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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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• Naming a class that decides to retrieve things from cache or a service + architecture evaluation

  - by Thomas Stock

  Hi, I'm a junior developer and I'm working on a pet project that I want to learn as much as possible from. I have the following scenario: There's a WCF service that I use to retrieve and update data, lets say Cars. So it's called CarWCFService and has a GetCars(), SaveCar(), ... . It implements interface ICarService. This isn't the Actual WCF service but more like a wrapper around it. Upon retrieving data from the service, I want to store them in local memory, as cache. I have made a class for this called CarCacheService which also implements interface ICarService. (I will explain later why it implements ICarService) I don't want client code to be calling these implementations. Instead, I want to create a third implementation for ICarService that tries to read from the CarCacheService before calling the WCFCarService, stores retrieved data in the CarCacheService, etc. 3 questions: How do I name this third class? I was thinking about something as simple as CarService. This does not really says what the service does exactly, tho. Is the naming for the other classes good? Would this naming and architecture be obvious for future programmers? This is my biggest concern. Does this architecture make sense? The reason that I implement ICarService on the CarCacheService is mainly because it allows me to fake the WCFService while debugging. I can store dummy data in a CarCacheService instance and pass it to the CarService, together with an(other) empty CarCacheService. If I made CacheCarService and WCFService public I could let client code decide if they want to drop the caching and just work directly on the WCFService.

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• Naming a predicate: "precondition" or "precondition_is_met"?

  - by RexE

  In my web app framework, each page can have a precondition that needs to be satisfied before it can be displayed to the user. For example, if user 1 and user 2 are playing a back-and-forth role-playing game, user 2 needs to wait for user 1 to finish his turn before he can take his turn. Otherwise, the user is displayed a waiting page. This is implemented with a predicate: def precondition(self): return user_1.completed_turn The simplest name for this API is precondition, but this leads to code like if precondition(): ..., which is not really obvious. Seems to me like it is more accurate to call it precondition_is_met(), but not sure about that either. Is there a best practice for naming methods like this?

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• Naming: objectAction or actionObject?

  - by DocSalvage

  The question, Stored procedure Naming conventions?, and Joel's excellent Making Wrong Code Look Wrong article come closest to addressing my question, but I'm looking for a more general set of criteria to use in deciding how to name modules containing code (classes, objects, methods, functions, widgets, or whatever). English (my only human language) is structured as action-object (i.e closeFile, openFile, saveFile) and since almost all computer languages are based on English, this is the most common convention. However, in trying to keep related code close together and still be able to find things, I've found object-action (i.e. fileClose, fileOpen, fileSave) to be very attractive. Quite a number of non-English human languages follow this structure as well. I doubt that one form is universally superior, but when should each be used in the pursuit of helping to make sure bad code looks bad?

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• Stored procedure Naming conventions?

  - by Chris

  One of our senior developers has stated that we should be using a naming convention for stored procedures with an "objectVerb" style of naming such as ("MemberGetById") instead of a "verbObject" type of naming ("GetMemberByID"). The reasoning for this standard is that all related stored procedures would be grouped together by object rather than by the action. While I see the logic for this way of naming things, this is the first time that I have seen stored procedures named this way. My opinion of the naming convention is that the name can not be read naturally and takes some time to determine what the words are saying and what the procedure might do. What are your takes on this? Which way is the more common way of naming a stored proc, and does a what types of stored proc naming conventions have you used or go by?

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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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• Naming Convention for Dedicated Thread Locking objects

  - by Chris Sinclair

  A relatively minor question, but I haven't been able to find official documentation or even blog opinion/discussions on it. Simply put: when I have a private object whose sole purpose is to serve for private lock, what do I name that object? class MyClass { private object LockingObject = new object(); void DoSomething() { lock(LockingObject) { //do something } } } What should we name LockingObject here? Also consider not just the name of the variable but how it looks in-code when locking. I've seen various examples, but seemingly no solid go-to advice: Plenty of usages of SyncRoot (and variations such as _syncRoot). Code Sample: lock(SyncRoot), lock(_syncRoot) This appears to be influenced by VB's equivalent SyncLock statement, the SyncRoot property that exists on some of the ICollection classes and part of some kind of SyncRoot design pattern (which arguably is a bad idea) Being in a C# context, not sure if I'd want to have a VBish naming. Even worse, in VB naming the variable the same as the keyword. Not sure if this would be a source of confusion or not. thisLock and lockThis from the MSDN articles: C# lock Statement, VB SyncLock Statement Code Sample: lock(thisLock), lock(lockThis) Not sure if these were named minimally purely for the example or not Kind of weird if we're using this within a static class/method. Several usages of PadLock (of varying casing) Code Sample: lock(PadLock), lock(padlock) Not bad, but my only beef is it unsurprisingly invokes the image of a physical "padlock" which I tend to not associate with the abstract threading concept. Naming the lock based on what it's intending to lock Code Sample: lock(messagesLock), lock(DictionaryLock), lock(commandQueueLock) In the VB SyncRoot MSDN page example, it has a simpleMessageList example with a private messagesLock object I don't think it's a good idea to name the lock against the type you're locking around ("DictionaryLock") as that's an implementation detail that may change. I prefer naming around the concept/object you're locking ("messagesLock" or "commandQueueLock") Interestingly, I very rarely see this naming convention for locking objects in code samples online or on StackOverflow. Question: What's your opinion generally about naming private locking objects? Recently, I've started naming them ThreadLock (so kinda like option 3), but I'm finding myself questioning that name. I'm frequently using this locking pattern (in the code sample provided above) throughout my applications so I thought it might make sense to get a more professional opinion/discussion about a solid naming convention for them. Thanks!

