconnected. This way for example, a developer can easily if how well the features and stories the developer is assigned to are covered by tests and how the tests results reflect on the content quality level. A QA engineer can easily access all related material relating to the features being covered and to get direct insights on the automated tests execution status up to the point of validating the test practices in conjunction with real production usage.

- User Stories reflecting their test coverage status - 

It is Highly Configurable

With much customization capabilities such as Business Rules, User Defined Fields, Workflow (of phases and transitions), Layout definition, and User Roles, ALM Octane can be easily molded to fit the exact needs of your teams, groups, divisions and your entire company.

-  Phases and Transitions make up the overall Workflow of an entity - 

It is just what every Enterprise needs

Though Scalability, Reliability, and Openness are IT terms that are easily tossed in the air in every IT related conversation, we keep taking these issues with great earnestness. ALM Octane is designed from the ground up to be an enterprise ready tool and cater to these factors.

It is Complimentary for ALM\QC Customers

Every customer on active maintenance for ALM\QC is entitled to ALM Octane.
So what are you waiting for...

Want to know more?

Drop me a note and write down a comment.

Save the Best for Start – Lesson learned from Switzerland Got Talent

How many times did you get to deliver a presentation with an amazing summary and punchline that came short in creating the effect you wanted to have?

See Corinne Sutter, this speed painter, doing her gig and how she almost lost her ticket in to the Switzerland Got Talent show: 

Part of the job for many of us involves presentations and those can come in various flavors. It can be of describing new ideas and initiatives for peers and managers, or instructional presentations for colleagues and customers, and of course sales presentation.

In most cases the attention of the crowed is limited and the more we stretch the limit of that span of attention the more likely we may lose most of the audience as the presentation progresses. This may result in a weaker buy-in for our ideas, or in reduced level of understanding of the concepts we try to convey, or simply failing to make that sell.

I, myself, am quite a logical person, thinking most of the time in a linear way. And for quite a long time, when I was asked to deliver a presentation I tried to take the audience through that linear path from Point A to the inevitable Point Z. I always thought that the people I talk to will have a better understanding of my idea\solution\business value if I will be able to first create a proper foundation of knowledge.

They will follow if they know where you are heading

As logical as this may sound, this form of a presentation will usually be less successful. People want to know where you are going, and where you are taking them. If the end point remains uncertain and illusive for a lengthy period of time (and that can be 30 seconds in an elevator pitch or 10 minutes in a key note session) the audience will become very uncomfortable, tired and sometimes even frustrated. In Corrine case above it took 1 minute and a half to be deemed as too long and boring.

This one goes under “Don’ts”

Keep the best for Start – Your bottom line must be placed on top. It would be best to engage your audience with your eventual goal close to the start and only later show the proofs and foundations to support your goal or idea.

Spill the beans right from the start

Do note that from storytelling perspective you can make your supporting arguments that follow your bottom line to be as engaging and exciting as the revelation of your eventual idea – that would be a good idea for another post.

50 Shades of Grey, a Black and Blue Dress, and your Development Methodology

I recently noticed that the buzz on social media had just about subsided from the great commotion around the “50 Shades of Grey” film debut to be once again excited over a completely different set of hues.

It is indeed quite baffling to see how two individuals have two different interpretations of the same picture of a colored dress.  Naturally many explanations have popped up on the net and now everyone speaks freely and confidently of photography and neuro-optical terms such as “White-Balance”, “Color Constancy” and “Vision-Bias” and mainly of the illusive notion of perception.

Black or Gold?

A similar paradox of perception can be observed in organizations dealing with application and software development. If you ask several stakeholders of the same organization of their development methodology and most likely you will get as many answers as the number of stakeholders you ask. On the very wide methodology spectrum ranging from extreme waterfall to extreme agile, most companies are located somewhere in between those extremes.  Some will deem their methodology to be agile—just for the fact that the teams work in iterations and practice daily scrum. Others will deem it Waterfall—just for still keeping fully documented specifications.

The tints and hues of the methodology differ from one company to another. While within each company methodologies keep evolving and moving along the wide spectrum of practices. Large enterprises even find themselves dealing with many shades of methodologies being practiced simultaneously by the various departments and teams. Much like Escher’s Waterfall, when you look at your organization, its methodologies may look at times much like a waterfall and at times they look quite iterative as Agile practices suggest.

Is it Waterfall or Iterative

Regardless of the methodology you are using, if it is not managed and enforced properly it is bound to fail.

Efficient and effective application delivery requires a management tool to fit your shade of methodology. With much more than 50 shades of application lifecycle management techniques, it is quite a challenge to find a tool that matches your specific methodology with all its nuances and your particular line of business.

For this reason many organizations find HP Application Lifecycle Management\Quality Center to  be the best tool to accommodate their many shades of ALM. With its rich and extremely flexible customization means HP ALM\QC can be fashioned to depict the exact workflow and policies your organization chooses to follow. The moment your organization decides to modify the process and lean more toward agile - or maybe even become more entrenched in waterfall practices - HP ALM\QC can be easily adjusted to accommodate any such change.

