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• Transformation of Product Management in Telecommunications for Rapid Launch of Next Generation Products

  - by raul.goycoolea

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } The Telecom industry continues to evolve through disruptive products, uncertain markets, shorter product lifecycles and convergence of technologies. Today’s market has moved from network centric to consumer centric and focuses primarily on the customer experience. It has resulted in several product management challenges such as an increased complexity and volume of offerings, creating product variants, accelerating time-to-market, ability to provide multiple product views for varied stakeholders, leveraging OSS intelligence to BSS layer, product co-creation and increasing audit and security concerns for service providers. The document discusses how enterprise product management enabled by PLM-based product catalogue solutions helps to launch next generation products rapidly in the context of the Telecommunication Industry.   1.0.       Introduction   Figure 1: Business Scenario   Modern business demands the launch of complex products in a very short timeframe and effecting changes in the price plan faster without IT intervention. One of the key transformation initiatives companies are focusing on is in the area of product management transformation and operational efficiency improvement. As part of these initiatives, companies are investing in best- in-class COTs-based Product Management solutions developed on industry-wide standards.   The new COTs packages are planned to integrate with existing or new B/OSS systems to provide a strategic end-to-end agile solution for reduced time-to-market and order journey time. In addition, system rationalization is being undertaken to phase out legacy systems and migrate to strategic systems.   2.0.       An Overview of Product Management in Telecom   Product data in telecom is multi- dimensional and difficult to manage. It increased significantly due to the complexity of the product, product offerings on the converged network, increased volume of offerings, bundled offering structures and ever increasing regulatory requirements.   In addition, the shrinking product lifecycle in telecom makes it difficult to manage the dynamic product data. Mergers and acquisitions coupled with organic growth pose major challenges in product portfolio management. It is a roadblock in the journey towards becoming an agile organization.       Figure 2: Complexity in Product Management   Network Technology’ is the new dimension in telecom product management where the same products are realized through different networks i.e., Soiled network to Converged network. Consequently, the product solution is different.     Figure 3: Current Scenario - Pain Points in Product Management   The major business implications arising out of the current scenario are slow time-to-market and an inefficient process that affects innovation.   3.0. Transformation of Next Generation Product Management   Companies must focus on their Product Management Transformation Journey in the areas of:   ·       Management of single truth of product information across the organization/geographies which is currently managed in heterogeneous systems   ·       Management of the Intellectual Property (IP) on the product concept and partnership in the design of discrete components to integrate into the system   ·       Leveraging structured and unstructured product data within the extended enterprise to extract consumer insights and drive innovation   ·       Management of effective operational separation to comply with regulatory bodies   ·       Reuse of existing designs and add relevant features such as value-added services to enable effective product bundling     Figure 4: Next generation needs   PLM-based Enterprise Product Catalogue solutions efficiently address the above requirements and act as an enabler towards product management transformation and rapid product launch.   4.0. PLM-based Enterprise Product Management     Figure 5: PLM-based Enterprise Product Mastering   Enterprise Product Management (EPM) enables the business to manage complex product attributes of data in complex environments. Product Mastering helps create a 'single view' of the product by creating a business-driven, IT-supported environment where a global 'single truth record' is created, managed and reused.   4.1 The Business Case for Telco PLM-based solutions for Enterprise Product Management   ·       Telco PLM-based Product Mastering solutions provide a centralized authoring environment for product definition and control of all product data and rules   ·       PLM packages are designed to support multiple perspectives of product data (ordering perspective, billing perspective, provisioning perspective)   ·       Maintains relationships/links between different elements of the entire product definition   ·       Telco PLM packages are specialized in next generation lifecycle management requirements of products such as revision and state management, test and release management, role management and impact analysis)   ·       Takes into consideration all aspects of OSS product requirements compared to CRM product catalogue solutions where the product data managed is mostly order oriented and transactional     ·       New breed of Telco PLM packages are designed with 'open' standards such as SID and eTOM. They are interoperable, support integration frameworks such as subscription and notification.   ·       Telco PLM packages have developed good collaboration frameworks to integrate suppliers and partners into the product development value chain   4.2 Various Architectures/Approaches for Product Mastering using Telco PLM systems   4. 2.a Single Central Product Management (Mastering) Approach   Figure 6: Single Central Product Management (Master) Approach       This approach is implemented across verticals such as aerospace and automotive. It focuses on a physically centralized product master to which other sources are dependent on. The product definition data (Product bundles, service bundles, price plans, offers and discounts, product configuration rules and market campaigns) is created and maintained physically in a centralized environment. In addition, the product definition/authoring environment is centralized. The existing legacy product definition data available in CRM product catalogue, billing catalogue and the legacy product catalogue is migrated to the centralized PLM-based Enterprise Product Management solution.   Architectural changes must be made in the existing business landscape of applications to create and revise data because the applications have to refer to the central repository for approvals and validation of product configurations. It is achieved by modifying how the applications write data or how the applications can be adapted to use the rules to be managed and published.   Complete product configuration validation will be done in enterprise / central product catalogue and final configuration will be sent to the B/OSS system through the SOA compliant product distribution architecture. The approach/architecture enables greater control in terms of product data management and product data governance.   4.2.b Federated Product Management (Mastering) Architecture     Figure 7: Federated Product Management (Mastering) Architecture   In the federated product mastering approach, the basic unique product definition data (product id, description product hierarchy, basic price plans and simple product design rules) will be centrally created and will be maintained. And, the advanced product definition (Product bundling, promotions, offers & discount plans) will be created in respective down stream OSS systems. The advanced product definition (Product bundling, promotions, offers and discount plans) will be created in respective downstream OSS systems.   For example, basic product definitions such as attributes, product hierarchy and basic price plans will be created and maintained in Enterprise/Central product reference catalogue and distributed to downstream OSS systems. Respective downstream OSS systems build product bundles, promotions, advanced price plans over the basic product definition and master the advanced product definition. Central reference database accesses the respective other source product master data and assembles a point-in-time consolidated view of the product. The approach is typically adapted in some merger and acquisition scenarios where there is a low probability of a central physical authority managing the data. In addition, the migration effort in this case is minimal and there are no big architectural changes to the organization application landscape. However, this approach will not result in better product data management and data governance.   5.0 Customer Scenario – Before EPC deployment   A leading global telecommunications service provider wanted to launch a quad play and triple play service offering in the shortest possible lead time. The service provider was offering Broadband and VoIP services to customers. The company wanted to reuse a majority of the Broadband services and price plans and bundle them with new wireless and IPTV services for quad play and triple play. The challenges in launching the new service offerings were:       Figure 8: Triple Play Plan   ·       Broadband product data was stored in multiple product catalogues (CRM catalogue, Billing catalogue, spread sheets)   ·       Product managers spent a lot of time performing tasks involving duplication or re-keying of data. Manual effort caused errors, cost and time over-runs.   ·       No effective product and price data governance mechanism. Price change issues arising from the lack of data consistency across systems resulted in leakage of customer value and revenue.   ·       Product data had re-usability issues and was not in a structured format. It resulted in uncontrolled product portfolio creation and product management issues.   ·       Lack of enterprise product model resulted into product distribution challenges and thus delays in product launch.   ·       Designers are constrained by existing legacy product management solutions to model product/service requirements and product configuration rules such as upgrading, downgrading and cross selling.    5.1 Customer Scenario - After EPC deployment     Figure 9: SOA-based end-to-end EPC Solution   The company deployed PLM-based Enterprise Product Catalogue solutions to launch quad play service after evaluating various product catalogues. The broadband product offering, service and price data were migrated to the new system, and the product and price plan hierarchy for new offerings were created using the entities defined in the Enterprise Product Model. Supplier product catalogue data such as routers and set up boxes were loaded onto the new solution through SOA-based web service. Price plans and configuration rules were built in the new system. The validated final product configurations were extracted from the product catalogue in a SID format and were distributed to the downstream B/OSS systems through exposed SOA-based web services. The transformations required for the B/OSS system were handled using the transformation layer as part of the solution.   6.0 How PLM enabled Product Management Transformation         Figure 10: Product Management Transformation     PLM-based Product Catalogue Solution helped the customer reduce the product launch cycle time by 30% and enable transformation of Product Management for next generation services.   7.0 Conclusion   On the one hand, the telecom industry is undergoing changes due to disruptions, uncertain product markets and increased complexity of products. On the other hand, the ARPU is decreasing year-on-year. Communications Service Providers are embarking on convergence, bundled service offerings, flexibility to cross-sell and up-sell, introduce new value-added services, leverage Web 2.0 concepts and network capabilities. Consequently, large scale IT transformation initiatives to improve their ARPU supporting network and business transformations are a business imperative. Product Management has become a focus area. Companies are investing in best-in- class COTS solutions to reduce time-to-market, ensure rapid service delivery and improve operational efficiency. An efficient PLM-based enterprise product mastering solution plays a key role in achieving zero touch automation and rapid product launch.   References:   1.     Preston G.Smith, Donald G.Reineristsem, Van Nostrand Reinhold “Developing Products in Half the time”.   2.     John G. Innes, "Achieving Successful Product Change", Pitman Publishing.   3.     D T Pham and R M Setchi (16th Jan, 2001) "Authoring environment for documentation development" University of Wales Cardiff, U.K., Proceedings on Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Vol. 215, Part B.   4.     Oracle Product Hub for Communications:   http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/master-data-management/product-hub-082059.html  

