SPINNacle

- Newsletter from SPIN Chennai January lsquo11

Issue 05

From the Presidentrsquos desk

Interesting Links

Inside this issue

PMI Chennai Chapter events

Visit PMI Chennai

gt Announcement of

SPICON 2011

gt First Watts Humphrey

Award - Winner

gt First Watts Humphrey

Award - Runner-up 1

gt First Watts Humphrey

Award - Runner-up 2

gt Interview

gt Voice of the Community

gt Testing Times

Dear SPIN Members

Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) Chennai has been striving to enrich the knowledge of its members and in bringing the software community together to effectively share their rich experience We as organizers can provide you a forum but it is you members who have made SPIN Chennai vibrant through your enthusias-tic participation in our various activities Thank you for this

We at SPIN Chennai always want to be responsive to your feedback and provide you with what you need This newsletter is one such initiative from us to actively communicate with the community and be an effective medium of knowledge shar-ing

In the days to come like any professional body most of our activities will centre around the web To enable this we have upgraded our website Now SPIN Chennai web site wears a new look

As you know in memory of late Dr Watts Humphrey we have instituted an annual Watts Humphrey Software Quality Award We had the presentation of the selected papers on lsquoBest Practices in Software Quality and Process Improvement during Nov 2010 The top position in the Best Practices session went to Mr Raghuram of Ramco Systems closely followed by the runners up Elizabeth Koshy of iGATE Solutions and Manjusha Gupta of Cognizant Technology Solutions During SPICON 2011 we have scheduled these paper presentations for the benefit of the larger audience

SPICON 2011 is coming up on the 29th and 30th of April With lsquoInnovation in IT Proc-esses - the Engine for Growthrdquo as the theme it is packed with sessions from excel-lent speakers and two interesting pre-conference sessions on

TRIZ - Theory of Inventive Problem Solving

Innovation Management and Seven Core Skills of Innovators

Make the best use of this opportunity and benefit from these sessions I look for-ward to your active participation

With Best Regards

Chandrakumar Raman

Establish a leadership forum for open exchange of software process improvement experiences and ideas

Promote achieving higher levels of process maturity and software quality

SPIN Chennai

Our Mission

eWIT

Visit httpewitcoin

CSI Chennai Chapter

Visit CSI Website

Previous SPINnacle issues

Newsletter 1

Newsletter 2

Newsletter 3

Newsletter 4

Academia Interface SPIN Talks and Seminars Other Associations

National Workshop in Cyber Security - RMK Engineering College - Jan 19th and 20th 2011

SPIN Chennai Talk Opera-tions Maturity in an IT Infra-structure Services 28-Oct-10

Highlights of CMMI V13 amp Changes from CMMI V12 18 on 22nd Jan 2011

First Watts Humphrey Award of My Practice session held on 27 November 2010

Business Excellence thro Cloud Computing - IIT Madras - 13-15 Dec 2010

Conference on Software Engineering CONSEG 2011 in Bangalore (February 17-19 2011 )

International Seminar on Usability Matters - UMO2010 - Chennai

Page 2

SPINNacle

Page 3

SPINNacle

Page 4

SPINNacle

Page 5

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Winner of My Practice Session

Practices in a Support Organization - M Raghuraman and Srinivasan of Ramco Systems Our Practice

Process transparency Tooling transparency and Operational transparency are key to any dynamic support or-ganization Achieving maturity in transparency is a function of Time Team culture Eco system feedback and Or-ganizational commitment

This write-up is all about how the above statements are just not clicheacutes but describe the evolution of our support organization standing the test of time

The key stakeholders for a support organization are

The Top Management (for the funding)

The Users (for consuming our products and services)

The Support Leaders (for Orchestration of Support Operations)

The Support Team (for Supporting the Users)

The Enhancement Team (for continuously enhancing our Products and Services)

At a High level the Support Process includes

Ticket Booking

Change Request (CR)

Customer Interaction (Queries)

Ticket Handling

Monitoring Tickets

Prioritizing Tickets

Impact Analysis

Change Management (Defect amp CR)

Verification amp Release

Multiple Customer Rollout amp Monitoring

Customer Feedback

The key challenges we faced include

Measurable customer satisfaction

Sensitivity to SLAs

Fix ready to fix usable timelines

Consistent fix rollouts

Multiple toolsets for support

Document management

Impact analysis and change management

Transparency in ticket handling and movement to closure

Knowledge management of process and toolset

Process transparency means different visibility scenarios to different stakeholders For on-demand information every stakeholder has a login to the Support Portal with multi-layered information presentation relevant to the needs of the stake holder This ensures that any stakeholder can connect to the Portal wherever they are from a variety of devices and obtain whatever information they may need

Continued hellip

SPINNacle

Page 6

hellip continued

Proactively the support infrastructure also sends relevant periodic information (both exception and summary) to the stakeholders It also publishes the Weekly Plans Status Resource Deployment and significant achievements to the Management

A variety of RSS Feeds are also published to address a variety of information requirement such as Support Status Resource Utilization Planning Effectiveness

Improving Operational Productivity has been a constant thrust point for the Support team The Support Engi-neers always use a single toolset for all their change management operations The toolset hides the complexity of Version management Managing Multiple Source Structures Automatic Publishing of Releases to stake holders for Consumption Automatic Packaging Mandatory checks for Release Processes Large Scale Automatic Deploy-ment and Centralized Deployment Verification

The Support team also has a roadmap of enhancements to its offerings Enhancements (Change Requests) also happen in parallel The toolset discussed above also supports the seamless enhancement Process It fully appreci-ates the criticality of support fixes but ensures that all such support fixes do get incorporated when a new CR for the same object gets released to Maintenance This ensures that Enhancements (CR) do not skip fixes released earlier

Testing is a mandatory part of any Defect Fix or CR release The toolset analyzes the objects fixed their relation-ship with other unmodified objects and provides the support engineer the list of test cases that needs to be tested before releasing the fix For any failures in such test cases a ticket gets raised automatically in the system with a reference to the fix and the case that caused the failure This ensures full traceability and quality assess-ment of fix releases

As a result of process automation we have achieved the following 1 Reduction in Bad fix rate from 730 to 186 2 Reduction in number of Escalations 3 Reduction in number of Release and Rollout days and 4 Increase in Process compliance and client satisfaction

The philosophy behind the operations of the support team is Quality Systems is not Optional itrsquos the way of life and has to be transparent and If something is manually repetitive its a candidate for automation

This is where we are and we continue to innovate

Authors

Srinivasan heads the Support and Development of Virtual Works Ramcos flagship devel-opment platform for assembling and developing large scale enterprise applications In his association with Ramco for the past 18+ years Srinivasan has played a significant role in major innovations within Ramco and is the inventor in various patents that have been filed for such innovations

Raghuraman M is currently working as Senior Quality Executive in Ramco Systems He holds a Bachelor degree in Information Technology and masters in Quality Engineering He is also a Certified Software Quality Analyst

SPINNacle

Page 7

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner-up 1 of My Practice Session

Requirements Framework - Elizabeth Koshy iGATE an integrated Technology amp Operations organization based in India had a steady climb in the customerrsquos value chain in terms of penetrating deeper (instead of wider) into customer portfolio More and more customers were proposing lsquopartnershiprsquo model One of the focus areas in partnership was lsquorequirements engineeringrsquo as the challenges faced in this area were affecting both iGATE and its customers In spite of iGATE having established process and tools some of the critical projects experienced cost and schedule overruns due to missed require-ments A series of initiatives were taken up at different time frames to counter the challenges cited and there were indi-cations of positive results emerging out of them Detailed analysis of the metrics from development projects was conducted to identify the root causes While the conventional Root Cause Analysis (RCA) approach resulted in incremental benefits an integrated approach to tackle the challenge was the need of the hour Subsequent improvements and the list of unresolved issues indicate that the process approach alone is not ade-quate to address the improvements in entirety The key elements that need to be integrated in requirements engineering area were coming out clearly as follows

1 Competency development and evaluation

2 Business perspective of owning projects

3 Unsolicited support and demonstration of value add to customer (provided) inputs

4 Tighter integration of tools and techniques

iGATE Requirements Framework was evolved over a period of one and half years crossing several milestones on its journey such as integration of training and technology project execution and facilitation Requirements framework was designed to overcome the challenges of requirements elicitation using structured analysis of problem and coming up with value added process-tools-training-model elements The results of implementation was (i) increase in completely owned development projects (ii) increase in resources engaged in requirements phase of project and (iii) improved annual organization level customer satisfaction results The organization at present is not only leveraging the requirements framework for successful execution of projects within iGATE Best practices of the framework are adopted by our customers and the framework is customized as ldquocustomer-iGATE specific joint requirements frameworkrdquo

Author

Elizabeth Koshy is the Head of SEPG function in iGATE

She was the program manager for CMMi implementation in iGATE and was also part of RBNQA team She has about 19 years of experience in the Information Technology Industry specialized in the areas of Software Engineering Quality Assurance Project Management and Six Sigma She is also a designated Six Sigma MBB and a certified BB Elizabeth has significantly contributed in incorporating Six Sigma practices into iGATE Quality Management System

SPINNacle

Page 8

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner up 2 of My Practice Session

APEX - Manjusha Gupta The three basic hygiene needs of any project are to improve SLA adherence to reduce risks and to improve Pro-ject Health (compliance) Prior to APEX projects had huge issues with respect to SLA missespenalties and con-tractual risks and they were constantly being highlighted as vulnerable project to the President and MD of the organization for review Hence APEX (A Passion for Excellence) as a concept was initiated across Cognizant BPO to improve these hygiene factors

APEX was based on the concept of edutainment (education and entertainment) Through simple mediums like cartoons puzzles poster competition computer based games snake amp ladder treasure hunt quiz etc the im-portance of quality was inculcated in the team at all levels These contests invigorated the floor brought out the competitive spirit and instilled a sense of accomplishment APEX has greatly helped BPO projects in bringing in lot of focus to review and understanding of contractual obligations and service levels Some of the other accom-plishments that were achieved as a part of APEX are

All SLAs are being signed up only post base-lining of metrics or after 6 months of data collection at the offshore

Detailed root cause analysis and corrective action for SLA slippages which has helped in improving SLA adherence

Revisiting SOW clauses and obtaining waiver from client on impossible client requirements

Metrics planning and reporting in one single portal

Improved transition management and governance Usage of customized Cognizant 20 for transition manage-

ment

Improved data integrity of the reported metrics due to improved data collection clear operational definition and

strong measurement system and validation by dedicated quality leaders at the project level

Some of the feedback received from the audiencejury were

ldquoThe way Quality was taken to the floor in terms of fun and games was truly noteworthyrdquo

ldquoThat the games were purely on quality concept was just amazingrdquo

ldquoA very complex concept executed in a very innovative wayrdquo

Author

Manjusha Gupta is currently a Quality Manager in Cognizant Technologies Solutions Pvt Ltd

She is a Six sigma trained professional is a Statistician by qualification and has a diploma in Total Quality Management She has close to 13 years of experience in Project and Quality Management Her experience spans across domains like Clinical Management Enterprise Ap-plication Interface (EAI) Human Resources Management System Insurance Knowledge Man-agement Business Process Outsourcing and e-learning

SPINNacle

Page 9

Interview mdash Gowri Shankar Subramaniam

Setting the strategic direction of Indiarsquos one of the fastest growing companies Aspire Sys-tems is Mr Gowri Shankar Subramaniam He is passionate about Producteering building software products for their clients He shares his views on software engineering and quality in this exclusive interview to SPIN Chennai One of the key services you offer is Producteering Ensuring process compliance in an in-house product devel-opment itself is a challenge for any quality team That being the case what do you do to ensure quality of your clientsrsquo product We have the experience of developing multiple products simultaneously At any point in time we handle devel-opment of about 40 to 50 products We know what works and what does not Not all our clients are high mature organizations They are at different levels of process maturity We have a well established framework to deal with any type of client There are four components that are important in any product development namely time-to-market budget scope and functionality We understand from our client which ones are sacrosanct Our key strength is focusing on technical quality Irrespective of the maturity level of our client we ensure that the product we build is tech-nically sound Focusing on architecture and not compromising on design quality has helped us to succeed In todayrsquos competitive market the mantra seems to be lsquodeliver more for lessrsquo I am sure Aspire would be no exception How do you sustain quality levels of offering We believe that quality is integrated into our products Quality is an integral part of whatever we do We are an ISO 9001 certified organization Our focus is more on technical quality rather than mere com-pliance to processes documented We emphasize on good design and efficient code This has paid us rich dividends over time Our customers recognize our strength For every project we assess the technical health apart from its process health We review the technical architecture and audit for compliance to standards Our Advanced Technology Group ensures that every project we undertake is superior in its technical health

How do you benchmark your performance vis-agrave-vis other organizationsrsquo in this industry

We rarely come across organizations publishing metrics or any association that publishes data against which we could benchmark our quality Alternatively we collate our own best practices We have internal benchmarks to compare with rather than external ones Our technology group lends their expertise through reviews and audits With multiple teams working in multiple locations and people coming from varied backgrounds how do you manage to drive quality to one and all especially to grassroots Quality spirit is inculcated right from the time one joins Aspire Our induction training is not so much to write Java or C++ code but to build a good piece of software We expose them to usability technical architecture and what it takes to build good software Through reviews and audits we ensure that every team works towards achieving our common goal building technically sound best-in-class products for our customers We ensure that our project managers are technically capable We recognize our achievers through rewards Our Red Falcon for quality Gold and Silver are aspirations of every project manager

SPINNacle

ldquoFor every project we assess the technical health apart from its proc-ess healthrdquo

Page 10

How do you measure your ROI on quality Are you realizing the desired benefits of your investment in qual-ity We do not identify quality as a separate parameter We do not have a quality team exclusively for collating data or to audit We have certainly realized that the time and effort we spend on nurturing technically strong teams have paid us off Last few years we have been hearing about the need to step up the quality of manpower coming out of col-leges Do you agree with that Yes We also experience the difficulty faced by most of the other organizations The percentage of students ready to be employed by the industry is very low The gap is very pronounced when it comes to soft skills such as com-munication or presentation

Most of the colleges and universities have introduced soft skills as a separate course to address this problem Would that help

Yes it helps to some extent There are certain aspects that cannot be taught overnight like attitude and ability to work hard etc When we recruit we look for the right attitude and aptitude Our philosophy is to create talent We provide extensive training to our new recruits During the training they are evaluated three to four times through reviews to assess their readiness and fitment to delivery

What should Tier 2 and tier 3 companies do to survive in IT Large companies seem to get a disproportionate amount of business leaving the next tier companies high and dry

Tier 2 and tier 3 companies should focus on their inherent strengths When they concentrate on specific areas they could be recognized in that segment We should encourage the mindset of youngsters to work in smaller organizations

The government can encourage entrepreneurs and device systems to support their growth

What is your advice to the community of software process improvement professionals

Software process improvement professionals should get more involved and understand the technical quality

SPINNacle

ldquoTier 2 and tier 3 compa-nies should focus on their inherent strengths rdquo

Page 11

Voice of the community

TREE BANK

Trees are important in purifying the air maintaining the ecological balance and providing nutrients to the soil Organizations and individuals can contribute towards this environmental cause by planting and nurturing trees in their areas Tree Bank is a non-profit social service organization enabling organizations and individuals to plant trees in their localities or office buildings or campuses or houses It gives away free saplings to the public who approach them and also ensures that the new owner nourishes the saplings with proper care

Mr G Mullaivanam a third generation farmer is the individual dedicated to this cause He has been collecting and giving away saplings from the age of 13 but formed lsquoTree Bank in 2008 with volunteers Then he started operating full time in this social cause now with support from about 355 volunteers (including college students and IT professionals) planting trees in each of the 155 divisions in Chennai everyday He is now the proud owner of about 2040000 trees that are planted in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states

