tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-103323872012-01-24T07:16:48.560-05:00I cover several topics including agile software development, software startups, web 2.0, social networking, SaaS, content management, media, enterprise 2.0 and business transformation.Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.comBlogger1401100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-20752613758478806402012-01-24T07:16:00.000-05:002012-01-24T07:16:48.571-05:00

I was relatively young when I attended my first board meeting. At the time, the board for my startup consisted of executives from some of the major media and newspaper companies including Hearst, Advance, Scripps, and Media News Group. This was back is 1998 or 1999, and like all Boards, they wanted to know how we were growing our business. They had few technology questions, though I do remember

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-11963881488803391162011-11-30T07:30:00.000-05:002011-11-30T08:46:48.560-05:00

In my last post, I stated that technology teams could achieve a 2X speed to market by leveraging agile platforms. Here are my top ten attributes of agile platforms: Fast and easy to learn - It lets average developers learn and be productive with short ramp up time. It has a combination of tools and documentation that lets my whole team start using it quickly. Built on standards - Because its

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-39928676361885474592011-10-28T07:24:00.001-04:002011-10-28T07:24:34.689-04:00

Wenger Giant Swiss Army Knife Developing extendable technology  platforms is what makes agile teams and agile businesses nimble. For simplicity I'm going to call a platform as any single or stack of technologies that are leveraged in more than one product or business process. Since a product or business process is somewhat fungible, what I really mean is more than one application developed

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-69953040342887095002011-10-10T23:04:00.000-04:002011-10-10T23:04:29.740-04:00

I firmly believe the best products are simple. What does simple mean? Simple to use, simple to understand, simple to sell, simple to market, simple to engineer, simple to test, simple to deploy. Simplicity comes from design patterns, reuse, and focus. User interfaces need to be easily understood. Our brains understand patterns; color schemes, design elements, navigation, messages,

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-41461190698863936952011-09-22T07:41:00.000-04:002011-09-22T07:43:51.082-04:00

Last year, I published a series on my first hundred days as CIO at McGraw-Hill Construction. I've largely been quiet since then, unfortunately (from a blogging perspective), with my head down working with the Business and IT teams. We've rolled out some new products like Dodge SpecShare Suite, upgraded several technology platforms, and established an agile project management office among many

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-32194601161666253132011-09-15T18:07:00.001-04:002011-09-15T18:08:55.856-04:00

In How to Kill Projects and Develop Agile Programs Part 1, I listed the first steps in moving from projects to programs. Embrace but control projects, execute the agile process, identify and measure productivity impediments. All three are important. What you need to demonstrate is that you have a team that is transparent, productive, and can execute on business priorities. You want business

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-46201669293873347292011-08-09T16:30:00.002-04:002011-08-09T19:30:04.109-04:00

This was the question I asked a Product Owner last week. I was encouraging him to think small and simple. I suggested the flux capacitor, a "simple" invention engineered by one man that changed the world. Don't try to build that death star that required a large army of storm troopers and the powers of the dark force to construct. I thought about this discussion all weekend because, after many

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-57871292060396334142011-06-20T06:12:00.000-04:002011-06-20T06:12:12.790-04:00

Last post I covered why product development organizations need to kill projects and move to agile programs Here's how: 1) Embrace, but control projects The first thing to realize is that there is an organizational dynamic around projects. So trying to "kill projects" in one step just isn't going to work and you'll get wrapped up in many change management challenges. Instead, I suggest doing

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-72861206590858959962011-06-09T07:45:00.001-04:002011-06-09T07:45:00.852-04:00

My last couple of posts covered the need to define markets before products as the first shift in transforming product delivery. The second issue to tackle is shifting from projects to programs. Projects kill product development organizations. By definition, a project assumes a beginning and an end. The beginning requires deigning, justifying, and planning the project. The end assumes that

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-71167507600703775382011-05-20T08:00:00.002-04:002011-05-20T08:00:11.257-04:00

In my last post, I discussed some of the key questions around market definition and suggested that in most situations, answers to these questions are needed before going into product or service definition. My rationale is simple There are many possible product or service definitions possible for a single market. I believe that optimal product definition is a collaborative process. Product

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-43442987235630277362011-05-11T08:45:00.006-04:002011-05-19T20:53:59.998-04:00

My last post introduced the transformation from a product to a market and platform organization and from a projects to programs. The rationale behind these transformations is to get to a more agile, nimble product and technology organization that can support a larger number of development initiatives, both new and enhancement. Key Questions to ask on Market Definition Let's start with some

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-44285631947909353252011-05-02T08:15:00.004-04:002011-05-02T08:15:00.187-04:00

As technologists, product developers, and marketers, we all love to work on the brand new idea. It might be a simple enhancement or a whole new application to a new audience, we are all motivated by creating something new and the prospect of success. I spent the first half of my career working in startups where the thrill of building something new was easily attainable. Or was it? The truth is,

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-71648365883204838842011-03-08T06:48:00.000-05:002011-03-08T06:48:02.064-05:00