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• Product application - is it a product or product variation

  - by jamesnov

  I'm dealing with a lot of vehicle specific products, and I've been trying to determine whether to convert the variants/fit option into individual products. I currently put the vehicle specific items under a product: Product: Widget Hood Deflectors Option1: 07-11 Silverado/Sierra, SKU1 Option2: 09-11 Ram, SKU2 etc. Take a hood/bug deflector for example. They all share the same description, and specifications for the most part. They look very similar, but the shape/appearance could vary significantly depending on the vehicle it is going on. Another example could be a suspension lift kit. Each one is engineered for a specific vehicle application. What would be the product "Widget Super Duper 4 inch lift kit", or "Widget Jeep 07-11 Super Duper 4 inch lift kit"? If I converted the variants to a product, then I have a lot more products (some so called products or product lines have hundreds of applications), when no vehicle is selected, but if I require a vehicle to be selected, then the product results would be basically the same, and specific for that vehicle. The description would also be longer: Product: Widget Silverado/Sierra 07-11 Hood Deflector With the fit as a variants/option, then I have fewer products, but I could have a huge list of options. Product: Widget Hood Deflectors Options: Fit/Vehicle Am I doing things right by having product applications as variants, or am I treating a product line as a product?

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• How to write a product definition?

  - by Skarab

  I would like to learn how to write a software product definition. Therefore I am looking for online materials or books, which would help me to learn more about this topic. I would like to learn: what must be in what must not to be in how to make a product definition to sell internally the product finding balance between use case descriptions (the why), and feature descriptions (the how). ... I am aware that it is not something that can learn in 15 minutes but I think such a discussion could help me to have a good start.