Tree Bank has innumerable number of saplingstrees including all varieties from which people can choose the one they want It has rare medicinal ones too Mr Mullaivanam collects the saplings from all possible sources waters them nourishes them prunes the trees and even prepares natural manures He does all this for no mone-tary benefit Farming and providing flower decoration services are his sources of income

ldquoOur team inspects the house of the people who takes saplings from us It looks for an appropriate place for the tree taking into account the Metro Water line and Electricity Board line and train them on how deep the pit should be and how to grow and maintain it The resident is expected to mail a picture of the planted tree and the team regularly keeps a check on its growthrdquo says Mr Mullaivanam ldquoThrice a year the team visits all the places where the trees were planted and help in pruning and other tree care servicesrdquo he adds

SPINNacle

Pictures (From Top Left Clockwise) (a) TREE Bank founder Mr G Mullaivanam (left) handing over some tree saplings (b) Tree Plantation at Gandhi Nagar Adyar Government Library (c) Tree Plantation at General Hospital (GH) Chennai by Dr J Mohana Sundaram Dean GH (d) Tree Plantation at Guindy Industrial Estate by Justice Mr S Mohan (behind) and Mrs Padma Venkatraman (center) daughter of Former President Mr S Venkatara-man on the 100th birth centenary of Mr S Venkatraman

Page 12

TREE BANK hellip continued

Many organizations have approached the Tree Bank and got the saplings and planted them in their places some examples are

LampT campus in PorurChennai 50 saplings

Olympia IT Park Guindy Chennai 50 saplings

Industrial Estate Guindy Chennai 100 saplings

Dye Mark Factory campus Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Government School Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Birla Planetarium Chennai 50 saplings

General Hospital Chennai 56 saplings

SRM University campus Chennai 60 saplings

MOP Vaishnav College campus Chennai 100 saplings

Alpha College Chennai initiated plantation of 10000 saplings in a phased manner over 1 year inside their campus and on the roads along in the Thiruvallur district in collaboration with District Collector Office

Vidya Ashram Kadalur district Tamilnadu 300 saplings

Tree Bank as their own Program Ongoing program of lsquoAt Least One sapling a dayrsquo to complete 300000 saplings along the roads in Kanchipuram Thiruvallur and Chennai Districts in Tamilnadu

In addition to above Tree Bank has been receiving requests through emails and has been providing saplings to organizations from other cities who visit Chennai and collect the saplings Some examples

Chittoor district 200 saplings

Pondicherry 300 saplings

Anybody who wants to get saplings from Tree Bank can mail their details to treebankofindiagmailcom or con-tact Mrs Karpagam Somasundaram Volunteer Tree Bank (email skarpagyahoocom) For more details visit wwwtreebankofindiawebscom

Answers to the SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

SPINNacle

Across

1 Japanese term for Leveling the work load- HEIJUNKA

3 If you know Genrich Altshuller you should know this approach - TRIZ

6 T in TSP - TEAM

7 Fundamental aspect of any software If any doubt check with Dan Brown - CODE

10 If you love noodles use this tool SPAGHETTI

CONGRATULATIONS Winner of SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

Divakar Vaiyapuri - Sify Corp Chennai

Dhanasekar Elumalai - Mindtree Chennai

Down

2 SEICMMI_ _ _ IT-CMF - IVI

4 You might have hated this in Maths class but in testing profession you cant give it a go- RE-GRESSION

5 Time to refresh physics when you do meas-urement in agile - VELOCITY

8 German concept connected with music - TAKT

9 GE Six Sigma Toyota LEAN

Page 3

SPINNacle

Page 4

SPINNacle

Page 5

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Winner of My Practice Session

Practices in a Support Organization - M Raghuraman and Srinivasan of Ramco Systems Our Practice

Process transparency Tooling transparency and Operational transparency are key to any dynamic support or-ganization Achieving maturity in transparency is a function of Time Team culture Eco system feedback and Or-ganizational commitment

This write-up is all about how the above statements are just not clicheacutes but describe the evolution of our support organization standing the test of time

The key stakeholders for a support organization are

The Top Management (for the funding)

The Users (for consuming our products and services)

The Support Leaders (for Orchestration of Support Operations)

The Support Team (for Supporting the Users)

The Enhancement Team (for continuously enhancing our Products and Services)

At a High level the Support Process includes

Ticket Booking

Change Request (CR)

Customer Interaction (Queries)

Ticket Handling

Monitoring Tickets

Prioritizing Tickets

Impact Analysis

Change Management (Defect amp CR)

Verification amp Release

Multiple Customer Rollout amp Monitoring

Customer Feedback

The key challenges we faced include

Measurable customer satisfaction

Sensitivity to SLAs

Fix ready to fix usable timelines

Consistent fix rollouts

Multiple toolsets for support

Document management

Impact analysis and change management

Transparency in ticket handling and movement to closure

Knowledge management of process and toolset

Process transparency means different visibility scenarios to different stakeholders For on-demand information every stakeholder has a login to the Support Portal with multi-layered information presentation relevant to the needs of the stake holder This ensures that any stakeholder can connect to the Portal wherever they are from a variety of devices and obtain whatever information they may need

Continued hellip

SPINNacle

Page 6

hellip continued

Proactively the support infrastructure also sends relevant periodic information (both exception and summary) to the stakeholders It also publishes the Weekly Plans Status Resource Deployment and significant achievements to the Management

A variety of RSS Feeds are also published to address a variety of information requirement such as Support Status Resource Utilization Planning Effectiveness

Improving Operational Productivity has been a constant thrust point for the Support team The Support Engi-neers always use a single toolset for all their change management operations The toolset hides the complexity of Version management Managing Multiple Source Structures Automatic Publishing of Releases to stake holders for Consumption Automatic Packaging Mandatory checks for Release Processes Large Scale Automatic Deploy-ment and Centralized Deployment Verification

The Support team also has a roadmap of enhancements to its offerings Enhancements (Change Requests) also happen in parallel The toolset discussed above also supports the seamless enhancement Process It fully appreci-ates the criticality of support fixes but ensures that all such support fixes do get incorporated when a new CR for the same object gets released to Maintenance This ensures that Enhancements (CR) do not skip fixes released earlier

Testing is a mandatory part of any Defect Fix or CR release The toolset analyzes the objects fixed their relation-ship with other unmodified objects and provides the support engineer the list of test cases that needs to be tested before releasing the fix For any failures in such test cases a ticket gets raised automatically in the system with a reference to the fix and the case that caused the failure This ensures full traceability and quality assess-ment of fix releases

As a result of process automation we have achieved the following 1 Reduction in Bad fix rate from 730 to 186 2 Reduction in number of Escalations 3 Reduction in number of Release and Rollout days and 4 Increase in Process compliance and client satisfaction

The philosophy behind the operations of the support team is Quality Systems is not Optional itrsquos the way of life and has to be transparent and If something is manually repetitive its a candidate for automation

This is where we are and we continue to innovate

Authors

Srinivasan heads the Support and Development of Virtual Works Ramcos flagship devel-opment platform for assembling and developing large scale enterprise applications In his association with Ramco for the past 18+ years Srinivasan has played a significant role in major innovations within Ramco and is the inventor in various patents that have been filed for such innovations

Raghuraman M is currently working as Senior Quality Executive in Ramco Systems He holds a Bachelor degree in Information Technology and masters in Quality Engineering He is also a Certified Software Quality Analyst

SPINNacle

Page 7

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner-up 1 of My Practice Session

Requirements Framework - Elizabeth Koshy iGATE an integrated Technology amp Operations organization based in India had a steady climb in the customerrsquos value chain in terms of penetrating deeper (instead of wider) into customer portfolio More and more customers were proposing lsquopartnershiprsquo model One of the focus areas in partnership was lsquorequirements engineeringrsquo as the challenges faced in this area were affecting both iGATE and its customers In spite of iGATE having established process and tools some of the critical projects experienced cost and schedule overruns due to missed require-ments A series of initiatives were taken up at different time frames to counter the challenges cited and there were indi-cations of positive results emerging out of them Detailed analysis of the metrics from development projects was conducted to identify the root causes While the conventional Root Cause Analysis (RCA) approach resulted in incremental benefits an integrated approach to tackle the challenge was the need of the hour Subsequent improvements and the list of unresolved issues indicate that the process approach alone is not ade-quate to address the improvements in entirety The key elements that need to be integrated in requirements engineering area were coming out clearly as follows

1 Competency development and evaluation

2 Business perspective of owning projects

3 Unsolicited support and demonstration of value add to customer (provided) inputs

4 Tighter integration of tools and techniques

iGATE Requirements Framework was evolved over a period of one and half years crossing several milestones on its journey such as integration of training and technology project execution and facilitation Requirements framework was designed to overcome the challenges of requirements elicitation using structured analysis of problem and coming up with value added process-tools-training-model elements The results of implementation was (i) increase in completely owned development projects (ii) increase in resources engaged in requirements phase of project and (iii) improved annual organization level customer satisfaction results The organization at present is not only leveraging the requirements framework for successful execution of projects within iGATE Best practices of the framework are adopted by our customers and the framework is customized as ldquocustomer-iGATE specific joint requirements frameworkrdquo

Author

Elizabeth Koshy is the Head of SEPG function in iGATE

She was the program manager for CMMi implementation in iGATE and was also part of RBNQA team She has about 19 years of experience in the Information Technology Industry specialized in the areas of Software Engineering Quality Assurance Project Management and Six Sigma She is also a designated Six Sigma MBB and a certified BB Elizabeth has significantly contributed in incorporating Six Sigma practices into iGATE Quality Management System

SPINNacle

Page 8

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner up 2 of My Practice Session

APEX - Manjusha Gupta The three basic hygiene needs of any project are to improve SLA adherence to reduce risks and to improve Pro-ject Health (compliance) Prior to APEX projects had huge issues with respect to SLA missespenalties and con-tractual risks and they were constantly being highlighted as vulnerable project to the President and MD of the organization for review Hence APEX (A Passion for Excellence) as a concept was initiated across Cognizant BPO to improve these hygiene factors

APEX was based on the concept of edutainment (education and entertainment) Through simple mediums like cartoons puzzles poster competition computer based games snake amp ladder treasure hunt quiz etc the im-portance of quality was inculcated in the team at all levels These contests invigorated the floor brought out the competitive spirit and instilled a sense of accomplishment APEX has greatly helped BPO projects in bringing in lot of focus to review and understanding of contractual obligations and service levels Some of the other accom-plishments that were achieved as a part of APEX are

All SLAs are being signed up only post base-lining of metrics or after 6 months of data collection at the offshore

Detailed root cause analysis and corrective action for SLA slippages which has helped in improving SLA adherence

Revisiting SOW clauses and obtaining waiver from client on impossible client requirements

Metrics planning and reporting in one single portal

Improved transition management and governance Usage of customized Cognizant 20 for transition manage-

ment

Improved data integrity of the reported metrics due to improved data collection clear operational definition and

strong measurement system and validation by dedicated quality leaders at the project level

Some of the feedback received from the audiencejury were

ldquoThe way Quality was taken to the floor in terms of fun and games was truly noteworthyrdquo

ldquoThat the games were purely on quality concept was just amazingrdquo

ldquoA very complex concept executed in a very innovative wayrdquo

Author

Manjusha Gupta is currently a Quality Manager in Cognizant Technologies Solutions Pvt Ltd

She is a Six sigma trained professional is a Statistician by qualification and has a diploma in Total Quality Management She has close to 13 years of experience in Project and Quality Management Her experience spans across domains like Clinical Management Enterprise Ap-plication Interface (EAI) Human Resources Management System Insurance Knowledge Man-agement Business Process Outsourcing and e-learning

SPINNacle

Page 9

Interview mdash Gowri Shankar Subramaniam

Setting the strategic direction of Indiarsquos one of the fastest growing companies Aspire Sys-tems is Mr Gowri Shankar Subramaniam He is passionate about Producteering building software products for their clients He shares his views on software engineering and quality in this exclusive interview to SPIN Chennai One of the key services you offer is Producteering Ensuring process compliance in an in-house product devel-opment itself is a challenge for any quality team That being the case what do you do to ensure quality of your clientsrsquo product We have the experience of developing multiple products simultaneously At any point in time we handle devel-opment of about 40 to 50 products We know what works and what does not Not all our clients are high mature organizations They are at different levels of process maturity We have a well established framework to deal with any type of client There are four components that are important in any product development namely time-to-market budget scope and functionality We understand from our client which ones are sacrosanct Our key strength is focusing on technical quality Irrespective of the maturity level of our client we ensure that the product we build is tech-nically sound Focusing on architecture and not compromising on design quality has helped us to succeed In todayrsquos competitive market the mantra seems to be lsquodeliver more for lessrsquo I am sure Aspire would be no exception How do you sustain quality levels of offering We believe that quality is integrated into our products Quality is an integral part of whatever we do We are an ISO 9001 certified organization Our focus is more on technical quality rather than mere com-pliance to processes documented We emphasize on good design and efficient code This has paid us rich dividends over time Our customers recognize our strength For every project we assess the technical health apart from its process health We review the technical architecture and audit for compliance to standards Our Advanced Technology Group ensures that every project we undertake is superior in its technical health

How do you benchmark your performance vis-agrave-vis other organizationsrsquo in this industry

We rarely come across organizations publishing metrics or any association that publishes data against which we could benchmark our quality Alternatively we collate our own best practices We have internal benchmarks to compare with rather than external ones Our technology group lends their expertise through reviews and audits With multiple teams working in multiple locations and people coming from varied backgrounds how do you manage to drive quality to one and all especially to grassroots Quality spirit is inculcated right from the time one joins Aspire Our induction training is not so much to write Java or C++ code but to build a good piece of software We expose them to usability technical architecture and what it takes to build good software Through reviews and audits we ensure that every team works towards achieving our common goal building technically sound best-in-class products for our customers We ensure that our project managers are technically capable We recognize our achievers through rewards Our Red Falcon for quality Gold and Silver are aspirations of every project manager

SPINNacle

ldquoFor every project we assess the technical health apart from its proc-ess healthrdquo

Page 10

How do you measure your ROI on quality Are you realizing the desired benefits of your investment in qual-ity We do not identify quality as a separate parameter We do not have a quality team exclusively for collating data or to audit We have certainly realized that the time and effort we spend on nurturing technically strong teams have paid us off Last few years we have been hearing about the need to step up the quality of manpower coming out of col-leges Do you agree with that Yes We also experience the difficulty faced by most of the other organizations The percentage of students ready to be employed by the industry is very low The gap is very pronounced when it comes to soft skills such as com-munication or presentation

Most of the colleges and universities have introduced soft skills as a separate course to address this problem Would that help

Yes it helps to some extent There are certain aspects that cannot be taught overnight like attitude and ability to work hard etc When we recruit we look for the right attitude and aptitude Our philosophy is to create talent We provide extensive training to our new recruits During the training they are evaluated three to four times through reviews to assess their readiness and fitment to delivery

What should Tier 2 and tier 3 companies do to survive in IT Large companies seem to get a disproportionate amount of business leaving the next tier companies high and dry

Tier 2 and tier 3 companies should focus on their inherent strengths When they concentrate on specific areas they could be recognized in that segment We should encourage the mindset of youngsters to work in smaller organizations

The government can encourage entrepreneurs and device systems to support their growth

What is your advice to the community of software process improvement professionals

Software process improvement professionals should get more involved and understand the technical quality

SPINNacle

ldquoTier 2 and tier 3 compa-nies should focus on their inherent strengths rdquo

Page 11

Voice of the community

TREE BANK

Trees are important in purifying the air maintaining the ecological balance and providing nutrients to the soil Organizations and individuals can contribute towards this environmental cause by planting and nurturing trees in their areas Tree Bank is a non-profit social service organization enabling organizations and individuals to plant trees in their localities or office buildings or campuses or houses It gives away free saplings to the public who approach them and also ensures that the new owner nourishes the saplings with proper care