Coming soon to a server near you

Moreover, with its various integration and synchronization means, HP ALM\QC can redeem ad-hoc silo systems that are being used by various teams from their isolation and hook those systems into the overall ALM workflow.

HP ALM\QC is a unique tool that adjusts itself to the particular methodology of the organization and does not enforce any particular shade of ALM.

HP ALM\QC works for you and not the other way around.

No matter what your shade of methodology is, If you haven’t tried HP ALM\QC yet – give it a shot and download it here.

[This post is a mirror post of the one I published on HP's Blog]

A Managed System is worth a thousand (MS) Words

Business Analysts (BA), for various reasons, still choose to use document tools such MS Word and Excel as the primary tool for defining and managing the product requirements.

Their inclination toward using Word and Excel is very much understood. The gratification is immediate—except for styling and indentation there is not much effort required. This is where the gratification stops and complexity begins. After all, no BA is an island, and the collected requirements are supposed to be shared and managed by multiple stakeholders. Such stakeholders include requirements reviewers, developers, testers and marketing managers.

When an entire set of requirements is handled as one big chunk of text it is quite impossible to reach proper levels of governance, collaboration and business intelligence.

Image courtesy of Dilbert.com

Comparing handling requirements using Word and Excel to managing requirements using managed systems reveals the shortcomings of Word and Excel. Here are just a few that come to top of mind:

Lack of Governance

• Lost Requirements – When a requirement boils down to one or a few paragraphs, with an unintentional flick of a button, a requirement can be mistakenly deleted. And when the document is saved, the requirement is practically purged. These are the times when you start praying to the gods of Word and Excel and email that you have a previous copy to find the requirement. 
• No Workflow Enforcement – A document as a whole and even the particular sections and paragraph are expected to follow some sort of workflow. For example, going from draft stage to Review and Sign-off stages. As no inherent means are provided by Word and Excel to do so, each company finds itself inventing some color-coding, labeling by comment, dedicated table mechanisms to achieve that flow. Such mechanisms rely on the authors’ good will and meticulousness to manage and maintain those mechanisms. Such methods are fragile and break quite quickly. 
• No History – Unless you put the effort of keeping a change table or saving the document in My_Feature_2014_11_10.docx there is no way for you or any other stakeholder to examine the changes that were made or to learn of the particular person who made a change. Not to mention that reverting back to a previous copy of a section in the document is almost impossible. When regulations and auditing come into play, no history means there is no way your process will ever be approved. 
• No Access Permission Level – Once you (and any other person) are in the document for editing purposes you are free to modify anything you want either intentionally, inadvertently, or even maliciously without leaving a trace.

Lack of Collaboration

• No Single Source of Truth – Even if you utilize shared repositories such as 
  MS Sharepoint there is no guarantee that the Sharepoint copy is indeed the latest. Even as the owner of the document, you cannot assure that all the other stakeholders are retrieving the last copy you shared. This results in multiple copies that are scattered around the company with no true reflection of what is the most updated truth.
• No Concurrent Access – When using a document all the requirements are turned into one big chunk of information. If you wish to edit one section, no one can edit another at the same time. The matter becomes worse when conflicting edits can be made on the same section without any mechanism to reflect them. 
• No Proper Collaboration– Reviewers have much to say about the document content. The more reviewers the messier the document gets with multicolored comments and notations. Eventually all comments are cleared to leave a clean, agreed-upon content, losing all traces of all past comments and interactions.

Lack of Analysis

• No change Impact analysis – How can you make sure that modifying the billing system requirements will affect the ordering system requirements? With Word or Excel you cannot. As it is plain data. And again, unless you cover the text with numerous tags, colorings and annotations, it is almost impossible to follow up on any possible change impact. 
• Planning vs. Delivery – To improve the content definition from one release to another, one must be able to assess the effectiveness of the content definition. Using plain documents, there is no easy way to assess the planned content against the actual delivered content. 
• Dependency on Tacit Knowledge – Each part of the content carries with it extra information such as the rationale of the requirement, the reasons for de-scoping it, the steps taken in refining it, etc. All this information, if not captured in designated placeholders of a system (e.g. attributes, comments) is kept only as tacit knowledge of the one handling the content. This means that highly valuable information is as transient as the content owner in his position. When the content owner sends out an email “It has been great working here for the past 6 years and now it is time for me to explore new challenges…”, all of that valuable information leaves the building with that ambitious employee.

Word and Excel are great tools for handling documents however they fall short greatly in handling data.

BA’s documents imply much data and that draws the line from which Word and Excel become a liability for companies who rely on top quality requirements gathering and management. 

How can you turn your BAs from working with Word and Excel to work directly with your application lifecycle management systems? Is it a technology issue? A functional issue? Is it just breaking the habit? 

Have you managed to make the transition from using documents to using managed systems? If you have I would love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to me in the comments section below. 

I will be very happy to meet you and hear about your experience in this matter and your ideas in the upcoming HP Discover Barcelona – Join me in Discussion Forum DF5316 titled “Engaging BAs to work with managed systems”  - There are a limited number of available seats, so make sure you register in advance.

You can register for HP Discover in Barcelona here.  Trust me, you won’t want to miss one minute of the action!