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• Determine which software product a Microsoft Product Key activates

  - by druciferre

  Without a product key being labelled, is there is any way to identify what Microsoft software product a given product key is meant to activate? Let's say for example I had the product key ABCDE-FGHIJ-KLMNO-PQRST-UVWXY, but I had no clue if was meant for Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 7 Home Premium, Vista Ultimate, or even Office 2010. Does Microsoft (or anyone for that matter) have any kind of tool that I could paste the key into and get a result that identifies the software product the key is meant for (or at least a good estimate)? Note: I have searched and searched many times on the Internet, but the only results I ever find are how to recover a lost product key by using something like Nirsoft ProduKey. This is not what I am looking for.

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• Messing with the Team

  - by Robert May

  Good Product Owners will help the team be the best that they can be.  Bad product owners will mess with the team and won’t care about the team.  If you’re a product owner, seek to do good and avoid bad behavior at all costs.  Remember, this is for YOUR benefit and you have much power given to you.  Use that power wisely. Scope Creep The product owner has several tools at his disposal to inject scope into an iteration.  First, the product owner can use defects to inject scope.  To do this, they’ll tell the team what functionality that they want to see in a feature.  Then, after the feature is developed, the Product Owner will decide that they don’t really like how the functionality behaves.  To change it, rather than creating a new story, they’ll add a defect.  The functionality is correct, as designed, but the Product Owner doesn’t like it.  By creating the defect, the Product Owner destroys the trust that the team has of the product owner.  They may not be able to count the story, because the Product Owner changed the story in the iteration, and the team then ends up looking like they have low velocity for something over which they have no control.  This is bad.  One way to deal with this is to add “Product Owner Time” to the iteration.  This will slow the velocity, but then the ScrumMaster can tell stake holders that this time is strictly in place to deal with bad behavior of the Product Owner. Another mechanism often used to inject Scope is the concept of directed development.  Outside of planning, stand-ups, or any other meeting, the Product Owner will take a developer aside and ask them to complete a task for them.  This is bad!  The team should be allocating all of their time to development.  If the Product Owner asks for a favor, then time that would normally be used for development will be used for a pet project of the Product Owner and the team will not get credit for this work.  Selfish product owners do this, and I typically see people who were “managers” do this behavior.  Authoritarian command and control development environments also see this happen.  The best thing that can happen is for the team member to report the issue to the ScrumMaster and the ScrumMaster to get very aggressive with management and the Product Owner to try and stop the behavior.  This may result in the ScrumMaster being fired, but if the behavior continues, Scrum is doomed.  This problem is especially bad in cases where the team member’s direct supervisor is the Product Owner.  I don’t recommend that the Product Owner or ScrumMaster have a direct report relationship with team members, since team members need the ability to say no.  To work around this issue, team members need to say no.  If that fails, team members need to add extra time to the iteration to deal with the scope creep injection and accept the lower velocity. As discussed above, another mechanism for injecting scope is by changing acceptance tests after the work is complete.  This is similar to adding defects to change scope and is bad.  To get around, add time for Product Owner uncertainty to the iteration and make sure that stakeholders are aware of the need to add this time because of the Product Owner. Refusing to Prioritize Refusing to prioritize causes chaos for the team.  From the team’s perspective, things that are not important will be worked on while things that the team knows are vital will be ignored.  A poor Product Owner will often pick the stories for the iteration on a whim.  This leads to the team working on many different aspects of the product and results in a lower velocity, since each iteration the team must switch context to the new area of development. The team will also experience confusion about priorities.  In one iteration, Feature X was the highest priority and had to be done.  Then, the following iteration, even though parts of Feature X still need to be completed, no stories to address them will be in the iteration.  However, three iterations later, Feature X will again become high priority. This will cause the team to not trust the Product Owner, and eventually, they’ll stop caring about the features they implement.  They won’t know what is important, so to insulate themselves from the ever changing chaos, they’ll become apathetic to all features.  Team members are some of the most creative people in a company.  By losing their engagement, the company is going to have a substandard product because the passion for the product won’t be in the team. Other signs that the Product Owner refuses to prioritize is that no one outside of the product owner will be consulted on priorities.  Additionally, the product, release, and iteration backlogs will be weak or non-existent. Dealing with this issue is not easy.  This really isn’t something the team can fix, short of taking over the role of Product Owner themselves.  An appeal to the stake holders might work, but only if the Product Owner isn’t a “manager” themselves.  The ScrumMaster needs to protect the team and do what they can to either get the Product Owner to prioritize or have the Product Owner replaced. Managing the Team A Product Owner that is also the “boss” of team members is a Scrum team that is waiting to fail.  If your boss tells you to do something, failing to do that something can cause you to be fired.  The team needs the ability to tell the Product Owner NO.  If the product owner introduces scope creep, the team has a responsibility to tell the Product Owner no.  If the Product Owner tries to get the team to commit to more than they can accomplish in an iteration, the team needs the ability to tell the Product Owner no. If the Product Owner is your boss and determines your pay increases, you’re probably not going to ever tell them no, and Scrum will likely fail.  The team can’t do much in this situation. Another aspect of “managing the team” that often happens is the Product Owner tries to tell the team how to develop the stories that are in the iteration.  This is one reason why I recommend that Product Owners are NOT technical people.  That way, the team can come up with the tasks that are needed to accomplish the stories and the Product Owner won’t know better.  If the Product Owner is technical, the ScrumMaster will need to take great care to protect the team from the ScrumMaster changing how the team thinks they need to implement the stories. Product Owners can also try to manage the team by their body language.  If the team says a task is going to take 6 hours to complete, and the Product Owner disagrees, they will use some kind of sour body language to indicate this disagreement.  In weak teams, this may cause the team to revise their estimate down, which will result in them taking longer than estimated and may result in them missing the iteration.  The ScrumMaster will need to make sure that the Product Owner doesn’t send such messages and that the team ignores them and estimates what they REALLY think it will take to complete the tasks.  Forcing the team to deal with such items in the retrospective can be helpful. Absenteeism The team is completely dependent upon the Product Owner to develop features for the customer.  The Product Owner IS the voice of the customer and without them, the team will lack direction.  Being the Product Owner is a full time job!  If the Product Owner cannot dedicate daily time with the team, a different product owner should be found. The Product Owner needs to attend every stand-up, planning meeting, showcase, and retrospective that the team has.  The team also must be able to have instant communication with the product owner.  They must not be required to schedule meetings to speak with their product owner.  The team must be the highest priority task that the Product Owner has. The best way to work around an absent Product Owner is to appoint a new Product Owner in the team.  This person will be responsible for making the decisions that the Product Owner should be making and to act as the liaison to the absent Product Owner.  If the delegate Product Owner doesn’t have authority to make decisions for the team, Scrum will fail.  If the Product Owner is absent, the ScrumMaster should seek to have that Product Owner replaced by someone who has the time and ability to be a real Product Owner. Making it Personal Too often Product Owners will become convinced that their ideas are the ones that matter and that anyone who disagrees is making a personal attack on them.  Remember that Product Owners will inherently be at odds with many people, simply because they have the need to prioritize.  Others will frequently question prioritization because they only see part of the picture that Product Owners face. Product Owners must have a thick skin and think egos.  