Mr G Mullaivanam a third generation farmer is the individual dedicated to this cause He has been collecting and giving away saplings from the age of 13 but formed lsquoTree Bank in 2008 with volunteers Then he started operating full time in this social cause now with support from about 355 volunteers (including college students and IT professionals) planting trees in each of the 155 divisions in Chennai everyday He is now the proud owner of about 2040000 trees that are planted in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states

Tree Bank has innumerable number of saplingstrees including all varieties from which people can choose the one they want It has rare medicinal ones too Mr Mullaivanam collects the saplings from all possible sources waters them nourishes them prunes the trees and even prepares natural manures He does all this for no mone-tary benefit Farming and providing flower decoration services are his sources of income

ldquoOur team inspects the house of the people who takes saplings from us It looks for an appropriate place for the tree taking into account the Metro Water line and Electricity Board line and train them on how deep the pit should be and how to grow and maintain it The resident is expected to mail a picture of the planted tree and the team regularly keeps a check on its growthrdquo says Mr Mullaivanam ldquoThrice a year the team visits all the places where the trees were planted and help in pruning and other tree care servicesrdquo he adds

SPINNacle

Pictures (From Top Left Clockwise) (a) TREE Bank founder Mr G Mullaivanam (left) handing over some tree saplings (b) Tree Plantation at Gandhi Nagar Adyar Government Library (c) Tree Plantation at General Hospital (GH) Chennai by Dr J Mohana Sundaram Dean GH (d) Tree Plantation at Guindy Industrial Estate by Justice Mr S Mohan (behind) and Mrs Padma Venkatraman (center) daughter of Former President Mr S Venkatara-man on the 100th birth centenary of Mr S Venkatraman

Page 12

TREE BANK hellip continued

Many organizations have approached the Tree Bank and got the saplings and planted them in their places some examples are

LampT campus in PorurChennai 50 saplings

Olympia IT Park Guindy Chennai 50 saplings

Industrial Estate Guindy Chennai 100 saplings

Dye Mark Factory campus Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Government School Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Birla Planetarium Chennai 50 saplings

General Hospital Chennai 56 saplings

SRM University campus Chennai 60 saplings

MOP Vaishnav College campus Chennai 100 saplings

Alpha College Chennai initiated plantation of 10000 saplings in a phased manner over 1 year inside their campus and on the roads along in the Thiruvallur district in collaboration with District Collector Office

Vidya Ashram Kadalur district Tamilnadu 300 saplings

Tree Bank as their own Program Ongoing program of lsquoAt Least One sapling a dayrsquo to complete 300000 saplings along the roads in Kanchipuram Thiruvallur and Chennai Districts in Tamilnadu

In addition to above Tree Bank has been receiving requests through emails and has been providing saplings to organizations from other cities who visit Chennai and collect the saplings Some examples

Chittoor district 200 saplings

Pondicherry 300 saplings

Anybody who wants to get saplings from Tree Bank can mail their details to treebankofindiagmailcom or con-tact Mrs Karpagam Somasundaram Volunteer Tree Bank (email skarpagyahoocom) For more details visit wwwtreebankofindiawebscom

Answers to the SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

SPINNacle

Across

1 Japanese term for Leveling the work load- HEIJUNKA

3 If you know Genrich Altshuller you should know this approach - TRIZ

6 T in TSP - TEAM

7 Fundamental aspect of any software If any doubt check with Dan Brown - CODE

10 If you love noodles use this tool SPAGHETTI

CONGRATULATIONS Winner of SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

Divakar Vaiyapuri - Sify Corp Chennai

Dhanasekar Elumalai - Mindtree Chennai

Down

2 SEICMMI_ _ _ IT-CMF - IVI

4 You might have hated this in Maths class but in testing profession you cant give it a go- RE-GRESSION

5 Time to refresh physics when you do meas-urement in agile - VELOCITY

8 German concept connected with music - TAKT

9 GE Six Sigma Toyota LEAN

Page 4

SPINNacle

Page 5

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Winner of My Practice Session

Practices in a Support Organization - M Raghuraman and Srinivasan of Ramco Systems Our Practice

Process transparency Tooling transparency and Operational transparency are key to any dynamic support or-ganization Achieving maturity in transparency is a function of Time Team culture Eco system feedback and Or-ganizational commitment

This write-up is all about how the above statements are just not clicheacutes but describe the evolution of our support organization standing the test of time

The key stakeholders for a support organization are

The Top Management (for the funding)

The Users (for consuming our products and services)

The Support Leaders (for Orchestration of Support Operations)

The Support Team (for Supporting the Users)

The Enhancement Team (for continuously enhancing our Products and Services)

At a High level the Support Process includes

Ticket Booking

Change Request (CR)

Customer Interaction (Queries)

Ticket Handling

Monitoring Tickets

Prioritizing Tickets

Impact Analysis

Change Management (Defect amp CR)

Verification amp Release

Multiple Customer Rollout amp Monitoring

Customer Feedback

The key challenges we faced include

Measurable customer satisfaction

Sensitivity to SLAs

Fix ready to fix usable timelines

Consistent fix rollouts

Multiple toolsets for support

Document management

Impact analysis and change management

Transparency in ticket handling and movement to closure

Knowledge management of process and toolset

Process transparency means different visibility scenarios to different stakeholders For on-demand information every stakeholder has a login to the Support Portal with multi-layered information presentation relevant to the needs of the stake holder This ensures that any stakeholder can connect to the Portal wherever they are from a variety of devices and obtain whatever information they may need

Continued hellip

SPINNacle

Page 6

hellip continued

Proactively the support infrastructure also sends relevant periodic information (both exception and summary) to the stakeholders It also publishes the Weekly Plans Status Resource Deployment and significant achievements to the Management

A variety of RSS Feeds are also published to address a variety of information requirement such as Support Status Resource Utilization Planning Effectiveness

Improving Operational Productivity has been a constant thrust point for the Support team The Support Engi-neers always use a single toolset for all their change management operations The toolset hides the complexity of Version management Managing Multiple Source Structures Automatic Publishing of Releases to stake holders for Consumption Automatic Packaging Mandatory checks for Release Processes Large Scale Automatic Deploy-ment and Centralized Deployment Verification

The Support team also has a roadmap of enhancements to its offerings Enhancements (Change Requests) also happen in parallel The toolset discussed above also supports the seamless enhancement Process It fully appreci-ates the criticality of support fixes but ensures that all such support fixes do get incorporated when a new CR for the same object gets released to Maintenance This ensures that Enhancements (CR) do not skip fixes released earlier

Testing is a mandatory part of any Defect Fix or CR release The toolset analyzes the objects fixed their relation-ship with other unmodified objects and provides the support engineer the list of test cases that needs to be tested before releasing the fix For any failures in such test cases a ticket gets raised automatically in the system with a reference to the fix and the case that caused the failure This ensures full traceability and quality assess-ment of fix releases

As a result of process automation we have achieved the following 1 Reduction in Bad fix rate from 730 to 186 2 Reduction in number of Escalations 3 Reduction in number of Release and Rollout days and 4 Increase in Process compliance and client satisfaction

The philosophy behind the operations of the support team is Quality Systems is not Optional itrsquos the way of life and has to be transparent and If something is manually repetitive its a candidate for automation

This is where we are and we continue to innovate

Authors

Srinivasan heads the Support and Development of Virtual Works Ramcos flagship devel-opment platform for assembling and developing large scale enterprise applications In his association with Ramco for the past 18+ years Srinivasan has played a significant role in major innovations within Ramco and is the inventor in various patents that have been filed for such innovations

Raghuraman M is currently working as Senior Quality Executive in Ramco Systems He holds a Bachelor degree in Information Technology and masters in Quality Engineering He is also a Certified Software Quality Analyst

SPINNacle

Page 7

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner-up 1 of My Practice Session

Requirements Framework - Elizabeth Koshy iGATE an integrated Technology amp Operations organization based in India had a steady climb in the customerrsquos value chain in terms of penetrating deeper (instead of wider) into customer portfolio More and more customers were proposing lsquopartnershiprsquo model One of the focus areas in partnership was lsquorequirements engineeringrsquo as the challenges faced in this area were affecting both iGATE and its customers In spite of iGATE having established process and tools some of the critical projects experienced cost and schedule overruns due to missed require-ments A series of initiatives were taken up at different time frames to counter the challenges cited and there were indi-cations of positive results emerging out of them Detailed analysis of the metrics from development projects was conducted to identify the root causes While the conventional Root Cause Analysis (RCA) approach resulted in incremental benefits an integrated approach to tackle the challenge was the need of the hour Subsequent improvements and the list of unresolved issues indicate that the process approach alone is not ade-quate to address the improvements in entirety The key elements that need to be integrated in requirements engineering area were coming out clearly as follows

1 Competency development and evaluation

2 Business perspective of owning projects

3 Unsolicited support and demonstration of value add to customer (provided) inputs

4 Tighter integration of tools and techniques

iGATE Requirements Framework was evolved over a period of one and half years crossing several milestones on its journey such as integration of training and technology project execution and facilitation Requirements framework was designed to overcome the challenges of requirements elicitation using structured analysis of problem and coming up with value added process-tools-training-model elements The results of implementation was (i) increase in completely owned development projects (ii) increase in resources engaged in requirements phase of project and (iii) improved annual organization level customer satisfaction results The organization at present is not only leveraging the requirements framework for successful execution of projects within iGATE Best practices of the framework are adopted by our customers and the framework is customized as ldquocustomer-iGATE specific joint requirements frameworkrdquo

Author

Elizabeth Koshy is the Head of SEPG function in iGATE

She was the program manager for CMMi implementation in iGATE and was also part of RBNQA team She has about 19 years of experience in the Information Technology Industry specialized in the areas of Software Engineering Quality Assurance Project Management and Six Sigma She is also a designated Six Sigma MBB and a certified BB Elizabeth has significantly contributed in incorporating Six Sigma practices into iGATE Quality Management System

SPINNacle

Page 8

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner up 2 of My Practice Session

APEX - Manjusha Gupta The three basic hygiene needs of any project are to improve SLA adherence to reduce risks and to improve Pro-ject Health (compliance) Prior to APEX projects had huge issues with respect to SLA missespenalties and con-tractual risks and they were constantly being highlighted as vulnerable project to the President and MD of the organization for review Hence APEX (A Passion for Excellence) as a concept was initiated across Cognizant BPO to improve these hygiene factors

APEX was based on the concept of edutainment (education and entertainment) Through simple mediums like cartoons puzzles poster competition computer based games snake amp ladder treasure hunt quiz etc the im-portance of quality was inculcated in the team at all levels These contests invigorated the floor brought out the competitive spirit and instilled a sense of accomplishment APEX has greatly helped BPO projects in bringing in lot of focus to review and understanding of contractual obligations and service levels Some of the other accom-plishments that were achieved as a part of APEX are

All SLAs are being signed up only post base-lining of metrics or after 6 months of data collection at the offshore

Detailed root cause analysis and corrective action for SLA slippages which has helped in improving SLA adherence

Revisiting SOW clauses and obtaining waiver from client on impossible client requirements

Metrics planning and reporting in one single portal

Improved transition management and governance Usage of customized Cognizant 20 for transition manage-

ment

Improved data integrity of the reported metrics due to improved data collection clear operational definition and

strong measurement system and validation by dedicated quality leaders at the project level

Some of the feedback received from the audiencejury were

ldquoThe way Quality was taken to the floor in terms of fun and games was truly noteworthyrdquo

ldquoThat the games were purely on quality concept was just amazingrdquo

ldquoA very complex concept executed in a very innovative wayrdquo

Author

Manjusha Gupta is currently a Quality Manager in Cognizant Technologies Solutions Pvt Ltd

She is a Six sigma trained professional is a Statistician by qualification and has a diploma in Total Quality Management She has close to 13 years of experience in Project and Quality Management Her experience spans across domains like Clinical Management Enterprise Ap-plication Interface (EAI) Human Resources Management System Insurance Knowledge Man-agement Business Process Outsourcing and e-learning

SPINNacle

Page 9

Interview mdash Gowri Shankar Subramaniam

Setting the strategic direction of Indiarsquos one of the fastest growing companies Aspire Sys-tems is Mr Gowri Shankar Subramaniam He is passionate about Producteering building software products for their clients He shares his views on software engineering and quality in this exclusive interview to SPIN Chennai One of the key services you offer is Producteering Ensuring process compliance in an in-house product devel-opment itself is a challenge for any quality team That being the case what do you do to ensure quality of your clientsrsquo product We have the experience of developing multiple products simultaneously At any point in time we handle devel-opment of about 40 to 50 products We know what works and what does not Not all our clients are high mature organizations They are at different levels of process maturity We have a well established framework to deal with any type of client There are four components that are important in any product development namely time-to-market budget scope and functionality We understand from our client which ones are sacrosanct Our key strength is focusing on technical quality Irrespective of the maturity level of our client we ensure that the product we build is tech-nically sound Focusing on architecture and not compromising on design quality has helped us to succeed In todayrsquos competitive market the mantra seems to be lsquodeliver more for lessrsquo I am sure Aspire would be no exception How do you sustain quality levels of offering We believe that quality is integrated into our products Quality is an integral part of whatever we do We are an ISO 9001 certified organization Our focus is more on technical quality rather than mere com-pliance to processes documented We emphasize on good design and efficient code This has paid us rich dividends over time Our customers recognize our strength For every project we assess the technical health apart from its process health We review the technical architecture and audit for compliance to standards Our Advanced Technology Group ensures that every project we undertake is superior in its technical health

How do you benchmark your performance vis-agrave-vis other organizationsrsquo in this industry

We rarely come across organizations publishing metrics or any association that publishes data against which we could benchmark our quality Alternatively we collate our own best practices We have internal benchmarks to compare with rather than external ones Our technology group lends their expertise through reviews and audits With multiple teams working in multiple locations and people coming from varied backgrounds how do you manage to drive quality to one and all especially to grassroots Quality spirit is inculcated right from the time one joins Aspire Our induction training is not so much to write Java or C++ code but to build a good piece of software We expose them to usability technical architecture and what it takes to build good software Through reviews and audits we ensure that every team works towards achieving our common goal building technically sound best-in-class products for our customers We ensure that our project managers are technically capable We recognize our achievers through rewards Our Red Falcon for quality Gold and Silver are aspirations of every project manager

SPINNacle

ldquoFor every project we assess the technical health apart from its proc-ess healthrdquo

Page 10

How do you measure your ROI on quality Are you realizing the desired benefits of your investment in qual-ity We do not identify quality as a separate parameter We do not have a quality team exclusively for collating data or to audit We have certainly realized that the time and effort we spend on nurturing technically strong teams have paid us off Last few years we have been hearing about the need to step up the quality of manpower coming out of col-leges Do you agree with that Yes We also experience the difficulty faced by most of the other organizations The percentage of students ready to be employed by the industry is very low The gap is very pronounced when it comes to soft skills such as com-munication or presentation

Most of the colleges and universities have introduced soft skills as a separate course to address this problem Would that help

Yes it helps to some extent There are certain aspects that cannot be taught overnight like attitude and ability to work hard etc When we recruit we look for the right attitude and aptitude Our philosophy is to create talent We provide extensive training to our new recruits During the training they are evaluated three to four times through reviews to assess their readiness and fitment to delivery

What should Tier 2 and tier 3 companies do to survive in IT Large companies seem to get a disproportionate amount of business leaving the next tier companies high and dry

Tier 2 and tier 3 companies should focus on their inherent strengths When they concentrate on specific areas they could be recognized in that segment We should encourage the mindset of youngsters to work in smaller organizations

The government can encourage entrepreneurs and device systems to support their growth

What is your advice to the community of software process improvement professionals

Software process improvement professionals should get more involved and understand the technical quality