See you there,

Ofer

Visualizing Your Message

A Microsoft Sharepoint confirmation message

Don't you just love such clever choice of icons to fit a message...

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Harlem Shake - The True First Shake

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Not implying that I am the first to make a Harlem shake video but this one describes the first "shake" all of us started at.

The original clip was created by mithotynochka and is called "When the egg meets sperm" and it shows the effect of placing sperm around an egg cell. These egg and sperm are not of human they are of a sea urchin.


 
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Enterprise Mobility Gets LG’s and VMWare Attention

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It is evident that with the massive proliferation of smartphones and other portable smart devices that Enterprise Mobility in an inevitable extension to the enterprise IT systems.

Enterprises still approach Enterprise Mobility with some level of anxiety mainly relating to the fact that smartphone theft is on the rise and the general volatile nature of smartphone. Smartphones are considered somewhat vulnerable endpoints to host sensitive data and access to sensitive applications.

Yesterday at CES, LG unveiled its solution for Enterprise Mobility based on VMWare technology which turns every Android device to a dual device isolating the work-related environment from the personal one. This way the enterprise application and data are always kept at arm’s length from any personal connections made on the smartphone device and IT having full governance over the work-related partition.



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Magic Software approach to Enterprise Mobility is of tightest security measures provided by the RIA architecture that serves as the backbone of its Mobile offering. Nevertheless, LG’s new solution gives Enterprise Mobility an extra padding to increase IT confidence in their initial steps towards this new challenging route.

LG Virtual Android OS running in parallel to the personal environment

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Magic - A Feature Full Technology (The Magic Supercut)

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Supercut is a term coined by Andy Baio which refers to a video montage depicting a certain idea, word or phrase.

As one who played around video editing and worked for Magic Software, what would be better than creating a supertcut video montage for “Magic”.

In all other videos we show features in Magic, this video shows Magic in Features :-).

For me this last video clip is my personal token of appreciation to a wonderful company and an amazing group of people with which I have the great privilege to work for so long.

The last scene in this clip sums it all up: "It's very rare to see real Magic!"



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Soon I will publish a post listing the titles of each movie that appears in this supercut.
In the mean time you can try and name them yourselves. You can post your findings as a comment below or on YouTube.

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NUI - Natural User Interface - A Quantum Leap in UX

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Natural User Interface (NUI) relates to interfaces that are hidden or that eventually turn invisible as the user keeps using them, or that become an integral part with the environment one operates in.

NUI is based on the natural and common ways by which humans interact with each other and their surroundings. This is done primarily by verbal\audio communication, gestures, movement, expressions and touch.

The samrtphone, tablets and other multi touch screens such as Surface, full body gesture based interaction such as Kinect, and iPhone Siri service serve as great examples of good natural user interface. It is quite impressive to see how the multi-touch screen is the first technical gadget that is so easily used by users of ages raging from 1 to 101.

Yesterday at a very insightful UX event held by Netcraft, Tal Florentin gave an interesting short presentation about Help. Tal talked about how help is to be catered to the user in the optimal way. The conclusion was that it should be given in a way that is not too disruptive, that is able to “know” the goal one wants to reach, to light up the correct path to get there, and to offer its help only when needed.

The video below shows a great example of an interface that shows you the way to your destination in the exact moment you need it.



This neat UI reminded me of the TV series Quantum Leap where in one chapter titled “Pool Hall Blues” Al used his Handlink to help Sam clear the pool table. The Handlink projected the required course needed to place each ball in its pocket.
I did not manage to find the video segment of it, and all I found was this small screen capture images:

The next video is of a real visualization done over a pool table tracking and responding to the balls movement:


The last two videos are actually the main reason for this blog post as they shows how natural a touch screen is also to non-humans users:




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CIO Alert - HP’s webOS goes Open-Source

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The smartphone and tablet OS market is definitely the most dynamic and unpredictable IT market. The main reason for that is that it is the first time where consumer meets IT and the consumer is the one to cast the last vote.

The dynamic, unpredictable nature of this market is demonstrated once again, with HP’s latest announcement to put their webOS in the hands of the Open Source community.

Out of the other options – HP continuing to support webOS as its own proprietary platform, selling webOS to another mega-vendor, killing webOS – the Open Source approach seems to be the one with the greatest potential of putting webOS among the leading mobile and tables operating systems.
It is because of the open-source nature, that Android managed to take the market lead. The reason for that goes to convergence of consumers and IT.

As an open source project, webOS will enable greater involvement of the developers community which in turn will result in a richer and wider collection of webOS based applications. Together with the ability of smartphone hardware vendors such as HTC to incorporate webOS in their devices makes a promising path for webOS to be adopted more widely by smartphone developers and users.

In the ancient PC days, open source OS such as Linux did not have a major impact on the PC market. This was because the PC market trends were set mainly by enterprises and governments who did not rush to adopt open source OS.

Now, in the Post-PC era, the end-user set the trends and the enterprises must follow. If webOS will gain enough public interest, and good chances for it to do so, enterprises will need to add webOS to as yet another mobile operating system they need to support.

The need for a true multi-device application platform becomes even more relevant than before.

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