Starting your own business

This post is to put together links to useful information about starting your own business:

1. New York Times' Small Business section: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/smallbusiness/index.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1259524816-DEabVUyXrN6xmccjLiYHng
2. Small Business 101: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/business/smallbusiness/01websb101.html
3. Networking sites for startups: http://smallbizbee.com/index/2010/02/02/ultimate-list-40-social-networking/
4. SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives): http://www.score.org/index.html
5. Seattle SCORE: http://www.seattlescore.org/default.aspx

Because it's there! (and free)

So someone asks the avid mountain climber why he climbs mountains. His answer? "Because it's there".

Last weekend I stumbled on an interesting blog about Sun's VirtualBox virtualization software. So I decided to give it a try. What the heck, it was free anyways. And yes, because it was there.

Surprisingly (to me atleast) it installed without a hitch on my home machine.

Once installed, you can setup what's called a Guest OS, to virtualize. I decided to choose Linux. That's right, because it's free, and it's there. So I downloaded Ubuntu's desktop iso, setup the necessary settings in VirtualBox's Guest OS UI, and presto, had Ubuntu Linux up and running. Again surprisingly (to me atleast) without a hitch.

Very impressive.

Update on Life

Yesterday I attended Startup Day 2009 that was held at Meydenbauer Center at Bellevue. It was pretty neat and an eye opener for me. Startup Day was held by the Seattle 2.0 folks.

One the the neat websites I came across as a result is this one: Programmable Web. Which lists many web-service APIs available.

Now to carve out some time to go through all this stuff

Healthcare Reform

Everyone knows that the healthcare system needs reform. And yet I see this weird trend where people are still not getting it, and once again being swayed by the spin machinery.

Also, the messaging on healthcare reform is not clear at best, and confusing at worst. Most messaging I see coming out of the White House groups all the issues together under the Healthcare Reform umbrella. My suggestion is to begin to separate out the 2 core issues being addressed: 1) healthcare for all 2) bringing down the price of healthcare. And then explain to the American people how each is being addressed. The American people need to understand that these 2 issues, though connected, need to be addressed with a separate set of solutions. Bottom line, simplify the message and beef it with more hard facts on how the change is going to happen, and less on political talking-point blather.

So here's my attempt to sort out the facts from the noise and spin:

Spin (what the insurance industry and supporters are saying\doing):

• Research Firm Cited by GOP Is Owned by Health Insurer
• Freedoms you will lose under proposed health reform plan: http://finance.yahoo.com/insurance/article/107408/5-freedoms-you-would-lose-in-health-care-reform.html?mod=insurance-health
• Heritage Org's 10 reasons why proposed health care reform sucks: http://www.heritage.org/Press/FactSheet/fs0036.cfm

Anti-Spin (what others are saying):

• Business Week article on insurance companies "purging" (dropping) small businesses: http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/aug2009/sb2009087_865725.htm
• Excellent (as always) Bill Moyers program on health care reform. Moyers interviews a former Health Insurance industry VP who is now retired and on the side of ordinary citizens to expose the corruption and crookedness of the health insurance industry. A MUST watch: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07312009/watch_excl.html

Mythbusting:

• Factcheck.org fact checks "Guv'mint is out to kill seniors": http://www.factcheck.org/2009/07/false-euthanasia-claims/
• AARP Responds to Health Reform Scare Tactics :http://www.aarp.org/aarp/presscenter/pressrelease/articles/mccaughey_statement.html
• The medical malpractice myth: http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/fall05/html/disc_myth.php

Facts:

• Rising premiums:
  • http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/54522.php
  • http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml
• The full bill: http://help.senate.gov/BAI09A84_xml.pdf(615 pages of terrific soporific reading)
• AMA announces it supports health-care reform: http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/news/news/ama-affirms-support.shtml
• AMA's FAQ on HR 3200: http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/399/hsr-hr3200-faqs.pdf
• A summary from the House Committee on Education and Labor: http://edlabor.house.gov/documents/111/pdf/publications/AAHCA-BILLSUMMARY-071409.pdf
• St. Petersburg newspaper's fact checking: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/jul/30/e-mail-analysis-health-bill-needs-check-/
• KFF report on health-care and the middle class: http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/7951.pdfInteresting point here is that 70% or so of those insured are via employer-provided insurance. I wonder what those numbers are now with unemployment at 9.4%?
• "Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis---and the People Who Pay the Price" by Jonathan Cohn

To automate tests, or to not automate tests?

I added my $0.02 on a topic on whether to automate tests or not on one of the discussions on LinkedIn.

Here's my response:

It's important to not lose sight of the primary goal of testing. ie to ensure that the product is released with as few bugs as possible (with the highest quality possible). Automation plays A role in that effort, not THE role.

For functional testing, bugs found via automation tends to be of 2 basic categories. Those found during test case development (ie test coding), and during regression test runs. The first category of bugs is directly correlated to the quality of the test case being automated. The second category of bugs is as a result of code changes and can be caught before it makes it into the build eg. via a pre-checkin system.

Performance and stress testing can only (usually) be performed using automated tests. Performance testing needs to be automated to provide the repeatability. Stress testing needs to be automated to provide the ability to load and\or hammer the system.

For me, the key indicator is where testers are spending their time, and the result of that effort. If testers are spending significant amounts of time on automation, but they are not discovering a whole lot of bugs, then that's a red flag.