SPINNacle

ldquoTier 2 and tier 3 compa-nies should focus on their inherent strengths rdquo

Page 11

Voice of the community

TREE BANK

Trees are important in purifying the air maintaining the ecological balance and providing nutrients to the soil Organizations and individuals can contribute towards this environmental cause by planting and nurturing trees in their areas Tree Bank is a non-profit social service organization enabling organizations and individuals to plant trees in their localities or office buildings or campuses or houses It gives away free saplings to the public who approach them and also ensures that the new owner nourishes the saplings with proper care

Mr G Mullaivanam a third generation farmer is the individual dedicated to this cause He has been collecting and giving away saplings from the age of 13 but formed lsquoTree Bank in 2008 with volunteers Then he started operating full time in this social cause now with support from about 355 volunteers (including college students and IT professionals) planting trees in each of the 155 divisions in Chennai everyday He is now the proud owner of about 2040000 trees that are planted in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states

Tree Bank has innumerable number of saplingstrees including all varieties from which people can choose the one they want It has rare medicinal ones too Mr Mullaivanam collects the saplings from all possible sources waters them nourishes them prunes the trees and even prepares natural manures He does all this for no mone-tary benefit Farming and providing flower decoration services are his sources of income

ldquoOur team inspects the house of the people who takes saplings from us It looks for an appropriate place for the tree taking into account the Metro Water line and Electricity Board line and train them on how deep the pit should be and how to grow and maintain it The resident is expected to mail a picture of the planted tree and the team regularly keeps a check on its growthrdquo says Mr Mullaivanam ldquoThrice a year the team visits all the places where the trees were planted and help in pruning and other tree care servicesrdquo he adds

SPINNacle

Pictures (From Top Left Clockwise) (a) TREE Bank founder Mr G Mullaivanam (left) handing over some tree saplings (b) Tree Plantation at Gandhi Nagar Adyar Government Library (c) Tree Plantation at General Hospital (GH) Chennai by Dr J Mohana Sundaram Dean GH (d) Tree Plantation at Guindy Industrial Estate by Justice Mr S Mohan (behind) and Mrs Padma Venkatraman (center) daughter of Former President Mr S Venkatara-man on the 100th birth centenary of Mr S Venkatraman

Page 12

TREE BANK hellip continued

Many organizations have approached the Tree Bank and got the saplings and planted them in their places some examples are

LampT campus in PorurChennai 50 saplings

Olympia IT Park Guindy Chennai 50 saplings

Industrial Estate Guindy Chennai 100 saplings

Dye Mark Factory campus Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Government School Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Birla Planetarium Chennai 50 saplings

General Hospital Chennai 56 saplings

SRM University campus Chennai 60 saplings

MOP Vaishnav College campus Chennai 100 saplings

Alpha College Chennai initiated plantation of 10000 saplings in a phased manner over 1 year inside their campus and on the roads along in the Thiruvallur district in collaboration with District Collector Office

Vidya Ashram Kadalur district Tamilnadu 300 saplings

Tree Bank as their own Program Ongoing program of lsquoAt Least One sapling a dayrsquo to complete 300000 saplings along the roads in Kanchipuram Thiruvallur and Chennai Districts in Tamilnadu

In addition to above Tree Bank has been receiving requests through emails and has been providing saplings to organizations from other cities who visit Chennai and collect the saplings Some examples

Chittoor district 200 saplings

Pondicherry 300 saplings

Anybody who wants to get saplings from Tree Bank can mail their details to treebankofindiagmailcom or con-tact Mrs Karpagam Somasundaram Volunteer Tree Bank (email skarpagyahoocom) For more details visit wwwtreebankofindiawebscom

Answers to the SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

SPINNacle

Across

1 Japanese term for Leveling the work load- HEIJUNKA

3 If you know Genrich Altshuller you should know this approach - TRIZ

6 T in TSP - TEAM

7 Fundamental aspect of any software If any doubt check with Dan Brown - CODE

10 If you love noodles use this tool SPAGHETTI

CONGRATULATIONS Winner of SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

Divakar Vaiyapuri - Sify Corp Chennai

Dhanasekar Elumalai - Mindtree Chennai

Down

2 SEICMMI_ _ _ IT-CMF - IVI

4 You might have hated this in Maths class but in testing profession you cant give it a go- RE-GRESSION

5 Time to refresh physics when you do meas-urement in agile - VELOCITY

8 German concept connected with music - TAKT

9 GE Six Sigma Toyota LEAN

Page 5

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Winner of My Practice Session

Practices in a Support Organization - M Raghuraman and Srinivasan of Ramco Systems Our Practice

Process transparency Tooling transparency and Operational transparency are key to any dynamic support or-ganization Achieving maturity in transparency is a function of Time Team culture Eco system feedback and Or-ganizational commitment

This write-up is all about how the above statements are just not clicheacutes but describe the evolution of our support organization standing the test of time

The key stakeholders for a support organization are

The Top Management (for the funding)

The Users (for consuming our products and services)

The Support Leaders (for Orchestration of Support Operations)

The Support Team (for Supporting the Users)

The Enhancement Team (for continuously enhancing our Products and Services)

At a High level the Support Process includes

Ticket Booking

Change Request (CR)

Customer Interaction (Queries)

Ticket Handling

Monitoring Tickets

Prioritizing Tickets

Impact Analysis

Change Management (Defect amp CR)

Verification amp Release

Multiple Customer Rollout amp Monitoring

Customer Feedback

The key challenges we faced include

Measurable customer satisfaction

Sensitivity to SLAs

Fix ready to fix usable timelines

Consistent fix rollouts

Multiple toolsets for support

Document management

Impact analysis and change management

Transparency in ticket handling and movement to closure

Knowledge management of process and toolset

Process transparency means different visibility scenarios to different stakeholders For on-demand information every stakeholder has a login to the Support Portal with multi-layered information presentation relevant to the needs of the stake holder This ensures that any stakeholder can connect to the Portal wherever they are from a variety of devices and obtain whatever information they may need

Continued hellip

SPINNacle

Page 6

hellip continued

Proactively the support infrastructure also sends relevant periodic information (both exception and summary) to the stakeholders It also publishes the Weekly Plans Status Resource Deployment and significant achievements to the Management

A variety of RSS Feeds are also published to address a variety of information requirement such as Support Status Resource Utilization Planning Effectiveness

Improving Operational Productivity has been a constant thrust point for the Support team The Support Engi-neers always use a single toolset for all their change management operations The toolset hides the complexity of Version management Managing Multiple Source Structures Automatic Publishing of Releases to stake holders for Consumption Automatic Packaging Mandatory checks for Release Processes Large Scale Automatic Deploy-ment and Centralized Deployment Verification

The Support team also has a roadmap of enhancements to its offerings Enhancements (Change Requests) also happen in parallel The toolset discussed above also supports the seamless enhancement Process It fully appreci-ates the criticality of support fixes but ensures that all such support fixes do get incorporated when a new CR for the same object gets released to Maintenance This ensures that Enhancements (CR) do not skip fixes released earlier

Testing is a mandatory part of any Defect Fix or CR release The toolset analyzes the objects fixed their relation-ship with other unmodified objects and provides the support engineer the list of test cases that needs to be tested before releasing the fix For any failures in such test cases a ticket gets raised automatically in the system with a reference to the fix and the case that caused the failure This ensures full traceability and quality assess-ment of fix releases

As a result of process automation we have achieved the following 1 Reduction in Bad fix rate from 730 to 186 2 Reduction in number of Escalations 3 Reduction in number of Release and Rollout days and 4 Increase in Process compliance and client satisfaction

The philosophy behind the operations of the support team is Quality Systems is not Optional itrsquos the way of life and has to be transparent and If something is manually repetitive its a candidate for automation

This is where we are and we continue to innovate

Authors

Srinivasan heads the Support and Development of Virtual Works Ramcos flagship devel-opment platform for assembling and developing large scale enterprise applications In his association with Ramco for the past 18+ years Srinivasan has played a significant role in major innovations within Ramco and is the inventor in various patents that have been filed for such innovations

Raghuraman M is currently working as Senior Quality Executive in Ramco Systems He holds a Bachelor degree in Information Technology and masters in Quality Engineering He is also a Certified Software Quality Analyst

SPINNacle

Page 7

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner-up 1 of My Practice Session

Requirements Framework - Elizabeth Koshy iGATE an integrated Technology amp Operations organization based in India had a steady climb in the customerrsquos value chain in terms of penetrating deeper (instead of wider) into customer portfolio More and more customers were proposing lsquopartnershiprsquo model One of the focus areas in partnership was lsquorequirements engineeringrsquo as the challenges faced in this area were affecting both iGATE and its customers In spite of iGATE having established process and tools some of the critical projects experienced cost and schedule overruns due to missed require-ments A series of initiatives were taken up at different time frames to counter the challenges cited and there were indi-cations of positive results emerging out of them Detailed analysis of the metrics from development projects was conducted to identify the root causes While the conventional Root Cause Analysis (RCA) approach resulted in incremental benefits an integrated approach to tackle the challenge was the need of the hour Subsequent improvements and the list of unresolved issues indicate that the process approach alone is not ade-quate to address the improvements in entirety The key elements that need to be integrated in requirements engineering area were coming out clearly as follows

1 Competency development and evaluation

2 Business perspective of owning projects

3 Unsolicited support and demonstration of value add to customer (provided) inputs

4 Tighter integration of tools and techniques

iGATE Requirements Framework was evolved over a period of one and half years crossing several milestones on its journey such as integration of training and technology project execution and facilitation Requirements framework was designed to overcome the challenges of requirements elicitation using structured analysis of problem and coming up with value added process-tools-training-model elements The results of implementation was (i) increase in completely owned development projects (ii) increase in resources engaged in requirements phase of project and (iii) improved annual organization level customer satisfaction results The organization at present is not only leveraging the requirements framework for successful execution of projects within iGATE Best practices of the framework are adopted by our customers and the framework is customized as ldquocustomer-iGATE specific joint requirements frameworkrdquo

Author

Elizabeth Koshy is the Head of SEPG function in iGATE

She was the program manager for CMMi implementation in iGATE and was also part of RBNQA team She has about 19 years of experience in the Information Technology Industry specialized in the areas of Software Engineering Quality Assurance Project Management and Six Sigma She is also a designated Six Sigma MBB and a certified BB Elizabeth has significantly contributed in incorporating Six Sigma practices into iGATE Quality Management System

SPINNacle

Page 8

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner up 2 of My Practice Session

APEX - Manjusha Gupta The three basic hygiene needs of any project are to improve SLA adherence to reduce risks and to improve Pro-ject Health (compliance) Prior to APEX projects had huge issues with respect to SLA missespenalties and con-tractual risks and they were constantly being highlighted as vulnerable project to the President and MD of the organization for review Hence APEX (A Passion for Excellence) as a concept was initiated across Cognizant BPO to improve these hygiene factors

APEX was based on the concept of edutainment (education and entertainment) Through simple mediums like cartoons puzzles poster competition computer based games snake amp ladder treasure hunt quiz etc the im-portance of quality was inculcated in the team at all levels These contests invigorated the floor brought out the competitive spirit and instilled a sense of accomplishment APEX has greatly helped BPO projects in bringing in lot of focus to review and understanding of contractual obligations and service levels Some of the other accom-plishments that were achieved as a part of APEX are

All SLAs are being signed up only post base-lining of metrics or after 6 months of data collection at the offshore

Detailed root cause analysis and corrective action for SLA slippages which has helped in improving SLA adherence

Revisiting SOW clauses and obtaining waiver from client on impossible client requirements

Metrics planning and reporting in one single portal

Improved transition management and governance Usage of customized Cognizant 20 for transition manage-

ment

Improved data integrity of the reported metrics due to improved data collection clear operational definition and

strong measurement system and validation by dedicated quality leaders at the project level

Some of the feedback received from the audiencejury were

ldquoThe way Quality was taken to the floor in terms of fun and games was truly noteworthyrdquo

ldquoThat the games were purely on quality concept was just amazingrdquo

ldquoA very complex concept executed in a very innovative wayrdquo

Author

Manjusha Gupta is currently a Quality Manager in Cognizant Technologies Solutions Pvt Ltd

She is a Six sigma trained professional is a Statistician by qualification and has a diploma in Total Quality Management She has close to 13 years of experience in Project and Quality Management Her experience spans across domains like Clinical Management Enterprise Ap-plication Interface (EAI) Human Resources Management System Insurance Knowledge Man-agement Business Process Outsourcing and e-learning

SPINNacle

Page 9

Interview mdash Gowri Shankar Subramaniam

Setting the strategic direction of Indiarsquos one of the fastest growing companies Aspire Sys-tems is Mr Gowri Shankar Subramaniam He is passionate about Producteering building software products for their clients He shares his views on software engineering and quality in this exclusive interview to SPIN Chennai One of the key services you offer is Producteering Ensuring process compliance in an in-house product devel-opment itself is a challenge for any quality team That being the case what do you do to ensure quality of your clientsrsquo product We have the experience of developing multiple products simultaneously At any point in time we handle devel-opment of about 40 to 50 products We know what works and what does not Not all our clients are high mature organizations They are at different levels of process maturity We have a well established framework to deal with any type of client There are four components that are important in any product development namely time-to-market budget scope and functionality We understand from our client which ones are sacrosanct Our key strength is focusing on technical quality Irrespective of the maturity level of our client we ensure that the product we build is tech-nically sound Focusing on architecture and not compromising on design quality has helped us to succeed In todayrsquos competitive market the mantra seems to be lsquodeliver more for lessrsquo I am sure Aspire would be no exception How do you sustain quality levels of offering We believe that quality is integrated into our products Quality is an integral part of whatever we do We are an ISO 9001 certified organization Our focus is more on technical quality rather than mere com-pliance to processes documented We emphasize on good design and efficient code This has paid us rich dividends over time Our customers recognize our strength For every project we assess the technical health apart from its process health We review the technical architecture and audit for compliance to standards Our Advanced Technology Group ensures that every project we undertake is superior in its technical health

How do you benchmark your performance vis-agrave-vis other organizationsrsquo in this industry

We rarely come across organizations publishing metrics or any association that publishes data against which we could benchmark our quality Alternatively we collate our own best practices We have internal benchmarks to compare with rather than external ones Our technology group lends their expertise through reviews and audits With multiple teams working in multiple locations and people coming from varied backgrounds how do you manage to drive quality to one and all especially to grassroots Quality spirit is inculcated right from the time one joins Aspire Our induction training is not so much to write Java or C++ code but to build a good piece of software We expose them to usability technical architecture and what it takes to build good software Through reviews and audits we ensure that every team works towards achieving our common goal building technically sound best-in-class products for our customers We ensure that our project managers are technically capable We recognize our achievers through rewards Our Red Falcon for quality Gold and Silver are aspirations of every project manager

SPINNacle

ldquoFor every project we assess the technical health apart from its proc-ess healthrdquo

Page 10

How do you measure your ROI on quality Are you realizing the desired benefits of your investment in qual-ity We do not identify quality as a separate parameter We do not have a quality team exclusively for collating data or to audit We have certainly realized that the time and effort we spend on nurturing technically strong teams have paid us off Last few years we have been hearing about the need to step up the quality of manpower coming out of col-leges Do you agree with that Yes We also experience the difficulty faced by most of the other organizations The percentage of students ready to be employed by the industry is very low The gap is very pronounced when it comes to soft skills such as com-munication or presentation

Most of the colleges and universities have introduced soft skills as a separate course to address this problem Would that help

Yes it helps to some extent There are certain aspects that cannot be taught overnight like attitude and ability to work hard etc When we recruit we look for the right attitude and aptitude Our philosophy is to create talent We provide extensive training to our new recruits During the training they are evaluated three to four times through reviews to assess their readiness and fitment to delivery

What should Tier 2 and tier 3 companies do to survive in IT Large companies seem to get a disproportionate amount of business leaving the next tier companies high and dry