When I talk to leaders and teams about agile and scrum, they get the basics right away - sprint length, stand ups, commitments, getting to done, and basic backlog management. After that, I'm usually asked a flood of questions. How do we engage the Business? How should we estimate? How do we handle forecasting end dates and financials? What should we do with stories that don't achieve 'done'? What

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-59282655019001185572011-02-09T17:45:00.001-05:002011-02-09T17:46:35.890-05:00

Me at the Taj Mahal on a very cloudy day I recently made a trip to India to visit our teams performing business operations, development, and support activities. It's a trip I like to do at least annually to get a sense of how teams are performing and where to make both improvements and investments. Below are some of the areas I explore when visiting offshore teams: Learn the culture - Who

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-89375947690601616572011-01-03T17:44:00.000-05:002011-01-03T17:44:30.639-05:00

I'm certain many CIOs will relate to some of these resolutions... I'm also certain that this is an incomplete list. I'm not trying to cover a full CIO agenda or responsibilities, but am pointing out some areas that at least I will try to aspire to in 2011. Not in any particular order....  1) Blog and Tweet more - to better contribute to your company, customers, colleagues, staff, and

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-80781458404431900172010-09-07T18:39:00.000-04:002010-09-07T18:39:02.077-04:00

It's been a little over 100 days since I started my new CIO post. When I started back in May, I published My First 100 Days as CIO with reference links I used to help develop my plan. About 1/3 of the way through, I published a Top 10 Guidance Tips to New CIOs and IT Leaders with some simple advice to those in new IT leadership positions. I even tweeted through my first 100 days. Now, after a

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-69056020945192024302010-08-11T07:32:00.000-04:002010-08-11T07:32:02.371-04:00

I've seen this issue before; a team is struggling to move into an agile process. In my case, they are using agile to plan out an architecture. It's a smart team, but they are immediately jumping into solving problems and developing artifacts. The problem is, using agile process (scrum specifically) for planning, problem solving, developing a strategy, documenting an architecture requires some

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-4309501083976115942010-07-13T18:48:00.000-04:002010-07-13T18:48:33.948-04:00

There is significant discussion in CIO circles on moving more IT spend out of the maintenance and into either enhancement work, new product development, innovation, or even R&D. As I’ve explored this issue, there are a number of causes of high maintenance worth exploring: 1)    The product requires technologists to respond to customer issues, address service level deficiencies, investigate root

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-42288773431737976452010-06-21T07:12:00.000-04:002010-06-21T07:12:44.634-04:00

It's been awhile since my last post. What can I say, the first 100 days of being CIO at a new job is busy. There's people to meet, the business to learn, and the technology to understand. Some things need immediate attention, others are things that can be dealt with later. It's easy to be overwhelmed. So, almost halfway into my 100 days, I can give new CIOs some advice. This goes beyond building

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-22576158457788257482010-05-14T00:12:00.000-04:002010-05-14T00:12:01.359-04:00

I started a new position this week as VP Technology / CIO of McGraw-Hill Construction and have started to work on a 100 day plan. Poking around a little bit, I've found a number of good references on this subject: Forrester's new CIO 100 Day Plan - Advises building a personal checklist. Has a good starting list of major learning and action tasks. Recommends "let your business peers know you are

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-46159519212409031432010-04-29T14:58:00.000-04:002010-04-29T14:58:28.141-04:00

Last week I moderated a panel on Social Networking and Media to a group of approximately 50 CIOs at the Global CIO Forum sponsored by Telwares. We covered social networking from a number of perspectives: Integrating social networking functionality into products (example, Twitter, LinkedIn like Business Exchange has done or Facebook integration as others have done successfullt) Social media/

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-86654202091864954452010-04-05T22:03:00.000-04:002010-04-05T22:03:06.770-04:00

One of the things I look for when introducing new tools and processes is what I term "easy on-ramps". Basically, that means that a small group of "believers" (to steal a term from McAfee's Enterprise 2.0 book) can start leveraging the tool quickly and easily. It also means that as the Believers benefit from the tool and build up its use cases, these same on-ramps make it just as easy for the next

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-44910859933402728842010-03-09T18:44:00.000-05:002010-03-09T18:44:17.670-05:00

Have you heard this one yet, "We're not ready to talk to Technology yet, we're still in strategic planning on the product and priorities. We'll talk soon when we have requirements ready". Ba humbug. Here's my answer to this issue. The key Business / IT engagement question is: What are some of the biggest issues or opportunities that need to be addressed for some of your core customers in the

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-39586529933416894002010-02-24T08:57:00.000-05:002010-02-24T08:57:41.212-05:00

I like to say that the best time to adopt agile in a large company or an enterprise is when there are the right business conditions. This may seem odd for a software development process, but while the development team has a lot to master when it comes to agile, it's the business functions that exhibit the most changes and must also put a lot of trust in their technology colleagues. I speak this

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-89488337511934404452010-02-16T08:54:00.000-05:002010-02-16T08:54:46.054-05:00

