Saw Crash recently. It was mesmerising. Every scene was a revelation. It captures a couple of days from the lives of a few people living in Los Angeles. The main characters are from different parts of the world: white americans, black americans, first generation arab immigrants, second generation arab immigrants, mexicans...



And mixes them all up: throws them together. They meet at various times, in varying contexts, with varying results. World view changing results. Your view of racism and race relations goes all topsy turvy. You learn of the complexities involved in the social lives of a multi-ethnic society. Real nuances, real detail.



At first, a lot of the characters seem to be from your regular movie, caricatures: the racist white policeman, the young black thug,... And then the twists start. The racist policeman is not. And the white anti-racist partner is.

Couples coping with their different ethnicities and what it means to the world. Racism is multi layered and not unidirectional. Layers get peeled, and new insights emerge.



There are some incredible turn of events, but they are all completely believable. And they all open new lines of thoughts.



Bottomline: 5 stars. Must watch. And tell me what you thought about it.

The office had a day long powercut today. They were testing the floodlights in the Mohali Cricket Stadium, in preparation for the Champions Trophy. And Mohali doesn't have enough power for both the city and the stadium, apparently. So we ran through hoops trying to keep our service up for customers, while the lights shown on the already bright grass.

If that's the situation in day time in test, what will it be like when the lights are on at night during a match? Chirag Taley Andhera? People all over the world watch the match, but someone with a home across the road can't?

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Animesh » Blog Archive » Who is your employee?
Animesh has an interesting post on it. I've added my thoughts here:

I think the family model is very well suited to a startup, mostly
because it is almost a necessity: in a startup, the boundary lines
between work and home and not well defined. In my experience, it is
true even if not all employees are white collar workers.

But keeping the same model as the company evolves into a bigger
organisation is probably not suitable and not feasible. You *want*
people to clearly delineate their professional and personal lives for a
better balance. And the returns to all stakeholders from the family
model become much lower.

Treating employees as customers is definitely the way to go. To me,
there is no other option. At least for the support functions, it should
be obvious that the rest of the organisation is their customers,
because, well, what else are they supporting?

Unfortunately, at least in India, that is often not the case.
Support functions often run as their own fiefdoms, and I think that
often goes on because the executive team doesn’t pay much attention to
them. I think the way to resolve this is to measure performance based
on customer feedback, as for the ‘core’ function. (But that’s
digressing…)

We did some bits and pieces automation on one of our projects over the last few months. It impressed some managers at our customer, who then asked to start a separate project to do end-to-end automation.
We just finished the first iteration. Now, once you have stuff set-up and configured, the following things happen every night:

• the application is built and packaged.
• The install elements: war, database dump, sql scripts, install instructions, release notes get copied to a release folder. The release is named by the timestamp.
• The application is installed and configured on a remote machine.
• The application is started on the remote machine.
• Some automated code review tools are run, and reports generated in a nice consolidated format.
• Junit tests are run on the deployed application, and code coverage reports are generated.
  

So, the next morning, when the team comes in, they know if some things broke. They can also spend 15 minutes running through the code review reports and test the application for sanity.

If a formal release needs to be made, that is also a single command : you just specify the tag name, and all of the above happens. In addition, source also gets tagged.

What's next: integrating canoo web test or some other similar tool with the deployed application, so that the nightly build can also do the sanity tests.

Finally, we are getting close to becoming the cool dudes of automation!

Just read the cover story of Business World of 6th Feb. They have rated the top 25 places to work at in India. Across industry sectors. Here are some excerpts I found interesting ( in that I've been trying to get some of these through at my workplace.) Here's some validation that these things do happen in India.

Many of the organisations in our list have unlimited sick leave, no attendance recording system and self-supervision as the norm.

True collaboration goes beyond employees setting the menu for the canteen… It requires an ability to share 'real power', as is reflected in RMSI's decision to empower employees to calculate their own performance bonuses.

Sasken prides itself on its 'single status' policy… All employees, including the co-founder, and eligible for the same travel benefits.

Amex… shares details of the salary ranges, how these were evolved and what comparator companies were used to determine them.

There is a direct relation between great places to work and superior financial performance…. During the period 1998-2002, an annually updated index of Fortune's 100 best companies to work for would have yielded a return of 9.86%, compared to -0.56% from the S&P 500.

(This one, of course, is US data)

At RMSI, when negotiating with those who leave, managers are forbidden from offering higher salaries as an incentive to stay back. At best, they can offer a different assignment or more responsibilities.

At JW Mariott, revenue and profit and loss figures are shared with all employees across levels, eve dishwashers.

At Aztec, to engage employees, CEO… sends out regular emails to them that are presonal, inspirational, and at times, even philosophical.

Sapient's senior-most bosses, its two managing directors, do not have their own rooms. Seriously. They do not even have their own cubicles or work stations.

At PSI Data Systems, employees were constantly kept updated of the company's true financial picture, orders that were in the pipeline and stragies that would change the company's performance. ( Even when the company was in the red.)

Really.
What IS it ?
People all over the place keep throwing it at you.

I need two loadrunner resources asap.
The customer wants to see the plan asap.
What's the priority of this task ? "asap".

Well, OK, I know what they really mean. They mean to say that it is urgent and pressing. Maybe I'm just nit picking on language. But indulge my language issue for a bit: ( BTW, I'm no grammar expert)

Start Nit Picking:

As soon as possible. As if anyone ever plans any differently. Have you heard of any plans that use the as late as possible principle? Of course I'll do it asap. That's how I do all my stuff.

End Nit Picking

OK, understood. They mean urgent. But that's still little help. That helps little when planning stuff. If I have 10 things to do on my task list, maybe this will take away 3 of them, the 3 that are just nice to do. But what about the other 7 ? Should I just drop them and spend all my time on this one? Or spend half my time on it? Should I spend more money to get this done?

Well, yes, I can find the real urgency by asking the right questions, but doesn't it help if some are already answered ?

To end, here's a customer who regularly sends us tasks over emails that start with " This is urgent as well as important". :-)

An excellent post on how to investigate these most tricky of bugs: ones that take place once in a while, and you cannot figure out how to reproduce them. Basically for testers, but very useful for developers as well.