Tier 2 and tier 3 companies should focus on their inherent strengths When they concentrate on specific areas they could be recognized in that segment We should encourage the mindset of youngsters to work in smaller organizations

The government can encourage entrepreneurs and device systems to support their growth

What is your advice to the community of software process improvement professionals

Software process improvement professionals should get more involved and understand the technical quality

SPINNacle

ldquoTier 2 and tier 3 compa-nies should focus on their inherent strengths rdquo

Page 11

Voice of the community

TREE BANK

Trees are important in purifying the air maintaining the ecological balance and providing nutrients to the soil Organizations and individuals can contribute towards this environmental cause by planting and nurturing trees in their areas Tree Bank is a non-profit social service organization enabling organizations and individuals to plant trees in their localities or office buildings or campuses or houses It gives away free saplings to the public who approach them and also ensures that the new owner nourishes the saplings with proper care

Mr G Mullaivanam a third generation farmer is the individual dedicated to this cause He has been collecting and giving away saplings from the age of 13 but formed lsquoTree Bank in 2008 with volunteers Then he started operating full time in this social cause now with support from about 355 volunteers (including college students and IT professionals) planting trees in each of the 155 divisions in Chennai everyday He is now the proud owner of about 2040000 trees that are planted in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states

Tree Bank has innumerable number of saplingstrees including all varieties from which people can choose the one they want It has rare medicinal ones too Mr Mullaivanam collects the saplings from all possible sources waters them nourishes them prunes the trees and even prepares natural manures He does all this for no mone-tary benefit Farming and providing flower decoration services are his sources of income

ldquoOur team inspects the house of the people who takes saplings from us It looks for an appropriate place for the tree taking into account the Metro Water line and Electricity Board line and train them on how deep the pit should be and how to grow and maintain it The resident is expected to mail a picture of the planted tree and the team regularly keeps a check on its growthrdquo says Mr Mullaivanam ldquoThrice a year the team visits all the places where the trees were planted and help in pruning and other tree care servicesrdquo he adds

SPINNacle

Pictures (From Top Left Clockwise) (a) TREE Bank founder Mr G Mullaivanam (left) handing over some tree saplings (b) Tree Plantation at Gandhi Nagar Adyar Government Library (c) Tree Plantation at General Hospital (GH) Chennai by Dr J Mohana Sundaram Dean GH (d) Tree Plantation at Guindy Industrial Estate by Justice Mr S Mohan (behind) and Mrs Padma Venkatraman (center) daughter of Former President Mr S Venkatara-man on the 100th birth centenary of Mr S Venkatraman

Page 12

TREE BANK hellip continued

Many organizations have approached the Tree Bank and got the saplings and planted them in their places some examples are

LampT campus in PorurChennai 50 saplings

Olympia IT Park Guindy Chennai 50 saplings

Industrial Estate Guindy Chennai 100 saplings

Dye Mark Factory campus Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Government School Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Birla Planetarium Chennai 50 saplings

General Hospital Chennai 56 saplings

SRM University campus Chennai 60 saplings

MOP Vaishnav College campus Chennai 100 saplings

Alpha College Chennai initiated plantation of 10000 saplings in a phased manner over 1 year inside their campus and on the roads along in the Thiruvallur district in collaboration with District Collector Office

Vidya Ashram Kadalur district Tamilnadu 300 saplings

Tree Bank as their own Program Ongoing program of lsquoAt Least One sapling a dayrsquo to complete 300000 saplings along the roads in Kanchipuram Thiruvallur and Chennai Districts in Tamilnadu

In addition to above Tree Bank has been receiving requests through emails and has been providing saplings to organizations from other cities who visit Chennai and collect the saplings Some examples

Chittoor district 200 saplings

Pondicherry 300 saplings

Anybody who wants to get saplings from Tree Bank can mail their details to treebankofindiagmailcom or con-tact Mrs Karpagam Somasundaram Volunteer Tree Bank (email skarpagyahoocom) For more details visit wwwtreebankofindiawebscom

Answers to the SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

SPINNacle

Across

1 Japanese term for Leveling the work load- HEIJUNKA

3 If you know Genrich Altshuller you should know this approach - TRIZ

6 T in TSP - TEAM

7 Fundamental aspect of any software If any doubt check with Dan Brown - CODE

10 If you love noodles use this tool SPAGHETTI

CONGRATULATIONS Winner of SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

Divakar Vaiyapuri - Sify Corp Chennai

Dhanasekar Elumalai - Mindtree Chennai

Down

2 SEICMMI_ _ _ IT-CMF - IVI

4 You might have hated this in Maths class but in testing profession you cant give it a go- RE-GRESSION

5 Time to refresh physics when you do meas-urement in agile - VELOCITY

8 German concept connected with music - TAKT

9 GE Six Sigma Toyota LEAN

Page 6

hellip continued

Proactively the support infrastructure also sends relevant periodic information (both exception and summary) to the stakeholders It also publishes the Weekly Plans Status Resource Deployment and significant achievements to the Management

A variety of RSS Feeds are also published to address a variety of information requirement such as Support Status Resource Utilization Planning Effectiveness

Improving Operational Productivity has been a constant thrust point for the Support team The Support Engi-neers always use a single toolset for all their change management operations The toolset hides the complexity of Version management Managing Multiple Source Structures Automatic Publishing of Releases to stake holders for Consumption Automatic Packaging Mandatory checks for Release Processes Large Scale Automatic Deploy-ment and Centralized Deployment Verification

The Support team also has a roadmap of enhancements to its offerings Enhancements (Change Requests) also happen in parallel The toolset discussed above also supports the seamless enhancement Process It fully appreci-ates the criticality of support fixes but ensures that all such support fixes do get incorporated when a new CR for the same object gets released to Maintenance This ensures that Enhancements (CR) do not skip fixes released earlier

Testing is a mandatory part of any Defect Fix or CR release The toolset analyzes the objects fixed their relation-ship with other unmodified objects and provides the support engineer the list of test cases that needs to be tested before releasing the fix For any failures in such test cases a ticket gets raised automatically in the system with a reference to the fix and the case that caused the failure This ensures full traceability and quality assess-ment of fix releases

As a result of process automation we have achieved the following 1 Reduction in Bad fix rate from 730 to 186 2 Reduction in number of Escalations 3 Reduction in number of Release and Rollout days and 4 Increase in Process compliance and client satisfaction

The philosophy behind the operations of the support team is Quality Systems is not Optional itrsquos the way of life and has to be transparent and If something is manually repetitive its a candidate for automation

This is where we are and we continue to innovate

Authors

Srinivasan heads the Support and Development of Virtual Works Ramcos flagship devel-opment platform for assembling and developing large scale enterprise applications In his association with Ramco for the past 18+ years Srinivasan has played a significant role in major innovations within Ramco and is the inventor in various patents that have been filed for such innovations

Raghuraman M is currently working as Senior Quality Executive in Ramco Systems He holds a Bachelor degree in Information Technology and masters in Quality Engineering He is also a Certified Software Quality Analyst

SPINNacle

Page 7

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner-up 1 of My Practice Session

Requirements Framework - Elizabeth Koshy iGATE an integrated Technology amp Operations organization based in India had a steady climb in the customerrsquos value chain in terms of penetrating deeper (instead of wider) into customer portfolio More and more customers were proposing lsquopartnershiprsquo model One of the focus areas in partnership was lsquorequirements engineeringrsquo as the challenges faced in this area were affecting both iGATE and its customers In spite of iGATE having established process and tools some of the critical projects experienced cost and schedule overruns due to missed require-ments A series of initiatives were taken up at different time frames to counter the challenges cited and there were indi-cations of positive results emerging out of them Detailed analysis of the metrics from development projects was conducted to identify the root causes While the conventional Root Cause Analysis (RCA) approach resulted in incremental benefits an integrated approach to tackle the challenge was the need of the hour Subsequent improvements and the list of unresolved issues indicate that the process approach alone is not ade-quate to address the improvements in entirety The key elements that need to be integrated in requirements engineering area were coming out clearly as follows

1 Competency development and evaluation

2 Business perspective of owning projects

3 Unsolicited support and demonstration of value add to customer (provided) inputs

4 Tighter integration of tools and techniques

iGATE Requirements Framework was evolved over a period of one and half years crossing several milestones on its journey such as integration of training and technology project execution and facilitation Requirements framework was designed to overcome the challenges of requirements elicitation using structured analysis of problem and coming up with value added process-tools-training-model elements The results of implementation was (i) increase in completely owned development projects (ii) increase in resources engaged in requirements phase of project and (iii) improved annual organization level customer satisfaction results The organization at present is not only leveraging the requirements framework for successful execution of projects within iGATE Best practices of the framework are adopted by our customers and the framework is customized as ldquocustomer-iGATE specific joint requirements frameworkrdquo

Author

Elizabeth Koshy is the Head of SEPG function in iGATE

She was the program manager for CMMi implementation in iGATE and was also part of RBNQA team She has about 19 years of experience in the Information Technology Industry specialized in the areas of Software Engineering Quality Assurance Project Management and Six Sigma She is also a designated Six Sigma MBB and a certified BB Elizabeth has significantly contributed in incorporating Six Sigma practices into iGATE Quality Management System

SPINNacle

Page 8

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner up 2 of My Practice Session

APEX - Manjusha Gupta The three basic hygiene needs of any project are to improve SLA adherence to reduce risks and to improve Pro-ject Health (compliance) Prior to APEX projects had huge issues with respect to SLA missespenalties and con-tractual risks and they were constantly being highlighted as vulnerable project to the President and MD of the organization for review Hence APEX (A Passion for Excellence) as a concept was initiated across Cognizant BPO to improve these hygiene factors

APEX was based on the concept of edutainment (education and entertainment) Through simple mediums like cartoons puzzles poster competition computer based games snake amp ladder treasure hunt quiz etc the im-portance of quality was inculcated in the team at all levels These contests invigorated the floor brought out the competitive spirit and instilled a sense of accomplishment APEX has greatly helped BPO projects in bringing in lot of focus to review and understanding of contractual obligations and service levels Some of the other accom-plishments that were achieved as a part of APEX are

All SLAs are being signed up only post base-lining of metrics or after 6 months of data collection at the offshore

Detailed root cause analysis and corrective action for SLA slippages which has helped in improving SLA adherence

Revisiting SOW clauses and obtaining waiver from client on impossible client requirements

Metrics planning and reporting in one single portal

Improved transition management and governance Usage of customized Cognizant 20 for transition manage-

ment

Improved data integrity of the reported metrics due to improved data collection clear operational definition and

strong measurement system and validation by dedicated quality leaders at the project level

Some of the feedback received from the audiencejury were

ldquoThe way Quality was taken to the floor in terms of fun and games was truly noteworthyrdquo

ldquoThat the games were purely on quality concept was just amazingrdquo

ldquoA very complex concept executed in a very innovative wayrdquo

Author

Manjusha Gupta is currently a Quality Manager in Cognizant Technologies Solutions Pvt Ltd

She is a Six sigma trained professional is a Statistician by qualification and has a diploma in Total Quality Management She has close to 13 years of experience in Project and Quality Management Her experience spans across domains like Clinical Management Enterprise Ap-plication Interface (EAI) Human Resources Management System Insurance Knowledge Man-agement Business Process Outsourcing and e-learning

SPINNacle

Page 9

Interview mdash Gowri Shankar Subramaniam

Setting the strategic direction of Indiarsquos one of the fastest growing companies Aspire Sys-tems is Mr Gowri Shankar Subramaniam He is passionate about Producteering building software products for their clients He shares his views on software engineering and quality in this exclusive interview to SPIN Chennai One of the key services you offer is Producteering Ensuring process compliance in an in-house product devel-opment itself is a challenge for any quality team That being the case what do you do to ensure quality of your clientsrsquo product We have the experience of developing multiple products simultaneously At any point in time we handle devel-opment of about 40 to 50 products We know what works and what does not Not all our clients are high mature organizations They are at different levels of process maturity We have a well established framework to deal with any type of client There are four components that are important in any product development namely time-to-market budget scope and functionality We understand from our client which ones are sacrosanct Our key strength is focusing on technical quality Irrespective of the maturity level of our client we ensure that the product we build is tech-nically sound Focusing on architecture and not compromising on design quality has helped us to succeed In todayrsquos competitive market the mantra seems to be lsquodeliver more for lessrsquo I am sure Aspire would be no exception How do you sustain quality levels of offering We believe that quality is integrated into our products Quality is an integral part of whatever we do We are an ISO 9001 certified organization Our focus is more on technical quality rather than mere com-pliance to processes documented We emphasize on good design and efficient code This has paid us rich dividends over time Our customers recognize our strength For every project we assess the technical health apart from its process health We review the technical architecture and audit for compliance to standards Our Advanced Technology Group ensures that every project we undertake is superior in its technical health

How do you benchmark your performance vis-agrave-vis other organizationsrsquo in this industry

We rarely come across organizations publishing metrics or any association that publishes data against which we could benchmark our quality Alternatively we collate our own best practices We have internal benchmarks to compare with rather than external ones Our technology group lends their expertise through reviews and audits With multiple teams working in multiple locations and people coming from varied backgrounds how do you manage to drive quality to one and all especially to grassroots Quality spirit is inculcated right from the time one joins Aspire Our induction training is not so much to write Java or C++ code but to build a good piece of software We expose them to usability technical architecture and what it takes to build good software Through reviews and audits we ensure that every team works towards achieving our common goal building technically sound best-in-class products for our customers We ensure that our project managers are technically capable We recognize our achievers through rewards Our Red Falcon for quality Gold and Silver are aspirations of every project manager

SPINNacle

ldquoFor every project we assess the technical health apart from its proc-ess healthrdquo

Page 10

How do you measure your ROI on quality Are you realizing the desired benefits of your investment in qual-ity We do not identify quality as a separate parameter We do not have a quality team exclusively for collating data or to audit We have certainly realized that the time and effort we spend on nurturing technically strong teams have paid us off Last few years we have been hearing about the need to step up the quality of manpower coming out of col-leges Do you agree with that Yes We also experience the difficulty faced by most of the other organizations The percentage of students ready to be employed by the industry is very low The gap is very pronounced when it comes to soft skills such as com-munication or presentation

Most of the colleges and universities have introduced soft skills as a separate course to address this problem Would that help

Yes it helps to some extent There are certain aspects that cannot be taught overnight like attitude and ability to work hard etc When we recruit we look for the right attitude and aptitude Our philosophy is to create talent We provide extensive training to our new recruits During the training they are evaluated three to four times through reviews to assess their readiness and fitment to delivery

What should Tier 2 and tier 3 companies do to survive in IT Large companies seem to get a disproportionate amount of business leaving the next tier companies high and dry

Tier 2 and tier 3 companies should focus on their inherent strengths When they concentrate on specific areas they could be recognized in that segment We should encourage the mindset of youngsters to work in smaller organizations

The government can encourage entrepreneurs and device systems to support their growth

What is your advice to the community of software process improvement professionals

Software process improvement professionals should get more involved and understand the technical quality

SPINNacle

ldquoTier 2 and tier 3 compa-nies should focus on their inherent strengths rdquo

Page 11

Voice of the community

TREE BANK

Trees are important in purifying the air maintaining the ecological balance and providing nutrients to the soil Organizations and individuals can contribute towards this environmental cause by planting and nurturing trees in their areas Tree Bank is a non-profit social service organization enabling organizations and individuals to plant trees in their localities or office buildings or campuses or houses It gives away free saplings to the public who approach them and also ensures that the new owner nourishes the saplings with proper care

Mr G Mullaivanam a third generation farmer is the individual dedicated to this cause He has been collecting and giving away saplings from the age of 13 but formed lsquoTree Bank in 2008 with volunteers Then he started operating full time in this social cause now with support from about 355 volunteers (including college students and IT professionals) planting trees in each of the 155 divisions in Chennai everyday He is now the proud owner of about 2040000 trees that are planted in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states