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• Naming conventions used for variables and functions in C

  - by Zel

  While coding a large project in C I came upon a problem. If I keep on writing more code then there will be a time when it will be difficult for me to organize the code. I mean that the naming for functions and variables for different parts of the program may seem to be mixed up. So I was thinking whether there are useful naming conventions that I can use for C variables and functions? Most languages suggest a naming convention. But for C the only thing I have read so far is the names should be descriptive for code readability. EDIT: Examples of some examples of suggested naming conventions: Python's PEP 8 Java Tutorial I read some more naming conventions for java somewhere but couldn't remember where.

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• Printer Naming Conventions

  - by John

  I am working on building a new AD print server and have been pondering the idea of renaming the printers. Right now we have a mix of names that varies between a mashup of some that reference location, some that reference functional area, and some that are rather generic. Some examples include the following: Dell 5210 - Building Name HP 4350 - Functional Area Dell Color 3100 - Location and Building Number HP 6500 - Mailroom I was curious what other people used to name their printers with. What conventions do you use and how to design a method that will be able to be used for a while without needing to rename them all again. Also, the naming methodology needs to be understandable for regular computing users so that they can relatively easily find the printer that they need. I was looking at some ideas from here, but I was not sure how practical some of them are. Any help that you can provide is appreciated. Note: I have reviewed many of the postings on here in relation to server naming conventions and found that they were not specific enough for the use case I present above.

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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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• Datacentre Rack naming convention with flexibility for reassignment of server roles

  - by g18c

  We are just shifting across to a new rack and until now have used names of cartoon characters. This is not going to work anymore, and need a better naming convention. Physically i would like to name the servers by location, and then have an alias as to its actual function/customer, i.e. Physical name LONS1R1SVR1 meaning London, suite 1, rack 1, server 1 Customer Alias Since the servers can be reassigned from time to time, for the above physical server name, i would have an alias as a column in a spreadsheet, that would be set to the customers host-name, i.e. wwww.customerserver1.com Patching For patching, I am looking at labeling up the physically connections, i.e. LON1S1R1SVR1-PWR1 LON1S1R1SVR1-PWR2 LON1S1R1SVR1-ETH0 LON1S1R1SVR1-KVM Ultimately if i am labeling cables, I really want to avoid putting LON1S1R1SQLSVR on any patch cord in case the server gets formatted and changed from a SQL server to a WWW server which would need to relabel all the patch cords also. In addition, throwing in virtual machines, i have got confused very quickly. I appreciated that it may be confusing having a physical host-name and customer alias. Please let me know what you run with and any other standards or best practices that i can follow?

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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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• Enforce SSIS naming conventions using BI-xPress

  - by jamiet

  A long long long time ago (in 2006 in fact) I published a blog post entitled Suggested Best Practises and naming conventions in which I suggested a bunch of acronyms that folks could use to prefix object names in their SSIS packages, thus allowing easier identification of those objects in log records, here is a sample of some of those suggestions: If you have adopted these naming conventions (and I am led to believe that a bunch of people have) then you might like to know that you can now check for adherence to these conventions using a tool called BI-xPress from Pragmatic Works. BI-xPress includes a feature called the Best Practices Analyzer that scans your packages and assess them according to some rules that you specify. In addition Pragmatic Works have made available a collection of these rules that adhere to the naming conventions I specified in 2006 You can download this collection however I recommend you first read the accompanying article that demonstrates the capabilities of the Best Practices Analyzer. Pretty cool stuff. @Jamiet

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• What happened this type of naming convention?

  - by Smith

  I have read so many docs about naming conventions, most recommending both Pascal and Camel naming conventions. Well, I agree to this, its ok. This might not be pleasing to some, but I am just trying to get you opinion why you name you objects and classes in a certain way. What happened to this type of naming conventions, or why are they bad? I want to name a struct, and i prefix it with struct. My reason, so that in IntelliSense, I see all the struct in one place, and anywhere I see the struct prefix, I know it's a struct: structPerson structPosition anothe example is the enum, although I may not prefix it with "enum", but maybe with "enm": enmFruits enmSex again my reason is so that in IntelliSense, I see all my enums in one place. Because, .NET has so many built in data structures, I think this helps me do less searching. Please I used .NET in this example, but I welcome language agnostic answers.