If they don’t, they tend to make things personal, which causes them to become emotional and causes them to take actions that can destroy the trust that team members have in the Product Owner. If a Product Owner is making things person, the best thing that team members can do is reassure them that its not personal, but be firm about doing what is best for the Company and for the users.  The ScrumMaster should also spend significant time coaching the Product Owner on how to not react emotionally and how to accept criticism without becoming defensive. Conclusion I’m sure there are other ways that a Product Owner can mess with the team, but these are the most common that I’ve seen.  I would encourage all Product Owners to seek to be a good Product Owner.  If you find yourself behaving in any of the bad product owner ways, change your behavior today!  Your team will thank you. Remember, being Product Owner is very difficult!  Product Owner is one of the most difficult roles in Scrum.  However, it can also be one of the most rewarding roles in Scrum, since Product Owners literally see their ideas brought to life on the computer screen.  Product Owners need to be very patient, even in the face of criticism and need to be willing to make tough decisions on priority, but then not become offended when others disagree with those decisions.  Companies should spend the time needed to find the right product owners for their teams.  Doing so will only help the company to write better software. Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• The Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult.  All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner.  Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities.  I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers and records stories for the backlog. Prioritizes stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog. Determines Release dates and Iteration Dates. Develops story details and helps the team understand those details. Helps QA to develop acceptance tests. Interact with the Customer to make sure that the product is meeting the customer’s needs. Discovers and Records Stories for the Backlog When I do Scrum, I always use User Stories as the means for capturing functionality that’s required in the system.  Some people will use Use Cases, but the same rule applies.  The Product Owner has the ultimate responsibility for figuring out what functionality will be in the system.  Many different mechanisms for capturing this input can be used.  User interviews are great, but all sources should be considered, including talking with Customer Support types.  Often, they hear what users are struggling with the most and are a great source for stories that can make the application easier to use. Care should be taken when soliciting user stories from technical types such as programmers and the people that manage them.  They will almost always give stories that are very technical in nature and may not have a direct benefit for the end user.  Stories are about adding value to the company.  If the stories don’t have direct benefit to the end user, the Product Owner should question whether or not the story should be implemented.  In general, technical stories should be included as tasks in User Stories.  Technical stories are often needed, but the ultimate value to the user is in user based functionality, so technical stories should be considered nothing more than overhead in providing that user functionality. Until the iteration prior to development, stories should be nothing more than short, one line placeholders. An exercise called Story Planning can be used to brainstorm and come up with stories.  I’ll save the description of this activity for another blog post. For more information on User Stories, please read the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. Prioritizes Stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog Prioritization of stories is one of the most difficult tasks that a Product Owner must do.  A key concept of Scrum done right is the need to have the team working from a single set of prioritized stories.  If the team does not have a single set of prioritized stories, Scrum will likely fail at your organization.  The Product Owner is the ONLY person who has the responsibility to prioritize that list.  The Product Owner must be very diplomatic and sincerely listen to the people around him so that he can get the priorities correct. Just listening will still not yield the proper priorities.  Care must also be taken to ensure that Return on Investment is also considered.  Ultimately, determining which stories give the most value to the company for the least cost is the most important factor in determining priorities.  Product Owners should be willing to look at cold, hard numbers to determine the order for stories.  Even when many people want a feature, if that features is costly to develop, it may not have as high of a return on investment as features that are cheaper, but not as popular. The act of prioritization often causes conflict in an environment.  Customer Service thinks that feature X is the most important, because it will stop people from calling.  Operations thinks that feature Y is the most important, because it will stop servers from crashing.  Developers think that feature Z is most important because it will make writing software much easier for them.  All of these are useful goals, but the team can have only one list of items, and each item must have a priority that is different from all other stories.  The Product Owner will determine which feature gives the best return on investment and the other features will have to wait their turn, which means that someone will not have their top priority feature implemented first. A weak Product Owner will refuse to do prioritization.  I’ve heard from multiple Product Owners the following phrase, “Well, it’s all got to be done, so what does it matter what order we do it in?”  If your product owner is using this phrase, you need a new Product Owner.  Order is VERY important.  In Scrum, every release is potentially shippable.  If the wrong priority items are developed, then the value added in each release isn’t what it should be.  Additionally, the Product Owner with this mindset doesn’t understand Agile.  A product is NEVER finished, until the company has decided that it is no longer a going concern and they are no longer going to sell the product.  Therefore, prioritization isn’t an event, its something that continues every day.  The logical extension of the phrase “It’s all got to be done” is that you will never ship your product, since a product is never “done.”  Once stories have been prioritized, assigning them to the Release Backlog and the Iteration Backlog becomes relatively simple.  The top priority items are copied into the respective backlogs in order and the task is complete.  The team does have the right to shuffle things around a little in the iteration backlog.  For example, they may determine that working on story C with story A is appropriate because they’re related, even though story B is technically a higher priority than story C.  Or they may decide that story B is too big to complete in the time available after Story A has tasks created, so they’ll work on Story C since it’s smaller.  They can’t, however, go deep into the backlog to pick stories to implement.  The team and the Product Owner should work together to determine what’s best for the company. Prioritization is time consuming, but its one of the most important things a Product Owner does. Determines Release Dates and Iteration Dates Product owners are responsible for determining release dates for a product.  A common misconception that Product Owners have is that every “release” needs to correspond with an actual release to customers.  This is not the case.  In general, releases should be no more than 3 months long.  You  may decide to release the product to the customers, and many companies do release the product to customers, but it may also be an internal release. If a release date is too far away, developers will fall into the trap of not feeling a sense of urgency.  The date is far enough away that they don’t need to give the release their full attention.  Additionally, important tasks, such as performance tuning, regression testing, user documentation, and release preparation, will not happen regularly, making them much more difficult and time consuming to do.  The more frequently you do these tasks, the easier they are to accomplish. The Product Owner will be a key participant in determining whether or not a release should be sent out to the customers.  The determination should be made on whether or not the features contained in the release are valuable enough  and complete enough that the customers will see real value in the release.  Often, some features will take more than three months to get them to a state where they qualify for a release or need additional supporting features to be released.  The product owner has the right to make this determination. In addition to release dates, the Product Owner also will help determine iteration dates.  In general, an iteration length should be chosen and the team should follow that iteration length for an extended period of time.  If the iteration length is changed every iteration, you’re not doing Scrum.  Iteration lengths help the team and company get into a rhythm of developing quality software.  Iterations should be somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks in length.  Any shorter, and significant software will likely not be developed.  Any longer, and the team won’t feel urgency and planning will become very difficult. Iterations may not be extended during the iteration.  Companies where Scrum isn’t really followed will often use this as a strategy to complete all stories.  They don’t want to face the harsh reality of what their true performance is, and looking good is more important than seeking visibility and improving the process and team.  Companies like this typically don’t allow failure.  