Tree Bank has innumerable number of saplingstrees including all varieties from which people can choose the one they want It has rare medicinal ones too Mr Mullaivanam collects the saplings from all possible sources waters them nourishes them prunes the trees and even prepares natural manures He does all this for no mone-tary benefit Farming and providing flower decoration services are his sources of income

ldquoOur team inspects the house of the people who takes saplings from us It looks for an appropriate place for the tree taking into account the Metro Water line and Electricity Board line and train them on how deep the pit should be and how to grow and maintain it The resident is expected to mail a picture of the planted tree and the team regularly keeps a check on its growthrdquo says Mr Mullaivanam ldquoThrice a year the team visits all the places where the trees were planted and help in pruning and other tree care servicesrdquo he adds

SPINNacle

Pictures (From Top Left Clockwise) (a) TREE Bank founder Mr G Mullaivanam (left) handing over some tree saplings (b) Tree Plantation at Gandhi Nagar Adyar Government Library (c) Tree Plantation at General Hospital (GH) Chennai by Dr J Mohana Sundaram Dean GH (d) Tree Plantation at Guindy Industrial Estate by Justice Mr S Mohan (behind) and Mrs Padma Venkatraman (center) daughter of Former President Mr S Venkatara-man on the 100th birth centenary of Mr S Venkatraman

Page 12

TREE BANK hellip continued

Many organizations have approached the Tree Bank and got the saplings and planted them in their places some examples are

LampT campus in PorurChennai 50 saplings

Olympia IT Park Guindy Chennai 50 saplings

Industrial Estate Guindy Chennai 100 saplings

Dye Mark Factory campus Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Government School Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Birla Planetarium Chennai 50 saplings

General Hospital Chennai 56 saplings

SRM University campus Chennai 60 saplings

MOP Vaishnav College campus Chennai 100 saplings

Alpha College Chennai initiated plantation of 10000 saplings in a phased manner over 1 year inside their campus and on the roads along in the Thiruvallur district in collaboration with District Collector Office

Vidya Ashram Kadalur district Tamilnadu 300 saplings

Tree Bank as their own Program Ongoing program of lsquoAt Least One sapling a dayrsquo to complete 300000 saplings along the roads in Kanchipuram Thiruvallur and Chennai Districts in Tamilnadu

In addition to above Tree Bank has been receiving requests through emails and has been providing saplings to organizations from other cities who visit Chennai and collect the saplings Some examples

Chittoor district 200 saplings

Pondicherry 300 saplings

Anybody who wants to get saplings from Tree Bank can mail their details to treebankofindiagmailcom or con-tact Mrs Karpagam Somasundaram Volunteer Tree Bank (email skarpagyahoocom) For more details visit wwwtreebankofindiawebscom

Answers to the SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

SPINNacle

Across

1 Japanese term for Leveling the work load- HEIJUNKA

3 If you know Genrich Altshuller you should know this approach - TRIZ

6 T in TSP - TEAM

7 Fundamental aspect of any software If any doubt check with Dan Brown - CODE

10 If you love noodles use this tool SPAGHETTI

CONGRATULATIONS Winner of SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

Divakar Vaiyapuri - Sify Corp Chennai

Dhanasekar Elumalai - Mindtree Chennai

Down

2 SEICMMI_ _ _ IT-CMF - IVI

4 You might have hated this in Maths class but in testing profession you cant give it a go- RE-GRESSION

5 Time to refresh physics when you do meas-urement in agile - VELOCITY

8 German concept connected with music - TAKT

9 GE Six Sigma Toyota LEAN

Page 7

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner-up 1 of My Practice Session

Requirements Framework - Elizabeth Koshy iGATE an integrated Technology amp Operations organization based in India had a steady climb in the customerrsquos value chain in terms of penetrating deeper (instead of wider) into customer portfolio More and more customers were proposing lsquopartnershiprsquo model One of the focus areas in partnership was lsquorequirements engineeringrsquo as the challenges faced in this area were affecting both iGATE and its customers In spite of iGATE having established process and tools some of the critical projects experienced cost and schedule overruns due to missed require-ments A series of initiatives were taken up at different time frames to counter the challenges cited and there were indi-cations of positive results emerging out of them Detailed analysis of the metrics from development projects was conducted to identify the root causes While the conventional Root Cause Analysis (RCA) approach resulted in incremental benefits an integrated approach to tackle the challenge was the need of the hour Subsequent improvements and the list of unresolved issues indicate that the process approach alone is not ade-quate to address the improvements in entirety The key elements that need to be integrated in requirements engineering area were coming out clearly as follows

1 Competency development and evaluation

2 Business perspective of owning projects

3 Unsolicited support and demonstration of value add to customer (provided) inputs

4 Tighter integration of tools and techniques

iGATE Requirements Framework was evolved over a period of one and half years crossing several milestones on its journey such as integration of training and technology project execution and facilitation Requirements framework was designed to overcome the challenges of requirements elicitation using structured analysis of problem and coming up with value added process-tools-training-model elements The results of implementation was (i) increase in completely owned development projects (ii) increase in resources engaged in requirements phase of project and (iii) improved annual organization level customer satisfaction results The organization at present is not only leveraging the requirements framework for successful execution of projects within iGATE Best practices of the framework are adopted by our customers and the framework is customized as ldquocustomer-iGATE specific joint requirements frameworkrdquo

Author

Elizabeth Koshy is the Head of SEPG function in iGATE

She was the program manager for CMMi implementation in iGATE and was also part of RBNQA team She has about 19 years of experience in the Information Technology Industry specialized in the areas of Software Engineering Quality Assurance Project Management and Six Sigma She is also a designated Six Sigma MBB and a certified BB Elizabeth has significantly contributed in incorporating Six Sigma practices into iGATE Quality Management System

SPINNacle

Page 8

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner up 2 of My Practice Session

APEX - Manjusha Gupta The three basic hygiene needs of any project are to improve SLA adherence to reduce risks and to improve Pro-ject Health (compliance) Prior to APEX projects had huge issues with respect to SLA missespenalties and con-tractual risks and they were constantly being highlighted as vulnerable project to the President and MD of the organization for review Hence APEX (A Passion for Excellence) as a concept was initiated across Cognizant BPO to improve these hygiene factors

APEX was based on the concept of edutainment (education and entertainment) Through simple mediums like cartoons puzzles poster competition computer based games snake amp ladder treasure hunt quiz etc the im-portance of quality was inculcated in the team at all levels These contests invigorated the floor brought out the competitive spirit and instilled a sense of accomplishment APEX has greatly helped BPO projects in bringing in lot of focus to review and understanding of contractual obligations and service levels Some of the other accom-plishments that were achieved as a part of APEX are

All SLAs are being signed up only post base-lining of metrics or after 6 months of data collection at the offshore

Detailed root cause analysis and corrective action for SLA slippages which has helped in improving SLA adherence

Revisiting SOW clauses and obtaining waiver from client on impossible client requirements

Metrics planning and reporting in one single portal

Improved transition management and governance Usage of customized Cognizant 20 for transition manage-

ment

Improved data integrity of the reported metrics due to improved data collection clear operational definition and

strong measurement system and validation by dedicated quality leaders at the project level

Some of the feedback received from the audiencejury were

ldquoThe way Quality was taken to the floor in terms of fun and games was truly noteworthyrdquo

ldquoThat the games were purely on quality concept was just amazingrdquo

ldquoA very complex concept executed in a very innovative wayrdquo

Author

Manjusha Gupta is currently a Quality Manager in Cognizant Technologies Solutions Pvt Ltd

She is a Six sigma trained professional is a Statistician by qualification and has a diploma in Total Quality Management She has close to 13 years of experience in Project and Quality Management Her experience spans across domains like Clinical Management Enterprise Ap-plication Interface (EAI) Human Resources Management System Insurance Knowledge Man-agement Business Process Outsourcing and e-learning

SPINNacle

Page 9

Interview mdash Gowri Shankar Subramaniam

Setting the strategic direction of Indiarsquos one of the fastest growing companies Aspire Sys-tems is Mr Gowri Shankar Subramaniam He is passionate about Producteering building software products for their clients He shares his views on software engineering and quality in this exclusive interview to SPIN Chennai One of the key services you offer is Producteering Ensuring process compliance in an in-house product devel-opment itself is a challenge for any quality team That being the case what do you do to ensure quality of your clientsrsquo product We have the experience of developing multiple products simultaneously At any point in time we handle devel-opment of about 40 to 50 products We know what works and what does not Not all our clients are high mature organizations They are at different levels of process maturity We have a well established framework to deal with any type of client There are four components that are important in any product development namely time-to-market budget scope and functionality We understand from our client which ones are sacrosanct Our key strength is focusing on technical quality Irrespective of the maturity level of our client we ensure that the product we build is tech-nically sound Focusing on architecture and not compromising on design quality has helped us to succeed In todayrsquos competitive market the mantra seems to be lsquodeliver more for lessrsquo I am sure Aspire would be no exception How do you sustain quality levels of offering We believe that quality is integrated into our products Quality is an integral part of whatever we do We are an ISO 9001 certified organization Our focus is more on technical quality rather than mere com-pliance to processes documented We emphasize on good design and efficient code This has paid us rich dividends over time Our customers recognize our strength For every project we assess the technical health apart from its process health We review the technical architecture and audit for compliance to standards Our Advanced Technology Group ensures that every project we undertake is superior in its technical health

How do you benchmark your performance vis-agrave-vis other organizationsrsquo in this industry

We rarely come across organizations publishing metrics or any association that publishes data against which we could benchmark our quality Alternatively we collate our own best practices We have internal benchmarks to compare with rather than external ones Our technology group lends their expertise through reviews and audits With multiple teams working in multiple locations and people coming from varied backgrounds how do you manage to drive quality to one and all especially to grassroots Quality spirit is inculcated right from the time one joins Aspire Our induction training is not so much to write Java or C++ code but to build a good piece of software We expose them to usability technical architecture and what it takes to build good software Through reviews and audits we ensure that every team works towards achieving our common goal building technically sound best-in-class products for our customers We ensure that our project managers are technically capable We recognize our achievers through rewards Our Red Falcon for quality Gold and Silver are aspirations of every project manager

SPINNacle

ldquoFor every project we assess the technical health apart from its proc-ess healthrdquo

Page 10

How do you measure your ROI on quality Are you realizing the desired benefits of your investment in qual-ity We do not identify quality as a separate parameter We do not have a quality team exclusively for collating data or to audit We have certainly realized that the time and effort we spend on nurturing technically strong teams have paid us off Last few years we have been hearing about the need to step up the quality of manpower coming out of col-leges Do you agree with that Yes We also experience the difficulty faced by most of the other organizations The percentage of students ready to be employed by the industry is very low The gap is very pronounced when it comes to soft skills such as com-munication or presentation

Most of the colleges and universities have introduced soft skills as a separate course to address this problem Would that help

Yes it helps to some extent There are certain aspects that cannot be taught overnight like attitude and ability to work hard etc When we recruit we look for the right attitude and aptitude Our philosophy is to create talent We provide extensive training to our new recruits During the training they are evaluated three to four times through reviews to assess their readiness and fitment to delivery

What should Tier 2 and tier 3 companies do to survive in IT Large companies seem to get a disproportionate amount of business leaving the next tier companies high and dry

Tier 2 and tier 3 companies should focus on their inherent strengths When they concentrate on specific areas they could be recognized in that segment We should encourage the mindset of youngsters to work in smaller organizations

The government can encourage entrepreneurs and device systems to support their growth

What is your advice to the community of software process improvement professionals

Software process improvement professionals should get more involved and understand the technical quality

SPINNacle

ldquoTier 2 and tier 3 compa-nies should focus on their inherent strengths rdquo

Page 11

Voice of the community

TREE BANK

Trees are important in purifying the air maintaining the ecological balance and providing nutrients to the soil Organizations and individuals can contribute towards this environmental cause by planting and nurturing trees in their areas Tree Bank is a non-profit social service organization enabling organizations and individuals to plant trees in their localities or office buildings or campuses or houses It gives away free saplings to the public who approach them and also ensures that the new owner nourishes the saplings with proper care

Mr G Mullaivanam a third generation farmer is the individual dedicated to this cause He has been collecting and giving away saplings from the age of 13 but formed lsquoTree Bank in 2008 with volunteers Then he started operating full time in this social cause now with support from about 355 volunteers (including college students and IT professionals) planting trees in each of the 155 divisions in Chennai everyday He is now the proud owner of about 2040000 trees that are planted in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states

Tree Bank has innumerable number of saplingstrees including all varieties from which people can choose the one they want It has rare medicinal ones too Mr Mullaivanam collects the saplings from all possible sources waters them nourishes them prunes the trees and even prepares natural manures He does all this for no mone-tary benefit Farming and providing flower decoration services are his sources of income

ldquoOur team inspects the house of the people who takes saplings from us It looks for an appropriate place for the tree taking into account the Metro Water line and Electricity Board line and train them on how deep the pit should be and how to grow and maintain it The resident is expected to mail a picture of the planted tree and the team regularly keeps a check on its growthrdquo says Mr Mullaivanam ldquoThrice a year the team visits all the places where the trees were planted and help in pruning and other tree care servicesrdquo he adds

SPINNacle

Pictures (From Top Left Clockwise) (a) TREE Bank founder Mr G Mullaivanam (left) handing over some tree saplings (b) Tree Plantation at Gandhi Nagar Adyar Government Library (c) Tree Plantation at General Hospital (GH) Chennai by Dr J Mohana Sundaram Dean GH (d) Tree Plantation at Guindy Industrial Estate by Justice Mr S Mohan (behind) and Mrs Padma Venkatraman (center) daughter of Former President Mr S Venkatara-man on the 100th birth centenary of Mr S Venkatraman

Page 12

TREE BANK hellip continued

Many organizations have approached the Tree Bank and got the saplings and planted them in their places some examples are

LampT campus in PorurChennai 50 saplings

Olympia IT Park Guindy Chennai 50 saplings

Industrial Estate Guindy Chennai 100 saplings

Dye Mark Factory campus Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Government School Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Birla Planetarium Chennai 50 saplings

General Hospital Chennai 56 saplings

SRM University campus Chennai 60 saplings

MOP Vaishnav College campus Chennai 100 saplings

Alpha College Chennai initiated plantation of 10000 saplings in a phased manner over 1 year inside their campus and on the roads along in the Thiruvallur district in collaboration with District Collector Office

Vidya Ashram Kadalur district Tamilnadu 300 saplings

Tree Bank as their own Program Ongoing program of lsquoAt Least One sapling a dayrsquo to complete 300000 saplings along the roads in Kanchipuram Thiruvallur and Chennai Districts in Tamilnadu

In addition to above Tree Bank has been receiving requests through emails and has been providing saplings to organizations from other cities who visit Chennai and collect the saplings Some examples

Chittoor district 200 saplings

Pondicherry 300 saplings

Anybody who wants to get saplings from Tree Bank can mail their details to treebankofindiagmailcom or con-tact Mrs Karpagam Somasundaram Volunteer Tree Bank (email skarpagyahoocom) For more details visit wwwtreebankofindiawebscom

Answers to the SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

SPINNacle

Across

1 Japanese term for Leveling the work load- HEIJUNKA

3 If you know Genrich Altshuller you should know this approach - TRIZ

6 T in TSP - TEAM

7 Fundamental aspect of any software If any doubt check with Dan Brown - CODE

10 If you love noodles use this tool SPAGHETTI

CONGRATULATIONS Winner of SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

Divakar Vaiyapuri - Sify Corp Chennai

Dhanasekar Elumalai - Mindtree Chennai

Down

2 SEICMMI_ _ _ IT-CMF - IVI

4 You might have hated this in Maths class but in testing profession you cant give it a go- RE-GRESSION

5 Time to refresh physics when you do meas-urement in agile - VELOCITY

8 German concept connected with music - TAKT

9 GE Six Sigma Toyota LEAN

Page 8

FIRST Watts Humphrey Award - Runner up 2 of My Practice Session

APEX - Manjusha Gupta The three basic hygiene needs of any project are to improve SLA adherence to reduce risks and to improve Pro-ject Health (compliance) Prior to APEX projects had huge issues with respect to SLA missespenalties and con-tractual risks and they were constantly being highlighted as vulnerable project to the President and MD of the organization for review Hence APEX (A Passion for Excellence) as a concept was initiated across Cognizant BPO to improve these hygiene factors