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• Naming convention: Final fields (not static)

  - by Zeeker

  Today I had a discussion with a co-worker about the naming of final fields in Java classes. In his opionion final fields should also be considered constants since their values won't change after the creation of the instance. This would lead to the following naming convention for final fields: public class Foo { private static final String BLA_BLA = "bla"; private final String BAR_BATZ; ... } In my opinion only static final fields should be considered constants while fields which are only final should follow the usual camelCase naming convention. public class Foo { private static final String BLA = "bla"; private final String barBatz; ... } Now I'm a bit uncertain since he is a far more experienced programmer than I am and I usually agree with his opinions and consider him a very good developer. Any input on this?

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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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• Variable naming conventions?

  - by Ziv

  I've just started using ReSharper (for C#) and I kind of like its code smells finder, it shows me some things about my writing that I meant to fix a long time ago (mainly variable naming conventions). It caused me to reconsider some of my naming conventions for methods and instance variables. ReSharper suggests that instance variable be lower camel case and begin with an underscore. For a while I meant to make all my local variables lower camel case but is the underscore necessary? Do you find it comfortable? I don't like this convention but I also haven't tried it yet, what is you opinion of it? The second thing it prompted me to re-evaluate is my naming conventions for GUI event handlers. I usually use the VS standard of ControlName_Action and my controls usually use hungarian notation (as a suffix, to help clarify in code what is visible to the user and what isn't when dealing with similarly named variable) so I end up with OK_btn_Click(), what is your opinion of that? Should I succumb to the ReSharper convention or there are other equally valid options?

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• Zookeeper naming service [closed]

  - by kolchanov

  I need a recommendation for naming service implementation. We are ISV and we have a lot of applications (services) with very different protocols such as http (Rest), low level tcp, amqp, diameter, telco protocols Rx, Ry, Ud and many others. We want to simplify configuration, deployment and service discovery procees and it seems that It's time to create central configuration registry. So I have few questions: - is zookeeper suitable for this purpose? - does exists more suitable and more special solution? - best practice for service naming for discoverin. Any standards? - recommendation for service configuration data structure Also we are keeping in mind future tasks For dynamic application distribution in a private cloud. Could you share your real life experience?

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• Tree position terminology/naming

  - by wst

  This is a naming things question. I am processing trees (XML documents), and there are often special rules applied to nodes based on structure. It's been very difficult coming up with concise naming conventions for some cases, namely for nodes in the first position among their siblings, along with some recursive relationship: Given an arbitrary node, I want to describe its first child, and then that node's first child, and so on recursively. Given another arbitrary node, I want to describe its parent if the parent is first among its siblings, and that parent's parent if it's first, and so on recursively. Is there existing terminology to describe these tree positions? How would you name a variable or function that captures one of these cases so that it's intuitive to an unfamiliar developer trying to understand an algorithm?

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• Naming interfaces for persistent values

  - by orip

  I have 2 distinct types of persistent values that I'm having trouble naming well. They're defined with the following Java-esque structure, borrowing Guava's Optional for the example and using generic names to avoid anchoring: interface Foo<T> { T get(); void set(T value); } interface Bar<T> { Optional<T> get(); void set(T value); } With Foo, if the value hasn't been set explicitly then there's some default value available or pre-set. With Bar, if the value hasn't been set explicitly then there's a distinct "no value" state. I'm trying to optimize the names for their call sites. For example, someone using Foo may not care whether there's a default value involved, only that they're guaranteed to always have a value. How would you go about naming these interfaces?

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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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• Guidance in naming awkward objects?

  - by GlenH7

  I'm modeling a chemical system, and I'm having problems with naming my objects within an enum. I'm not sure if I should use: the atomic formula the chemical name an abbreviated chemical name. For example, sulfuric acid is H2SO4 and hydrochloric acid is HCl. With those two, I would probably just use the atomic formula as they are reasonably common. However, I have others like sodium hexafluorosilicate which is Na2SiF6. In that example, the atomic formula isn't as obvious (to me) but the chemical name is hideously long: myEnum.SodiumHexaFluoroSilicate. I'm not sure how I would be able to safely come up with an abbreviated chemical name that would have a consistent naming pattern. From a maintenance point of view, which of the options would you prefer to see and why? Audience for the code will be just programmers, not chemists. If that guides the particulars: I'm using C#; I'm starting with 10 - 20 compounds and would have at most 100 compounds. The enum is to facilitate common calculations - the equation is the same for all compounds but you insert a property of the compound to complete the equation.

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