This is unhealthy.  Failure is part of life and unless we learn from it, we can’t improve.  I would much rather see a team push out stories to the next iteration and then have healthy discussions about why they failed rather than extend the iteration and not deal with the core problems. If iteration length varies, retrospectives become more difficult.  For example, evaluating the performance of the team’s estimation efforts becomes much more difficult if the iteration length varies.  Also, the team must have a velocity measurement.  If the iteration length varies, measuring velocity becomes impossible and upper management no longer will have the ability to evaluate the teams performance.  People external to the team will no longer have the ability to determine when key features are likely to be developed.  Variable iterations cause the entire company to fail and likely cause Scrum to fail at an organization. Develops Story Details and Helps the Team Understand Those Details A key concept in Scrum is that the stories are nothing more than a placeholder for a conversation.  Stories should be nothing more than short, one line statements about the functionality.  The team will then converse with the Product Owner about the details about that story.  The product owner needs to have a very good idea about what the details of the story are and needs to be able to help the team understand those details. Too often, we see this requirement as being translated into the need for comprehensive documentation about the story, including old fashioned requirements documentation.  The team should only develop the documentation that is required and should not develop documentation that is only created because their is a process to do so. In general, what we see that works best is the iteration before a team starts development work on a story, the Product Owner, with other appropriate business analysts, will develop the details of that story.  They’ll figure out what business rules are required, potentially make paper prototypes or other light weight mock-ups, and they seek to understand the story and what is implied.  Note that the time allowed for this task is deliberately short.  The Product Owner only has a single iteration to develop all of the stories for the next iteration. If more than one iteration is used, I’ve found that teams will end up with Big Design Up Front and traditional requirements documents.  This is a waste of time, since the team will need to then have discussions with the Product Owner to figure out what the requirements document says.  Instead of this, skip making the pretty pictures and detailing the nuances of the requirements and build only what is minimally needed by the team to do development.  If something comes up during development, you can address it at that time and figure out what you want to do.  The goal is to keep things as light weight as possible so that everyone can move as quickly as possible. Helps QA to Develop Acceptance Tests In Scrum, no story can be counted until it is accepted by QA.  Because of this, acceptance tests are very important to the team.  In general, acceptance tests need to be developed prior to the iteration or at the very beginning of the iteration so that the team can make sure that the tasks that they develop will fulfill the acceptance criteria. The Product Owner will help the team, including QA, understand what will make the story acceptable.  Note that the Product Owner needs to be careful about specifying that the feature will work “Perfectly” at the end of the iteration.  In general, features are developed a little bit at a time, so only the bit that is being developed should be considered as necessary for acceptance. A weak Product Owner will make statements like “Do it right the first time.”  Not only are these statements damaging to the team (like they would try to do it WRONG the first time . . .), they’re also ignoring the iterative nature of Scrum.  Additionally, a weak product owner will seek to add scope in the acceptance testing.  For example, they will refuse to determine acceptance at the beginning of the iteration, and then, after the team has planned and committed to the iteration, they will expand scope by defining acceptance.  This often causes the team to miss the iteration because scope that wasn’t planned on is included.  There are ways that the team can mitigate this problem.  For example, include extra “Product Owner” time to deal with the uncertainty that you know will be introduced by the Product Owner.  This will slow the perceived velocity of the team and is not ideal, since they’ll be doing more work than they get credit for. Interact with the Customer to Make Sure that the Product is Meeting the Customer’s Needs Once development is complete, what the team has worked on should be put in front of real live people to see if it meets the needs of the customer.  One of the great things about Agile is that if something doesn’t work, we can revisit it in a future iteration!  This frees up the team to make the best decision now and know that if that decision proves to be incorrect, the team can revisit it and change that decision. Features are about adding value to the customer, so if the customer doesn’t find them useful, then having the team make tweaks is valuable.  In general, most software will be 80 to 90 percent “right” after the initial round and only minor tweaks are required.  If proper coding standards are followed, these tweaks are usually minor and easy to accomplish.  Product Owners that are doing a good job will encourage real users to see and use the software, since they know that they are trying to add value to the customer. Poor product owners will think that they know the answers already, that their customers are silly and do stupid things and that they don’t need customer input.  If you have a product owner that is afraid to show the team’s work to real customers, you probably need a different product owner. Up Next, “Who Makes a Good Product Owner.” Followed by, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• Who Makes a Good Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In general, the best product owners are those that care passionately about the customer of the product.  Note that I didn’t say about the product itself.  Actually, people that only care about the product, generally do not make good product owners.  Products only matter in relationship to their customers.  If a product doesn’t provide value to the customer, then the product has no value, no matter what a person might think of the product, and no matter what cool technologies exist inside of the product. A good product owner is also a good negotiator.  They recognize that many different priorities exist inside of a corporation, but that there can be only one list that developers work from.  A good product owner recognizes that its their job to help others around them prioritize (perhaps with a Product Council), but also understand that they alone have the final say about priorities and are willing to make the tough decisions required.  Deciding the priority between two perfectly valid stories is very difficult, especially when the stories are from two different departments! A good product owner is deeply interested in helping the team be successful.  They don’t seek to control the team, but instead seek to understand what the team can do and then work with the team to get the best product possible for the Customer.  A good product owner is never denigrating to team members, ever.  They recognize that such behavior would damage the trust that needs to be present between team members and product owners and will avoid it at all costs. In general, technical people (i.e. former or current developers) make poor product owners.  In their minds, they can’t separate implementation details from user functionality, so their stories end up sounding like implementation details.  For example, “The user enters their username on the password screen” is something that a technical product owner would write.  The proper wording for that story is “A user supplies the system with their credentials.”  Because technical people think different from the rest of the population, they are generally not a good fit. A good product owner is also a good writer.  Writing good stories demands good writing.  The art of persuasion, descriptiveness and just general good grammar are all required.  A good Product Owner must also be well spoken, since most of what will be conveyed will be conveyed with the spoken word, not just written word. A good product owner is a “People Person.”  They like talking to people and are very patient.  They don’t mind having questions repeated or fielding many questions, because they want to make sure that the ideas they’re conveying are properly understood so the customer gets the best product possible.  They are happy to answer any questions a team member may have and invite feedback and criticism of designs and stories, since they want a good product.  They really have little ego that gets in the way of building a great product. All of these qualities can be hard to find, but if you look close enough, you’ll find the right person in your organization.  Product owners can be found anywhere, not just in upper management.  Some of the best product owners are those that are very close to the customer.  In fact, check your customer support staff.  I’d bet that several great product owners are lurking there. Final note about what makes a good product owner.  You’re probably NOT going to find a good product owner in a manager, especially if they consider themselves a “Manager.”  Product owners don’t manage anything but the backlog, so be especially careful if the person you’re selecting for Product Owner is a manager. Up Next, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• Linking Simple product to their page listed under Grouped product in Magento