APEX was based on the concept of edutainment (education and entertainment) Through simple mediums like cartoons puzzles poster competition computer based games snake amp ladder treasure hunt quiz etc the im-portance of quality was inculcated in the team at all levels These contests invigorated the floor brought out the competitive spirit and instilled a sense of accomplishment APEX has greatly helped BPO projects in bringing in lot of focus to review and understanding of contractual obligations and service levels Some of the other accom-plishments that were achieved as a part of APEX are

All SLAs are being signed up only post base-lining of metrics or after 6 months of data collection at the offshore

Detailed root cause analysis and corrective action for SLA slippages which has helped in improving SLA adherence

Revisiting SOW clauses and obtaining waiver from client on impossible client requirements

Metrics planning and reporting in one single portal

Improved transition management and governance Usage of customized Cognizant 20 for transition manage-

ment

Improved data integrity of the reported metrics due to improved data collection clear operational definition and

strong measurement system and validation by dedicated quality leaders at the project level

Some of the feedback received from the audiencejury were

ldquoThe way Quality was taken to the floor in terms of fun and games was truly noteworthyrdquo

ldquoThat the games were purely on quality concept was just amazingrdquo

ldquoA very complex concept executed in a very innovative wayrdquo

Author

Manjusha Gupta is currently a Quality Manager in Cognizant Technologies Solutions Pvt Ltd

She is a Six sigma trained professional is a Statistician by qualification and has a diploma in Total Quality Management She has close to 13 years of experience in Project and Quality Management Her experience spans across domains like Clinical Management Enterprise Ap-plication Interface (EAI) Human Resources Management System Insurance Knowledge Man-agement Business Process Outsourcing and e-learning

SPINNacle

Page 9

Interview mdash Gowri Shankar Subramaniam

Setting the strategic direction of Indiarsquos one of the fastest growing companies Aspire Sys-tems is Mr Gowri Shankar Subramaniam He is passionate about Producteering building software products for their clients He shares his views on software engineering and quality in this exclusive interview to SPIN Chennai One of the key services you offer is Producteering Ensuring process compliance in an in-house product devel-opment itself is a challenge for any quality team That being the case what do you do to ensure quality of your clientsrsquo product We have the experience of developing multiple products simultaneously At any point in time we handle devel-opment of about 40 to 50 products We know what works and what does not Not all our clients are high mature organizations They are at different levels of process maturity We have a well established framework to deal with any type of client There are four components that are important in any product development namely time-to-market budget scope and functionality We understand from our client which ones are sacrosanct Our key strength is focusing on technical quality Irrespective of the maturity level of our client we ensure that the product we build is tech-nically sound Focusing on architecture and not compromising on design quality has helped us to succeed In todayrsquos competitive market the mantra seems to be lsquodeliver more for lessrsquo I am sure Aspire would be no exception How do you sustain quality levels of offering We believe that quality is integrated into our products Quality is an integral part of whatever we do We are an ISO 9001 certified organization Our focus is more on technical quality rather than mere com-pliance to processes documented We emphasize on good design and efficient code This has paid us rich dividends over time Our customers recognize our strength For every project we assess the technical health apart from its process health We review the technical architecture and audit for compliance to standards Our Advanced Technology Group ensures that every project we undertake is superior in its technical health

How do you benchmark your performance vis-agrave-vis other organizationsrsquo in this industry

We rarely come across organizations publishing metrics or any association that publishes data against which we could benchmark our quality Alternatively we collate our own best practices We have internal benchmarks to compare with rather than external ones Our technology group lends their expertise through reviews and audits With multiple teams working in multiple locations and people coming from varied backgrounds how do you manage to drive quality to one and all especially to grassroots Quality spirit is inculcated right from the time one joins Aspire Our induction training is not so much to write Java or C++ code but to build a good piece of software We expose them to usability technical architecture and what it takes to build good software Through reviews and audits we ensure that every team works towards achieving our common goal building technically sound best-in-class products for our customers We ensure that our project managers are technically capable We recognize our achievers through rewards Our Red Falcon for quality Gold and Silver are aspirations of every project manager

SPINNacle

ldquoFor every project we assess the technical health apart from its proc-ess healthrdquo

Page 10

How do you measure your ROI on quality Are you realizing the desired benefits of your investment in qual-ity We do not identify quality as a separate parameter We do not have a quality team exclusively for collating data or to audit We have certainly realized that the time and effort we spend on nurturing technically strong teams have paid us off Last few years we have been hearing about the need to step up the quality of manpower coming out of col-leges Do you agree with that Yes We also experience the difficulty faced by most of the other organizations The percentage of students ready to be employed by the industry is very low The gap is very pronounced when it comes to soft skills such as com-munication or presentation

Most of the colleges and universities have introduced soft skills as a separate course to address this problem Would that help

Yes it helps to some extent There are certain aspects that cannot be taught overnight like attitude and ability to work hard etc When we recruit we look for the right attitude and aptitude Our philosophy is to create talent We provide extensive training to our new recruits During the training they are evaluated three to four times through reviews to assess their readiness and fitment to delivery

What should Tier 2 and tier 3 companies do to survive in IT Large companies seem to get a disproportionate amount of business leaving the next tier companies high and dry

Tier 2 and tier 3 companies should focus on their inherent strengths When they concentrate on specific areas they could be recognized in that segment We should encourage the mindset of youngsters to work in smaller organizations

The government can encourage entrepreneurs and device systems to support their growth

What is your advice to the community of software process improvement professionals

Software process improvement professionals should get more involved and understand the technical quality

SPINNacle

ldquoTier 2 and tier 3 compa-nies should focus on their inherent strengths rdquo

Page 11

Voice of the community

TREE BANK

Trees are important in purifying the air maintaining the ecological balance and providing nutrients to the soil Organizations and individuals can contribute towards this environmental cause by planting and nurturing trees in their areas Tree Bank is a non-profit social service organization enabling organizations and individuals to plant trees in their localities or office buildings or campuses or houses It gives away free saplings to the public who approach them and also ensures that the new owner nourishes the saplings with proper care

Mr G Mullaivanam a third generation farmer is the individual dedicated to this cause He has been collecting and giving away saplings from the age of 13 but formed lsquoTree Bank in 2008 with volunteers Then he started operating full time in this social cause now with support from about 355 volunteers (including college students and IT professionals) planting trees in each of the 155 divisions in Chennai everyday He is now the proud owner of about 2040000 trees that are planted in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states

Tree Bank has innumerable number of saplingstrees including all varieties from which people can choose the one they want It has rare medicinal ones too Mr Mullaivanam collects the saplings from all possible sources waters them nourishes them prunes the trees and even prepares natural manures He does all this for no mone-tary benefit Farming and providing flower decoration services are his sources of income

ldquoOur team inspects the house of the people who takes saplings from us It looks for an appropriate place for the tree taking into account the Metro Water line and Electricity Board line and train them on how deep the pit should be and how to grow and maintain it The resident is expected to mail a picture of the planted tree and the team regularly keeps a check on its growthrdquo says Mr Mullaivanam ldquoThrice a year the team visits all the places where the trees were planted and help in pruning and other tree care servicesrdquo he adds

SPINNacle

Pictures (From Top Left Clockwise) (a) TREE Bank founder Mr G Mullaivanam (left) handing over some tree saplings (b) Tree Plantation at Gandhi Nagar Adyar Government Library (c) Tree Plantation at General Hospital (GH) Chennai by Dr J Mohana Sundaram Dean GH (d) Tree Plantation at Guindy Industrial Estate by Justice Mr S Mohan (behind) and Mrs Padma Venkatraman (center) daughter of Former President Mr S Venkatara-man on the 100th birth centenary of Mr S Venkatraman

Page 12

TREE BANK hellip continued

Many organizations have approached the Tree Bank and got the saplings and planted them in their places some examples are

LampT campus in PorurChennai 50 saplings

Olympia IT Park Guindy Chennai 50 saplings

Industrial Estate Guindy Chennai 100 saplings

Dye Mark Factory campus Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Government School Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Birla Planetarium Chennai 50 saplings

General Hospital Chennai 56 saplings

SRM University campus Chennai 60 saplings

MOP Vaishnav College campus Chennai 100 saplings

Alpha College Chennai initiated plantation of 10000 saplings in a phased manner over 1 year inside their campus and on the roads along in the Thiruvallur district in collaboration with District Collector Office

Vidya Ashram Kadalur district Tamilnadu 300 saplings

Tree Bank as their own Program Ongoing program of lsquoAt Least One sapling a dayrsquo to complete 300000 saplings along the roads in Kanchipuram Thiruvallur and Chennai Districts in Tamilnadu

In addition to above Tree Bank has been receiving requests through emails and has been providing saplings to organizations from other cities who visit Chennai and collect the saplings Some examples

Chittoor district 200 saplings

Pondicherry 300 saplings

Anybody who wants to get saplings from Tree Bank can mail their details to treebankofindiagmailcom or con-tact Mrs Karpagam Somasundaram Volunteer Tree Bank (email skarpagyahoocom) For more details visit wwwtreebankofindiawebscom

Answers to the SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

SPINNacle

Across

1 Japanese term for Leveling the work load- HEIJUNKA

3 If you know Genrich Altshuller you should know this approach - TRIZ

6 T in TSP - TEAM

7 Fundamental aspect of any software If any doubt check with Dan Brown - CODE

10 If you love noodles use this tool SPAGHETTI

CONGRATULATIONS Winner of SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

Divakar Vaiyapuri - Sify Corp Chennai

Dhanasekar Elumalai - Mindtree Chennai

Down

2 SEICMMI_ _ _ IT-CMF - IVI

4 You might have hated this in Maths class but in testing profession you cant give it a go- RE-GRESSION

5 Time to refresh physics when you do meas-urement in agile - VELOCITY

8 German concept connected with music - TAKT

9 GE Six Sigma Toyota LEAN

Page 9

Interview mdash Gowri Shankar Subramaniam

Setting the strategic direction of Indiarsquos one of the fastest growing companies Aspire Sys-tems is Mr Gowri Shankar Subramaniam He is passionate about Producteering building software products for their clients He shares his views on software engineering and quality in this exclusive interview to SPIN Chennai One of the key services you offer is Producteering Ensuring process compliance in an in-house product devel-opment itself is a challenge for any quality team That being the case what do you do to ensure quality of your clientsrsquo product We have the experience of developing multiple products simultaneously At any point in time we handle devel-opment of about 40 to 50 products We know what works and what does not Not all our clients are high mature organizations They are at different levels of process maturity We have a well established framework to deal with any type of client There are four components that are important in any product development namely time-to-market budget scope and functionality We understand from our client which ones are sacrosanct Our key strength is focusing on technical quality Irrespective of the maturity level of our client we ensure that the product we build is tech-nically sound Focusing on architecture and not compromising on design quality has helped us to succeed In todayrsquos competitive market the mantra seems to be lsquodeliver more for lessrsquo I am sure Aspire would be no exception How do you sustain quality levels of offering We believe that quality is integrated into our products Quality is an integral part of whatever we do We are an ISO 9001 certified organization Our focus is more on technical quality rather than mere com-pliance to processes documented We emphasize on good design and efficient code This has paid us rich dividends over time Our customers recognize our strength For every project we assess the technical health apart from its process health We review the technical architecture and audit for compliance to standards Our Advanced Technology Group ensures that every project we undertake is superior in its technical health

How do you benchmark your performance vis-agrave-vis other organizationsrsquo in this industry

We rarely come across organizations publishing metrics or any association that publishes data against which we could benchmark our quality Alternatively we collate our own best practices We have internal benchmarks to compare with rather than external ones Our technology group lends their expertise through reviews and audits With multiple teams working in multiple locations and people coming from varied backgrounds how do you manage to drive quality to one and all especially to grassroots Quality spirit is inculcated right from the time one joins Aspire Our induction training is not so much to write Java or C++ code but to build a good piece of software We expose them to usability technical architecture and what it takes to build good software Through reviews and audits we ensure that every team works towards achieving our common goal building technically sound best-in-class products for our customers We ensure that our project managers are technically capable We recognize our achievers through rewards Our Red Falcon for quality Gold and Silver are aspirations of every project manager

SPINNacle

ldquoFor every project we assess the technical health apart from its proc-ess healthrdquo

Page 10

How do you measure your ROI on quality Are you realizing the desired benefits of your investment in qual-ity We do not identify quality as a separate parameter We do not have a quality team exclusively for collating data or to audit We have certainly realized that the time and effort we spend on nurturing technically strong teams have paid us off Last few years we have been hearing about the need to step up the quality of manpower coming out of col-leges Do you agree with that Yes We also experience the difficulty faced by most of the other organizations The percentage of students ready to be employed by the industry is very low The gap is very pronounced when it comes to soft skills such as com-munication or presentation

Most of the colleges and universities have introduced soft skills as a separate course to address this problem Would that help

Yes it helps to some extent There are certain aspects that cannot be taught overnight like attitude and ability to work hard etc When we recruit we look for the right attitude and aptitude Our philosophy is to create talent We provide extensive training to our new recruits During the training they are evaluated three to four times through reviews to assess their readiness and fitment to delivery

What should Tier 2 and tier 3 companies do to survive in IT Large companies seem to get a disproportionate amount of business leaving the next tier companies high and dry

Tier 2 and tier 3 companies should focus on their inherent strengths When they concentrate on specific areas they could be recognized in that segment We should encourage the mindset of youngsters to work in smaller organizations

The government can encourage entrepreneurs and device systems to support their growth

What is your advice to the community of software process improvement professionals

Software process improvement professionals should get more involved and understand the technical quality

SPINNacle

ldquoTier 2 and tier 3 compa-nies should focus on their inherent strengths rdquo

Page 11

Voice of the community

TREE BANK

Trees are important in purifying the air maintaining the ecological balance and providing nutrients to the soil Organizations and individuals can contribute towards this environmental cause by planting and nurturing trees in their areas Tree Bank is a non-profit social service organization enabling organizations and individuals to plant trees in their localities or office buildings or campuses or houses It gives away free saplings to the public who approach them and also ensures that the new owner nourishes the saplings with proper care

Mr G Mullaivanam a third generation farmer is the individual dedicated to this cause He has been collecting and giving away saplings from the age of 13 but formed lsquoTree Bank in 2008 with volunteers Then he started operating full time in this social cause now with support from about 355 volunteers (including college students and IT professionals) planting trees in each of the 155 divisions in Chennai everyday He is now the proud owner of about 2040000 trees that are planted in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states

Tree Bank has innumerable number of saplingstrees including all varieties from which people can choose the one they want It has rare medicinal ones too Mr Mullaivanam collects the saplings from all possible sources waters them nourishes them prunes the trees and even prepares natural manures He does all this for no mone-tary benefit Farming and providing flower decoration services are his sources of income

ldquoOur team inspects the house of the people who takes saplings from us It looks for an appropriate place for the tree taking into account the Metro Water line and Electricity Board line and train them on how deep the pit should be and how to grow and maintain it The resident is expected to mail a picture of the planted tree and the team regularly keeps a check on its growthrdquo says Mr Mullaivanam ldquoThrice a year the team visits all the places where the trees were planted and help in pruning and other tree care servicesrdquo he adds

