Some things i came across in india... best practices for the rest of us

Some things i came across:

• Do not double-assign tasks to different people 
• Do not switch task assignment when first one is 90% done - second person will start from zero again 
• Do provide clear and precise bug reports.
  
  
  • Actions to follow when reproducing behaviour
  • Rerence to testcase if applicable
  • Expexted result
  • Actual result
  • Log files, error messages, etc.
  
  
  
• Provide tracebility requirement->testcase->bugs/status 
• Do not put date/version tags to the file names when using svn. Use svn mechanismn (copy to version) instead! 
• Do not produce multiple copies of documents in different folders
• If you change something (code, config, etc), send precise and complete information
• Use same logins (username,password) on every environment 
• Don't change them 
• Provide public list of these logins (put on wall!). 
• Do project/task planning in one location only. Do not mix MSProject, Excel, Whiteboard, Resultspace. This will become a maintenance nightmare! 
• Plan activities or results, not fluff like "Anything else?" or "Multiple CDP porlets on same page leads to multilple calls to Content fetch" 
• Intregrate specialists early in the project, especially in the design. It does not really help to do a bad design, than get lot's of experts to help implementing this.
• Get experienced people and leverage them properly. Do not let them do trivial things... They are too expensive and get pissed off easily.
• Do not start project with tons of rookies... 
• Assure they know the basics upfront. You cannot easily teach a 4 years old how to drive a Ferrari... 
• Have Arch decisions double checked by someone else. They may be wrong...
• Go for simple approaches, do not plan to future proof everything. 
• Watch performance impact early. After 96% completion, it becomes harder to change. 
• If you identify potential problems, clear them immediately, even if LOE seems to high. Later they will catch you again... (e.g. logger - my fault not to escalate it...) 
• Enforce some discipline (be on time, read and answer email, check your own stuff, inform properly and precise, provide ALL necessary information,...) 
• Setup process for environment replication early (ghost images, vmware, etc.). See this: 50 developers spend minimum 2 days on setup and also need help from others => Minimum waisted time= 100 person days = ??Euro?? 
• Setup monitoring and notification early. How often did we have the case of not running servers and following research? 
• Environment down => 2-50 people playing pocket billiard... 
• Provide a valid build process early. In the 39th week of implementation you don't want build problems any more...
• Start vertical slices of complex functionality early. Release working software often, with minimum functionality. E.g. implementation for CDP as a very important part of the solution might have started much earlier. And you always want to be able see something... 
• Setup continuous integration - at least for common parts like framework or portal_commons, etc.
• Watch dependencies and 3rd party library usage!! We currently seem to include every open source lib in the world... 
• Provide reasonable hardware. 100€ (even 1000!) for Ram is nothing compared to people being unproductive. 
• Have QA people who know their job. Rookies will not give you any benefit here! Only if you want a "delivery assurance" instead of "quality assurance". But, this will get you later...
• Value/productivity of really good people compared to rookies can be 1:10!! So, get the best and let them do what they can do best! 
• Roles of senior developers/techies needed! There currently is a gap. 

India and the Mars

A quote from India Times

HYDERABAD: India's first mission to moon 'Chandrayaan I' this year, manned mission to earth's satellite in 2014, landing on Mars in 2020 and perhaps colonisation of the red planet later. That's Indian space think tank's list of missions for the future. 

The rotation of Mars is more or less as earth, but it has just one-third its density and one-tenth its atmosphere. "The day time temperatures are about 20 degrees Celsius though night time temperatures are low. We should be able to build an atmosphere without much problem. Then, we could send half our population there," said Physical Research Laboratory council chairman and former Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) chief Prof U R Rao on Monday. 

He was delivering the National Science Day lecture on 'The Exciting Frontiers of Space: Past, Present and Future' at the National Geophysical Research Institute in the city. Prof Rao, who played a key role in the development of launch vehicles like GSLV, PSLV and cryogenic engines, said that while it took a few billions of years for evolution to take place on earth, it could be triggered on Mars by sending bacteria of various kinds. This would mean that water and other essentials need not be transported from earth. 

"Nations will have to come together for colonisation of Mars. We should build a mass transportation system to send people to Mars though it takes six months to reach there," added U R Rao. Earth's natural satellite, moon, would need to be used as a transition point to Mars. He said that an elevator could be built to moon as it was only half a million miles away.