  - by Yogesh

  I want to add url for each simple product listed under Grouped product in Magento i have changed it with below code in app\design\frontend\blank\default\template\catalog\product\view\type\grouped.phtml but still not work for me it's link but with main group product (Example: Main Grouped product and three simple products Item1 Item2 Item3 but all simple product show same url of ain Grouped product) <td><a href="<?php $_item->getUrlPath() ?>"><?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_item->getName()) ?></a> </td> and this also <td><a href="<?php $_item->getProductUrl() ?>"><?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_item->getName()) ?></a> </td> i am doing any mistek pls. help how and where to change it

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• Product table, many kinds of product, each product has many parameters

  - by StoneHeart

  Hi, i'm have not much experience in table design. My goal is a product table(s), it must design to fix some requirement below: Support many kind of products (TV, Phone, PC, ...). Each kind of product has different set of parameters like: Phone will have Color, Size, Weight, OS... PC will have CPU, HDD, RAM... Set of parameters must be dynamic. You can add or edit any parameter you like. I don't want make a table for each kind of product. So I need help to find a correct solution. Thanks.

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• Price comparison sites and its effect on Google ranking

  - by Jivago

  I am the webmaster of a website that contains roughly 10,000 products. I would be possibly interested to index those products in a price comparison site like PriceGrabber, Nextag, Shopbot, etc. The principle of price comparison sites is great for an actual user that want to compare prices but my main concern is the effect it could have on my actual ranking on Google... Since a site like Shopbot uses a CPC model (Cost-per-click), all the links on the website are builted to track clicks (IE: http://www.shopbot.ca/r.html?i=3&catc=2&refshop=5706&refshopcodeid=42587349), it uses redirection, no direct links (So no direct backlinking). In your opinion and/or experience, is this a smart, business wise, seo wise move or not? THANKS!

