Directi Corporate Blog

Mary and Tom Poppendieck were the speakers at the second Techcamp event, organized by TechCamp and ASCI, on 28th July, 08. They are today the foremost proponents of Lean software development. They are also highly acclaimed speakers. Techcampers gathered together with a sense of anticipation at Hotel Sea Princess in Mumbai, at 2 pm.

It was an informative afternoon. We learnt how the Lean and Agile approaches to software development spring from similar motivations. The Poppendiecks emphasized that although Lean thinking originated in the manufacturing sector, its principles can be applied effectively to the process of software development.

The talk discussed ways and means to identify and eliminate waste. We first looked at the Lean approach to defining value. We then drilled down into what constitutes waste. Mary showed, with several examples, that conventional ideas of waste may not hold good in all circumstances.

They also explained how the Lean thinking looks to eliminate waste by continuous improvment of processes. They explained that it is important to critique the process that creates value for customers in it’s entirety, else, waste will continue to exist in unaddressed areas, adversely affecting the value of the end result.

They then went on to introduce to us the value stream map.

The second half was a practical session. We used value stream maps to critically analyse processes within our own companies.

This session was a good, insightful introduction to Lean thinking. We left the venue with valuable insights into Lean software development, and ideas for putting them to use. Techcamp kept it’s promise, and delivered a focused atmosphere for likeminded technologists to learn, grow and make friends.

Today was the first ever Techcamp event (co-organised by ASCI). Techcamp is an initiative taken by a bunch of Directians with the underlying thought of knowledge sharing and community building. The session was on Agile Development - How to approach Evolutionary Design by Dr. Venkat Subramanium - a very interesting speaker. It was an afternoon talk, held from 2 to 6. But there wasn’t a dull moment as he discussed the problems with the stereotypical approach to architecture and design, in contrast with the agile alternative. At Directi we are incorporating agile practices into our product development lifecycles. So we arrived at the venue with several questions.

Dr. Venkat made several interesting points. He stated that the design of a project must continue to evolve throughout it’s life. He spoke about how rapid prototyping and version control go hand in hand. He warned against the tendency to build extensible components without there being any present need for extensibility.

The only downside was the code session after tea. The Groovy code that he used contained concepts from dynamic languages which were not very common knowledge. As a result, not all of were able to follow the code very clearly, although we were able to catch the general import of his illustrations.

He had to catch a plane as soon as he concluded his talk. I wish that there had been some more time for interaction after the talk.

The Great Indian Developer Summit - this was one event we were most looking forward to. It promised to be 5 wholesome days of total tech immersion. Like any other conference, this one too, had its share of highs and lows.

We had to divide our time between interacting with people at the booth and attending sessions. The booth experience was really interesting – explaining to a variety of people what Directi does, what “Quit Working” (which was on front page of the Directi brochure) means. and playing a couple of boxing rounds on the Nintendo Wii (the prize for the winner of the Directi Treasure Hunt).

Now to the meaty stuff: the sessions we attended. The first session was on Building Great UX with .Net, conducted by Kalpesh Parmar. It was quite a disappointing session, to say the least. Kalpesh Parmar is the lead technical evangelist in India for Infragistics, Inc. While he explained the concept of User Experience, and how it is different from User Interface design, he did not delve into the related capabilities of .Net, and it seemed like a preamble for the next session on “Building LOBs Applications and Dashboards using Infragistics Components”. We decided to give the second session a miss, as it was clearly going to be a demo of the Infragistics component suite.

Next we attended a session that was somewhat misleadingly titled “Hone Your Coding Kung Fu with Best Practices”, by Jean Luc David. Jean Luc David is a Developer Advisor for Microsoft Canada and is the author of five books, including Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System. The content of this session was mostly a demonstration of the various features of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System rather than the best practices to be followed while coding, which would have been much more interesting.