Nothing beats an intelligent knowledegeable tester spending time figuring out how to test the feature. It is the result of that intellectual effort that drives the quality of the test effort. It is not the tool, technique, automated vs manual etc that drives the quality of the test effort.

And, as everything else in life, a balance is needed. An overemphasis of one technique of testing will not be beneficial to the ultimate goal of shipping high quality software.

James Whittaker surfaces

The rumors turned out to be true. James Whittaker is now indeed Director of Test at Google. His blog is http://googletesting.blogspot.com/

Jim Collins: How to Thrive in 2009

Jim Collins: How to Thrive in 2009, Leading Your Company Article - Inc. Article

This was an interesting interview in Inc. magazine.

Collins' basic thesis here is that large corporations are reaching the limit of their being and are instead being replaced by small organizations. Where every individual now has the potential to be their own business org. Especially with the know-how and tools at hand today.

Testing

Came across this interesting question on Linked in about code coverage and testing.

Here's my response to the question:

Ultimately, software testing is limited by time, specifically time to ship\release. Software that is 100% bug free is worthless if it's not in the customer's hands. Software that is 100% bug free is also an impossibility. Along the lines of Godel's incompleteness theorem.

100% code coverage has nothing to do about flushing out all bugs. A simple and often quoted example is as thus: Take the following code -

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)

{

//do something

}

So you have a test that hits the above code. You get 100% code coverage. But what if the value of the limit in the loop (10) was wrong? That's a bug. But code coverage didn't not expose it.

An oft-repeated phrase in the software engineering field is that testing does not prove the absence of bugs, but rather the presence of bugs.

The most pragmatic goal in testing (IMO) is testing the product to a good enough level of quality for release. The challenge is figuring out what "good enough" implies, and how to achieve it. Nailing this conundrum is what differentiates an effective test effort from one that isn't.

Google Wave

So I was trolling the Net earlier today, and came across a small snippet somewhere about Google Wave.

So I start watching the YouTube video of a demo, and WAS BLOWN AWAY!!

This was exactly the app I was wishing I had 2 weeks ago when I was at the outplacement agency and needed to sync information (email, chats, docs etc) all in one app. Rather than having a bazzillion webpages and apps open.

Looks like the app was created by the same guys (Lars and Jens Rasmussen) who had originally created what became Google Maps.

So questions\thoughts that come to mind right now:

1. How is Google going to make money from (the marketing term being "monetize") this app?

2. The UI is already looking complicated. They should look at simplifying it.

3. They are already talking about working with the standards body to enhance HTML to support some newer features. This is the kind of stuff Microsoft used to do back when.

Geoffrey Moore on the evolution of companies

Reading Geoffrey Moore's book titled "Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution"

While reading the book, I'm coming across stuff has particular bearing to my experience with the Response Point team. Response Point was an IP-PBX system built by a small team in Microsoft. (What Bill Gates once called "a small but elite team"). This team operated very much like a startup, built and shipped V1 from scratch in 2 years, and then 2 Service Packs within 6 months of each other. Then on May 5th, 2009, the entire team was eliminated as part of Layoffs 2.0 at Microsoft. The reason cited was that there wasn't a chance for business success "in the forseeable future".

Here are a few of my interpretations based off my learnings from the Response Point experience, and what Moore postulates in his book:

• There are basically 2 business architectures: complex systems and volume systems. Complex systems are low volume high touch transactions but economically expensive. Volume systems are high volume low touch, low complexity but economically inexpensive systems. Complex systems tend to be customized around a target customer. Volume systems on the other hand are targeted for the masses, optimized to meet the 3 basic values of retail markets: price, availability and selection.

  IMO, Response Point was designed to be a volume system but was marketed as a complex system.

• Volume systems require strong branding with a distribution channel that does not sell to customers, but rather allows them to buy.

  Response Point had a mixed branding issue. The units were sold under an OEM brand, with Microsoft (the stronger brand name) as a secondary brand. Also, a VAR model was used to sell the units to customers. In hindsight, one wonders if branding the units as Microsoft, and selling via channels such as Best Buy would have had a more positive impact.

James Whittaker leaves Microsoft

I was bummed to hear that James Whittaker has resigned from Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/james_whittaker/archive/2009/05/21/tour-of-the-month-the-exit-stage-right-tour.aspx

James is a terrific ambassador for testing, showing the world that testing is extremely fun, highly technical and an intellectual exercise.

[Breaking news: 5\27\2009] Per this blog, James is now a Director of Test in Google!

I first noticed James as a result of his paper "What is software testing, and why is it so hard?" way back in 2000 (see embedded document below). As a tester myself, I was blown away that an academic (as I then wrongly considered James to be) knew what it was like in the trenches.

What is Software Testing and Why It is So Hard

Publish at Scribd or explore others: School Work Internet & Technolog Books Fiction software testing

IBM and Intuit working together for SMB solutions

There was an announcement today that IBM and Intuit are teaming up to provide small and medium businesses with bundled software and solutions: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/27543.wss

This is actually well timed, given that the government is pumping huge amounts of money into "the system" via the stimulus plan. And that SMBs are really hurting in the current economy and looking for cost reductions and improving efficiencies.

Also, SMB continues to be an underserved (and poorly understood, some would say) segment.

So all in all, a very smart move by both companies.

Starting the blog

So here goes. New blog. Posting #1.