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• Advice On Price Comparison Affiliate Programs

  - by pixelcook

  I want a price comparison feature on my site similar to Consumer Reports' "Price & Shop" section. They use PriceGrabber.com, but as far as I can tell they have a special deal with CR, so I can't get a similar service for my site. I've gathered that I need to use an affiliate network, but the whole thing seems so shady, I don't really know what sites are legit, and I don't know what sites offer the price comparison feature. Datafeedfile.com comes up a lot during my searches, but the ugly site makes me wary. Does anyone have any experience with this? What affiliate networks do you recommend? Or should I be looking at something else altogether?

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• Oracle Product Leader Named a Leader in Gartner MQ for MDM of Product Data Solutions

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  Gartner recently Oracle as a leader in the MQ report for MDM of Product Data Solutions.  They named Oracle as a leader with the following key points:  Strong MDM portfolio covering multiple data domains, industries and use cases Oracle PDH can be a good fit for Oracle EBS customers and can form part of a multidomain solution: Deep MDM of product data functionality Evolving support for information stewardship For  more information on the report visit Oracle's Analyst Relations blog at  http://blog.us.oracle.com/dimdmar/.  To learn more about Oracle's product information solutions for master data management click here. 

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• What do you call "X <= $foo <= Y" comparison?

  - by Jakob

  While writing a Perl statement like if ( $foo >= X && $foo <= Y ) yet again, I wondered why many programming languages do not support the more comfortable form if ( X <= $foo <= Y ) and what this is called. I came up with "3-legged comparison" but no results when searching for it. By the way there is also the "element-of-set" form if ( $foo in X..Y ) which I only consider more readable when provided via a short keyword. Is there a term for X <= $foo <= Y comparison? Which languages support it?

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• Product Naming Conventions - Does it make sense

  - by NeilHambly

  Maybe it’s just me, but with some of the MS Products being released in 2010 with "2010" in their product name, is the naming of the SQL Server product suite being released with product name that doesn’t make sense, our latest SQL Server Release which is now just about to be released is "SQL Server 2008 R2" My question is do you think this product name is ? Good, Bad or just plain confusing IMHO I think we could have been better placed if this was named "SQL Server 2010"...(read more)

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• Magento: Getting Product Url's for Products within a Grouped Product

  - by Nathan

  For a grouped product, I would like to display a link to the simple products it is composed of. For example, if I have a grouped product called Dining Set composed of plates, knives, forks, etc. I'd like each of the subproducts to have a link to that subproduct (click plates goes to the Simple Product for plates) <?php foreach ($_associatedProducts as $_item): ?> <tr> <td><?php echo $this->htmlEscape($_item->getName()) ?></td> <td class="a-right"> <?php echo $this->getPriceHtml($_item, true) ?> </td> <?php if ($_product->isSaleable()): ?> <td class="a-center"> <?php if ($_item->isSaleable()) : ?> <a href="<?php $_item->getProductUrl() ?>">View</a> <?php else: ?> <p class="availability"><span class="out-of-stock"><?php echo $this->__('Out of stock.') ?></span></p> <?php endif; ?> </td> <?php endif; ?> </tr> <?php endforeach; ?> This is a code snippet from the grouped.phtml file in app/design/frontend/blank/default/template/catalog/product/view/type/grouped.phtml In particular the line that has $_item-getProductUrl() This does not work, and I don't know the code needed to get the url for this associated product item. If anyone could help here it would be much appreciated. Also, where on earth can I find the method's available (and how they're used) for Products or Categories or $_item and the like? Thanks, Nathan

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• When to use identity comparison instead of equals?

  - by maaartinus

  I wonder why would anybody want to use identity comparison for fields in equals, like here (Java syntax): class C { private A a; public boolean equals(Object other) { // standard boring prelude if (other==this) return true; if (other==null) return false; if (other.getClass() != this.getClass()) return false; C c = (C) other; // the relevant part if (c.a != this.a) return false; // more tests... and then return true; } // getter, setters, hashCode, ... } Using == is a bit faster than equals and a bit shorter (due to no need for null tests), too, but in what cases (if any) you'd say it's really better to use == for fields inside equals?

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• comparison of an unsigned variable to 0

  - by user2651062

  When I execute the following loop : unsigned m; for( m = 10; m >= 0; --m ){ printf("%d\n",m); } the loop doesn't stop at m==0, it keeps executing interminably, so I thought that reason was that an unsigned cannot be compared to 0. But when I did the following test unsigned m=9; if(m >= 0) printf("m is positive\n"); else printf("m is negative\n"); I got this result: m is positive which means that the unsigned variable m was successfully compared to 0. Why doesn't the comparison of m to 0 work in the for loop and works fine elsewhere?

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• Custom graph comparison?

  - by user57828

  I'm trying to compare two graphs using hash value ( i.e, at the time of comparison, try to avoid traversing the graph ) Is there a way to make a function such that the hash values compared can also lead to determining at which height the graphs differ? The comparisons between two graphs are to be made by comparing children at a certain level. One way to compare the graphs is have a final hash value for the root node and compare them, but that wouldn't directly reflect at which level the graphs differ, since their immediate children might be the same ( or any other case ).

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• Comparison of music data

  - by Christian P.

  Hey I am looking for theory, algorithms and similar for how to compare music. More specifically, I am looking into how to dupecheck music tracks that have different bitrates or perhaps slightly different variations (radio vs album version), but otherwise sound the same. Use cases for this include services such as Grooveshark, Youtube, etc. where they get a lot of duplicate tracks. I am also interested in text comparisons (Britney Spers vs Britney Spears, how far they deviate, etc.) although this is secondary and I already have some sources to go on in this area. I am mostly interested in codec-agnostic comparison techniques and algoritms (assuming a "raw" stream), but codec-specific resources are appreciated. I am aware of projects such as musicbrainz.org, but have not investigated it further, and would be interested if such projects could be of help in this endeavor.

