Thursday, August 16, 2012

Webinar on 'Force of Habit: Seven Essentials of 21-st Century IT Professionals'



Gone are those days when monolithic IT systems were developed and maintained by exclusive communities of IT professionals confined to technology-savvy regions of the world. The challenges of software engineering during the 21st century are quite different and multifold because of factors such as globalization and technology evolution. In order to face these challenges, 21st-century IT professionals will need to transform successful practices into habits so that these practices become second nature.

I am conducting a webinar on this topic. This webinar is on 22nd August 2012 at 3pm IST.  In this webinar, I am going to discuss the seven habits that are essential for today’s IT professionals. These seven habits empower IT professionals to prepare, act, collaborate, optimize, and influence effectively in their career. This webinar will help Project Managers in understanding the importance of leadership skills and building high-performance teams.

Registration Link: http://www.techgig.com/webinars/Project-Management-Leadership-Series-Session-14-Force-of-Habit-Seven-Essentials-for-21st-Century-IT-Professionals-203

White Paper (PDF) Download: http://www.mindtree.com/insights/thought-posts/articles/force-habit-seven-essentials-21st-century-it-professionals




Thursday, August 2, 2012

Requirements Engineering: Lessons from 5 Unusual Sources


Requirements Engineering continues to be one of the challenging aspects of software engineering. Delivering working software in short iterations requires intense communication and coordination among agile teams in order to refine requirements and identify dependencies and conflicts. In my experience with agile teams in both collocated and distributed environments, an interesting aspect I have observed is that successful agile teams can learn from unusual sources. Here are five such unusual sources.
  1. Restaurants & Waiters
  2. Airports and Flights
  3. Families and Children
  4. Schools and Teachers
  5. Ant Colonies
In my article titled, ‘Distributed Agile: Steps to Improve Quality before Design” I wrote that quality is a journey that starts from the early stages of projects. When we open our eyes and ears to the world around us and learn from unusual sources, we get an opportunity to apply such lessons and understand how simple things make big differences.
What can we learn from these 5 unusual sources? To know more, read this article 'Agile Requirements: Lessons from Five Unusual Sources' published in Agile Record.