We also attended two other sessions, one on ASP.Net MVC, and the other one on Silverlight 2.0 Deep Dive, both conducted by Todd Anglin. Todd Anglin is an active .NET community member, President of the North Houston .NET User Group, and Telerik’s Chief Technical Evangelist. Both his sessions were well planned and executed, and had a lot of very interesting, cutting edge technical content besides being peppered with fun trivia and anecdotes. The seminar hall was completely packed, with a lot of people having to sit on the stairs for lack of available seats. His interaction with the audience throughout the session kept us from dozing off (even though the Silverlight Deep Dive was a three hour marathon).

The session on Practical Semantic Web, by Jon Aizen was also quite interesting. Jon Aizen is co-founder and CTO at Dapper. In his session he described how Dapper advocates and implements a new approach to transform the existing web into a semantic web.

Another session that we were looking forward to attending was the Master Class on The elements of User Experience, conducted by none other than Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and president of Adaptive Path, also known as the Father of Ajax. His book, The Elements of User Experience, has been called “brilliant” and “essential” and is considered one of the seminal works on user-centered design. While this session had some interesting content on the elements of user experience, he did not speak much about Ajax, which seemed to be what the audience was expecting.

Connecting the Worlds - Design/Development Collaboration using XAML, Expression and Silverlight, a session by Harish Ranganathan was a very basic, hello world demonstration of how Expression Blend and Visual Studio can be used for collaboration between the user interface designer and the software developer. They demonstrated memorabilia.hardrock.com to showcase the new DeepZoom technology in Silverlight. This presentation, although interestingly conducted, had very little technical content.

Personally, we found many sessions to be lackluster and vendor centric. The hands-on sessions on Silverlight by Todd Anglin from Telerik, .Net Gottchas by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam were worth its weight in gold and were the highlights of the three days we attended the Summit. Bhavin’s session (Building a Scalable Architecture for Web Apps) had a packed audience. People shot a lot of intelligent questions, which he handled in his ever energetic, crisp and without batting an eyelid style.

Also, you could have a look at the GIDS photographs on our Flickr stream.

-Co-authored by manoj.ku

We’re participating in the Great Indian Developer Summit that has started today. The event is spread across 5 days, with dedicated days for .net, richweb and java.

A lot of people from Directi have been looking forward to this event - since it seems to have some really good speakers, and we’re confident that the information shared will be quite interesting. Bhavin is going to be talking about Builiding a Scalable Architecture for Web Apps, and Naresh is conducting a workshop on Acceptance Test Driven Development.

We have also created an online treasure hunt contest for the event attendees, and it has been received extremely well. Every now and then you will find somebody out here sitting on their laptop (or even at our booth) and trying to crack the puzzle. Obviously one of the reasons might be because of what’s at stake – a Nintendo Wii.

In case you are on twitter, you could follow us: http://twitter.com/directi.

We’ll also soon be adding photographs of this event on our Flickr stream.

Last week we attended the Web Innovation 2008 Conference which was held at the Grand Hyatt. The conference focused on Web 2.0 and had 3 tracks directly related to its evolution, namely Business, Enterprise, and of course the Technology Track.

Bhavin and Naresh were invited as speakers, and held an interactive session that described their experiences in adopting Agile development philosophies and practices at Directi; titled ‘Our Journey Down the Yellow Brick Road (Agile Devlopment practices)‘. This presentation covered the importance of Agile, the different practices we have adopted at Directi, as well as an insight in to the road ahead. Some of the practices that Bhavin and Naresh discussed were Daily Standup Meetings, Weekly Iterations & Monthly Releases, and eXtreme Programming. Just before their session they alsoparticipated in a BoF discussion on REST vs. SOAP.

The conference was conducted smoothly, but somehow the information and knowledge shared seemed to be restricted to application demos only. Having said that, some of the demos were fantastic, and very useful for the software development community.

We will also be participating in the Great Indian Developers Summit. In the meantime, you could also check out Web Innovation snaps on our Flickr stream.