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• varchar comparison in SQL Server

  - by Ram

  I am looking for some SQL varchar comparison function like C# string.compare (we can ignore case for now, should return zero when the character expression are same and a non zero expression when they are different) Basically I have some alphanumeric column in one table which needs to be verified in another table. I cannot do select A.col1 - B.col1 from (query) as "-" operator cannot be applied on character expressions I cannot cast my expression as int (and then do a difference/subtraction) as it fails select cast ('ASXT000R' as int) Conversion failed when converting varchar 'ASXT000R' to int Soundex would not do it as soundex is same for 2 similar strings Difference would not do it as select difference('abc','ABC') = 4 (as per msdn, difference is the difference in the soundex of 2 character expressions and difference =4 implies least different) Is there any other way of doing it ?

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• Numeric comparison difficulty in R

  - by Matt Parker

  I'm trying to compare two numbers in R as a part of a if-statement condition: (a-b) >= 0.5 In this particular instance, a = 0.58 and b = 0.08... and yet (a-b) >= 0.5 is false. I'm aware of the dangers of using == for exact number comparisons, and this seems related: (a - b) == 0.5) is false, while all.equal((a - b), 0.5) is true. The only solution I can think of is to have two conditions: (a-b) > 0.5 | all.equal((a-b), 0.5). This works, but is that really the only solution? Should I just swear off of the = family of comparison operators forever?

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• We're Hiring! - Server and Desktop Virtualization Product Management

  - by adam.hawley

  There is a lot of exciting stuff going on here at Oracle in general but the server and desktop virtualization group in particular is deeply involved in executing on Oracle's strategy for delivering complete hardware-software solutions across the company, so we're expanding our team with several open positions. If you're interested and qualified, then please send us your resume. The three positions in Virtualization Product Management can be found by going here or going to the Employment Opportunities Job Search page, clicking on 'Advanced Search' and typing the job opening numbers (include 'IRC'... see below) in the 'Keywords' field. Click Search. Current openings are... IRC1457623: Oracle VM Product Management IRC1457626: Desktop Virtualization Application Solutions Product Management IRC1473577: Oracle VM Best Practices Implementation Engineer (Product Management) I look forward to hearing from you!

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• How does Comparison Sites work?

  - by Vijay

  Need your thinking on how does these Comparision Sites actually work. Sites like Junglee.com policybazaar.com and there are many like these which provides comaprision of products , fares etc. grabbed from different websites. I had read a little about it and what i found is-: These sites uses Feeds of the sites data. These sites uses APIs of the sites which are actually provided by those sites. And for some sites which do not have any of these two posibility then the Comparision sites uses web-crawler to crawl their data. This is what i have found out. If you think there is more things to it please do give your own views. But i want to know these for my learning purpose and a little for curiosity- how does they actually matches the crawled data , feeds, and other so that there is no duplicacy. What is the process or algorithms for it. And where should i go to learn these concepts. References for books , articles or anything else.

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• Just another web startup - platform comparison

  - by Holland

  I'm looking to do a web startup which involves something along the lines of an ecommerce site, yet a little more in depth than that. While it's something that I would rather not go into detail with in terms of the initial idea, I can specify (on a basic level) what would be required of the website. If you have any observations or opinions derived from personal experience, which relate to what you see here, I'd appreciate it if you could share these. Paypal's API interaction (definitely). From what I've read about their API, integration with it into their website is VERY expensive, so I'd probably hold off on that until I've (hopefully) generated money and write my own simple credit-card interaction system. SQL Backend (obviously) PostgreSQL seems like a pretty good choice, as from what I've read, it's structure is a bit more "object-oriented" than, say, MySQL. Then again, I've used MySQL before and haven't had much problem with it whatsoever. Would it be worth learning PostgreSQL for this purpose? Java or .Net implementation (Preferably Mono, so I can use .Net while hosting the website using Apache). The reason for this is because, frankly, while I know PHP is a great platform to develop websites with, I hate developing with it. Before someone chimes in and flames me for saying that, note that I have nothing against the language, I just don't like it for my purposes. While Mono may be good to go with, I'm aware that ASP.Net MVC 3 hasn't been released for Mono yet, which may be a pain to work with, without their Razor syntax. Ontop of that, it seems Java is completely FULL of class libraries which deal with web development, that can be downloaded from the web. If anyone has any experience with these, I'd appreciate if that were posted. From what I've read about Spring and Struts2, they seem to be the best out there - especially since they're (AFAIK) MVC. I've considered Python and Django, which do seem REALLY nice, but I don't know much Python, and I'd rather start with something that I already know (language-wise; not framework-wise) than dive into learning a language AND a new framework. I'd REALLY like to be able to host my website via Apache, rather than using Windows Server or anything like that, as, frankly, I hate their setup. I'm not dissing it in any way, shape, or form, I'm just saying I dislike it. <3 terminal config. If there is a good reason to with Windows Server, however, I'd be willing to learn it. C# has a lot of things that Java appears not to have, including Delegates, unsigned types, and LINQ. Is there anything that Java has which can counter these?

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• Comparison of languages by usage type?

  - by Tom

  Does anyone know of a good place to go find comparisons of programming languages by the intended platform/usage? Basically, what I want to know, is of the more popular languages, which ones are meant for high level application development, low level system development, mobile development, web, etc. If there's a good listing out there already, I'm not finding it so far. Does anyone know of a place that would have this? Thanks.

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