SPINNacle

Pictures (From Top Left Clockwise) (a) TREE Bank founder Mr G Mullaivanam (left) handing over some tree saplings (b) Tree Plantation at Gandhi Nagar Adyar Government Library (c) Tree Plantation at General Hospital (GH) Chennai by Dr J Mohana Sundaram Dean GH (d) Tree Plantation at Guindy Industrial Estate by Justice Mr S Mohan (behind) and Mrs Padma Venkatraman (center) daughter of Former President Mr S Venkatara-man on the 100th birth centenary of Mr S Venkatraman

Page 12

TREE BANK hellip continued

Many organizations have approached the Tree Bank and got the saplings and planted them in their places some examples are

LampT campus in PorurChennai 50 saplings

Olympia IT Park Guindy Chennai 50 saplings

Industrial Estate Guindy Chennai 100 saplings

Dye Mark Factory campus Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Government School Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Birla Planetarium Chennai 50 saplings

General Hospital Chennai 56 saplings

SRM University campus Chennai 60 saplings

MOP Vaishnav College campus Chennai 100 saplings

Alpha College Chennai initiated plantation of 10000 saplings in a phased manner over 1 year inside their campus and on the roads along in the Thiruvallur district in collaboration with District Collector Office

Vidya Ashram Kadalur district Tamilnadu 300 saplings

Tree Bank as their own Program Ongoing program of lsquoAt Least One sapling a dayrsquo to complete 300000 saplings along the roads in Kanchipuram Thiruvallur and Chennai Districts in Tamilnadu

In addition to above Tree Bank has been receiving requests through emails and has been providing saplings to organizations from other cities who visit Chennai and collect the saplings Some examples

Chittoor district 200 saplings

Pondicherry 300 saplings

Anybody who wants to get saplings from Tree Bank can mail their details to treebankofindiagmailcom or con-tact Mrs Karpagam Somasundaram Volunteer Tree Bank (email skarpagyahoocom) For more details visit wwwtreebankofindiawebscom

Answers to the SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

SPINNacle

Across

1 Japanese term for Leveling the work load- HEIJUNKA

3 If you know Genrich Altshuller you should know this approach - TRIZ

6 T in TSP - TEAM

7 Fundamental aspect of any software If any doubt check with Dan Brown - CODE

10 If you love noodles use this tool SPAGHETTI

CONGRATULATIONS Winner of SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

Divakar Vaiyapuri - Sify Corp Chennai

Dhanasekar Elumalai - Mindtree Chennai

Down

2 SEICMMI_ _ _ IT-CMF - IVI

4 You might have hated this in Maths class but in testing profession you cant give it a go- RE-GRESSION

5 Time to refresh physics when you do meas-urement in agile - VELOCITY

8 German concept connected with music - TAKT

9 GE Six Sigma Toyota LEAN

Page 10

How do you measure your ROI on quality Are you realizing the desired benefits of your investment in qual-ity We do not identify quality as a separate parameter We do not have a quality team exclusively for collating data or to audit We have certainly realized that the time and effort we spend on nurturing technically strong teams have paid us off Last few years we have been hearing about the need to step up the quality of manpower coming out of col-leges Do you agree with that Yes We also experience the difficulty faced by most of the other organizations The percentage of students ready to be employed by the industry is very low The gap is very pronounced when it comes to soft skills such as com-munication or presentation

Most of the colleges and universities have introduced soft skills as a separate course to address this problem Would that help

Yes it helps to some extent There are certain aspects that cannot be taught overnight like attitude and ability to work hard etc When we recruit we look for the right attitude and aptitude Our philosophy is to create talent We provide extensive training to our new recruits During the training they are evaluated three to four times through reviews to assess their readiness and fitment to delivery

What should Tier 2 and tier 3 companies do to survive in IT Large companies seem to get a disproportionate amount of business leaving the next tier companies high and dry

Tier 2 and tier 3 companies should focus on their inherent strengths When they concentrate on specific areas they could be recognized in that segment We should encourage the mindset of youngsters to work in smaller organizations

The government can encourage entrepreneurs and device systems to support their growth

What is your advice to the community of software process improvement professionals

Software process improvement professionals should get more involved and understand the technical quality

SPINNacle

ldquoTier 2 and tier 3 compa-nies should focus on their inherent strengths rdquo

Page 11

Voice of the community

TREE BANK

Trees are important in purifying the air maintaining the ecological balance and providing nutrients to the soil Organizations and individuals can contribute towards this environmental cause by planting and nurturing trees in their areas Tree Bank is a non-profit social service organization enabling organizations and individuals to plant trees in their localities or office buildings or campuses or houses It gives away free saplings to the public who approach them and also ensures that the new owner nourishes the saplings with proper care

Mr G Mullaivanam a third generation farmer is the individual dedicated to this cause He has been collecting and giving away saplings from the age of 13 but formed lsquoTree Bank in 2008 with volunteers Then he started operating full time in this social cause now with support from about 355 volunteers (including college students and IT professionals) planting trees in each of the 155 divisions in Chennai everyday He is now the proud owner of about 2040000 trees that are planted in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states

Tree Bank has innumerable number of saplingstrees including all varieties from which people can choose the one they want It has rare medicinal ones too Mr Mullaivanam collects the saplings from all possible sources waters them nourishes them prunes the trees and even prepares natural manures He does all this for no mone-tary benefit Farming and providing flower decoration services are his sources of income

ldquoOur team inspects the house of the people who takes saplings from us It looks for an appropriate place for the tree taking into account the Metro Water line and Electricity Board line and train them on how deep the pit should be and how to grow and maintain it The resident is expected to mail a picture of the planted tree and the team regularly keeps a check on its growthrdquo says Mr Mullaivanam ldquoThrice a year the team visits all the places where the trees were planted and help in pruning and other tree care servicesrdquo he adds

SPINNacle

Pictures (From Top Left Clockwise) (a) TREE Bank founder Mr G Mullaivanam (left) handing over some tree saplings (b) Tree Plantation at Gandhi Nagar Adyar Government Library (c) Tree Plantation at General Hospital (GH) Chennai by Dr J Mohana Sundaram Dean GH (d) Tree Plantation at Guindy Industrial Estate by Justice Mr S Mohan (behind) and Mrs Padma Venkatraman (center) daughter of Former President Mr S Venkatara-man on the 100th birth centenary of Mr S Venkatraman

Page 12

TREE BANK hellip continued

Many organizations have approached the Tree Bank and got the saplings and planted them in their places some examples are

LampT campus in PorurChennai 50 saplings

Olympia IT Park Guindy Chennai 50 saplings

Industrial Estate Guindy Chennai 100 saplings

Dye Mark Factory campus Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Government School Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Birla Planetarium Chennai 50 saplings

General Hospital Chennai 56 saplings

SRM University campus Chennai 60 saplings

MOP Vaishnav College campus Chennai 100 saplings

Alpha College Chennai initiated plantation of 10000 saplings in a phased manner over 1 year inside their campus and on the roads along in the Thiruvallur district in collaboration with District Collector Office

Vidya Ashram Kadalur district Tamilnadu 300 saplings

Tree Bank as their own Program Ongoing program of lsquoAt Least One sapling a dayrsquo to complete 300000 saplings along the roads in Kanchipuram Thiruvallur and Chennai Districts in Tamilnadu

In addition to above Tree Bank has been receiving requests through emails and has been providing saplings to organizations from other cities who visit Chennai and collect the saplings Some examples

Chittoor district 200 saplings

Pondicherry 300 saplings

Anybody who wants to get saplings from Tree Bank can mail their details to treebankofindiagmailcom or con-tact Mrs Karpagam Somasundaram Volunteer Tree Bank (email skarpagyahoocom) For more details visit wwwtreebankofindiawebscom

Answers to the SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

SPINNacle

Across

1 Japanese term for Leveling the work load- HEIJUNKA

3 If you know Genrich Altshuller you should know this approach - TRIZ

6 T in TSP - TEAM

7 Fundamental aspect of any software If any doubt check with Dan Brown - CODE

10 If you love noodles use this tool SPAGHETTI

CONGRATULATIONS Winner of SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

Divakar Vaiyapuri - Sify Corp Chennai

Dhanasekar Elumalai - Mindtree Chennai

Down

2 SEICMMI_ _ _ IT-CMF - IVI

4 You might have hated this in Maths class but in testing profession you cant give it a go- RE-GRESSION

5 Time to refresh physics when you do meas-urement in agile - VELOCITY

8 German concept connected with music - TAKT

9 GE Six Sigma Toyota LEAN

Page 11

Voice of the community

TREE BANK

Trees are important in purifying the air maintaining the ecological balance and providing nutrients to the soil Organizations and individuals can contribute towards this environmental cause by planting and nurturing trees in their areas Tree Bank is a non-profit social service organization enabling organizations and individuals to plant trees in their localities or office buildings or campuses or houses It gives away free saplings to the public who approach them and also ensures that the new owner nourishes the saplings with proper care

Mr G Mullaivanam a third generation farmer is the individual dedicated to this cause He has been collecting and giving away saplings from the age of 13 but formed lsquoTree Bank in 2008 with volunteers Then he started operating full time in this social cause now with support from about 355 volunteers (including college students and IT professionals) planting trees in each of the 155 divisions in Chennai everyday He is now the proud owner of about 2040000 trees that are planted in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states

Tree Bank has innumerable number of saplingstrees including all varieties from which people can choose the one they want It has rare medicinal ones too Mr Mullaivanam collects the saplings from all possible sources waters them nourishes them prunes the trees and even prepares natural manures He does all this for no mone-tary benefit Farming and providing flower decoration services are his sources of income

ldquoOur team inspects the house of the people who takes saplings from us It looks for an appropriate place for the tree taking into account the Metro Water line and Electricity Board line and train them on how deep the pit should be and how to grow and maintain it The resident is expected to mail a picture of the planted tree and the team regularly keeps a check on its growthrdquo says Mr Mullaivanam ldquoThrice a year the team visits all the places where the trees were planted and help in pruning and other tree care servicesrdquo he adds

SPINNacle

Pictures (From Top Left Clockwise) (a) TREE Bank founder Mr G Mullaivanam (left) handing over some tree saplings (b) Tree Plantation at Gandhi Nagar Adyar Government Library (c) Tree Plantation at General Hospital (GH) Chennai by Dr J Mohana Sundaram Dean GH (d) Tree Plantation at Guindy Industrial Estate by Justice Mr S Mohan (behind) and Mrs Padma Venkatraman (center) daughter of Former President Mr S Venkatara-man on the 100th birth centenary of Mr S Venkatraman

Page 12

TREE BANK hellip continued

Many organizations have approached the Tree Bank and got the saplings and planted them in their places some examples are

LampT campus in PorurChennai 50 saplings

Olympia IT Park Guindy Chennai 50 saplings

Industrial Estate Guindy Chennai 100 saplings

Dye Mark Factory campus Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Government School Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Birla Planetarium Chennai 50 saplings

General Hospital Chennai 56 saplings

SRM University campus Chennai 60 saplings

MOP Vaishnav College campus Chennai 100 saplings

Alpha College Chennai initiated plantation of 10000 saplings in a phased manner over 1 year inside their campus and on the roads along in the Thiruvallur district in collaboration with District Collector Office

Vidya Ashram Kadalur district Tamilnadu 300 saplings

Tree Bank as their own Program Ongoing program of lsquoAt Least One sapling a dayrsquo to complete 300000 saplings along the roads in Kanchipuram Thiruvallur and Chennai Districts in Tamilnadu

In addition to above Tree Bank has been receiving requests through emails and has been providing saplings to organizations from other cities who visit Chennai and collect the saplings Some examples

Chittoor district 200 saplings

Pondicherry 300 saplings

Anybody who wants to get saplings from Tree Bank can mail their details to treebankofindiagmailcom or con-tact Mrs Karpagam Somasundaram Volunteer Tree Bank (email skarpagyahoocom) For more details visit wwwtreebankofindiawebscom

Answers to the SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

SPINNacle

Across

1 Japanese term for Leveling the work load- HEIJUNKA

3 If you know Genrich Altshuller you should know this approach - TRIZ

6 T in TSP - TEAM

7 Fundamental aspect of any software If any doubt check with Dan Brown - CODE

10 If you love noodles use this tool SPAGHETTI

CONGRATULATIONS Winner of SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

Divakar Vaiyapuri - Sify Corp Chennai

Dhanasekar Elumalai - Mindtree Chennai

Down

2 SEICMMI_ _ _ IT-CMF - IVI

4 You might have hated this in Maths class but in testing profession you cant give it a go- RE-GRESSION

5 Time to refresh physics when you do meas-urement in agile - VELOCITY

8 German concept connected with music - TAKT

9 GE Six Sigma Toyota LEAN

Page 12

TREE BANK hellip continued

Many organizations have approached the Tree Bank and got the saplings and planted them in their places some examples are

LampT campus in PorurChennai 50 saplings

Olympia IT Park Guindy Chennai 50 saplings

Industrial Estate Guindy Chennai 100 saplings

Dye Mark Factory campus Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Government School Red Hills Chennai 200 saplings

Birla Planetarium Chennai 50 saplings

General Hospital Chennai 56 saplings

SRM University campus Chennai 60 saplings

MOP Vaishnav College campus Chennai 100 saplings

Alpha College Chennai initiated plantation of 10000 saplings in a phased manner over 1 year inside their campus and on the roads along in the Thiruvallur district in collaboration with District Collector Office

Vidya Ashram Kadalur district Tamilnadu 300 saplings

Tree Bank as their own Program Ongoing program of lsquoAt Least One sapling a dayrsquo to complete 300000 saplings along the roads in Kanchipuram Thiruvallur and Chennai Districts in Tamilnadu

In addition to above Tree Bank has been receiving requests through emails and has been providing saplings to organizations from other cities who visit Chennai and collect the saplings Some examples

Chittoor district 200 saplings

Pondicherry 300 saplings

Anybody who wants to get saplings from Tree Bank can mail their details to treebankofindiagmailcom or con-tact Mrs Karpagam Somasundaram Volunteer Tree Bank (email skarpagyahoocom) For more details visit wwwtreebankofindiawebscom

Answers to the SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

SPINNacle

Across

1 Japanese term for Leveling the work load- HEIJUNKA

3 If you know Genrich Altshuller you should know this approach - TRIZ

6 T in TSP - TEAM

7 Fundamental aspect of any software If any doubt check with Dan Brown - CODE

10 If you love noodles use this tool SPAGHETTI

CONGRATULATIONS Winner of SPINnacle Issue-4 ldquoRelax and Rattle your brainsrdquo

Divakar Vaiyapuri - Sify Corp Chennai

Dhanasekar Elumalai - Mindtree Chennai

Down

2 SEICMMI_ _ _ IT-CMF - IVI

4 You might have hated this in Maths class but in testing profession you cant give it a go- RE-GRESSION

5 Time to refresh physics when you do meas-urement in agile - VELOCITY

8 German concept connected with music - TAKT

9 GE Six Sigma Toyota LEAN

Page 13

Software testing is no mean feat

Finding bugs generates some heat

Can get more complex than writing code

Yoursquod agree itrsquos difficult to off-load

I have tested many a code

Ran test cases without getting bored

Posed many challenges for a geek

But none would match that test last week

Started like most with requirements unstated

Policy permitted no tool pirated

Wrote down the cases defined criteria

With mugs of coffee supplied from cafeteria

Testing began white box and black

UI included not sparing hack

Stressed it for long until it cracked

Delighted we were on closure when tracked

Counted defects per lines of code

Filled in all reports in on-line mode

Milestones achieved we called in the boss

Shared test results from simple to gross

Expecting appreciation from chief

But heard him say in disbelief

ldquoThis is not the version at all

You tested the wrong version after all rdquo

SPINNacle

Testing Times by Latha Ramesh

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If you are interested in contributing something interesting for the newsletter we would like to hear from you

You can reach us at secretaryspinchennaiorg

copy All images and illustrations are copyrights of original sources referred They are used only for illustration and information sharing purpose

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