Are you a technology executive looking to adopt or migrate to an agile software development practice? According to a Forrester survey Mainstream Adoption Has Changed Agility, 35% of IT professionals say their development practice most closely resembles an agile development practice causing the media proclamation that agile is now mainstream. But of course this also means that 65% are not

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-61815377863921872172010-02-01T09:10:00.001-05:002010-02-01T09:19:24.543-05:00

I've been covering the CIO path to credibility. First, the CIO must be able to negotiate priorities and develop a path for consistent delivery - which is why I thing the CIO loves Agile (or should love it). So if you are buying into my methodology, the next step the CIO must determine is how to introduce an agile development life cycle to both the Technology and the Business organizations. Now

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-63542019272712816512010-01-28T08:30:00.001-05:002010-01-28T08:39:24.989-05:00

Doing some poking around today and this evening on the iPad, and the vibe I'm getting is ho-hum. Gadget enthusiasts are somewhat disappointed on the lack of some features (sd card, camera) but investors are enthused over the $499 entry price. Obviously the Apple designers had to make some tough calls on what hardware features they had to include given constraints on cost, physical size, and

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-34345063654411708822010-01-25T08:36:00.001-05:002010-01-25T08:42:15.942-05:00

Let's say you're following my last two posts on negotiating business priorities. You're the CIO and have just been given a set of business priorities and now need to get your IT team aligned and executing. Let's play out a couple of scenarios: You go back to the sponsors, assign a business analyst and work on requirements and a project plan. Once requirements are largely stable, you then look at

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-63236491052934346392010-01-04T09:30:00.002-05:002010-01-04T09:32:32.776-05:00

Several CIOs questioned my last post and why The Most Important Job of the CIO is to Negotiate with the Business  and not collaboration or partnership?  So before I get into how CIOs can establish credibility, let me elaborate a bit on my last post. My rationale on negotiation before collaboration is quite simple: Before you can collaborate and have a true partnership between Business and

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-20882983877301493422009-12-22T07:10:00.001-05:002009-12-22T07:21:51.165-05:00

I was having a discussion today with a colleague about the role of a business unit CIO and told him quite definitively:The Most Important Job of the CIO is to Negotiate with the Businessand to be successful, the CIO should aim to spend 50-75% of his or her time working directly with the Business at all levels of the organization.My rationale is quite simple. I've never been in a business that has

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-5846727236901528762009-12-08T08:45:00.000-05:002009-12-08T11:19:27.343-05:00

li {margin: .8em 0}What do we mean about failing early, failing fast, failing often, or failing cheap? Why is "failing" a good, positive outcome for some features, agile projects or agile delivery? Why is it needed for innovation?Failure was once an absolute outcome. You either succeeded or failed in your business, your project or your investment. Once something was marked as a failure, it was

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-67162505342572676852009-12-03T08:00:00.000-05:002009-12-03T09:04:46.292-05:00

li {margin: .8em 0}So what will save the media industry? John Byrne's assessment of the issues are dead on1) Print advertising will never come back. There are just too many options for advertisers today and too much pressure on rates. Sadly, success in print will be measured in single-digit declines, forever. 2) Online advertising will never offset those declines nor save print. There’s far too

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-57782050833237657902009-11-30T23:15:00.002-05:002009-12-01T11:52:37.761-05:00

Today was my last full day heading technology at BusinessWeek (or CIO as my superiors acknowledge).I’m very proud of the BusinessWeek Technology Team’s accomplishments during my tenure. Some of our product accomplishments have been very public. We launched, Business Exchange, a social platform for business professionals. If you haven’t checked out this platform then I encourage you to spend some

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-71901100519346063722009-11-17T08:30:00.000-05:002009-11-17T09:05:12.858-05:00

li {margin: .8em 0}Lots of companies these days are focused on innovation and idea generation. In fact, one of the major reasons CIOs are backing Enterprise 2.0 is to provide tools to the entire distributed organization for idea capture, collaboration, and ranking. Here are some of my tips on fostering "useful" idea generation so that the organization can implement the best ideas:Communicate the

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-88821409435867408512009-11-03T08:07:00.001-05:002009-11-03T15:01:22.189-05:00

How should Enterprises fill the Scrum Master Role?I field this question very often and especially from members of technology organizations where agile and scrum in particular is being introduced top down from Management. I've blogged a bit on Product Owners in the Enterprise and Why Project Managers are still needed, but what about Scrum Masters?Some ThoughtsHere's how this question surfaced over

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-83606611165558230122009-10-27T08:30:00.000-04:002009-12-08T00:03:55.276-05:00

What's wrong with these two pictures?a) A product manager is working on the latest strategic initiative. She's researching competition, finding opportunities in the marketplace, considering price points, sizing up the revenue potential and evaluating vendors. She may even narrow down the list of vendors to an optimal one or two, and if she's really dangerous, will determine exactly what's needed

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-5329604278060828472009-10-16T09:50:00.006-04:002009-10-16T12:38:14.566-04:00

There have been many articles this week on Bloomberg's acquisition of BusinessWeek. Linked below are a couple of my favorite quotes; a small testament to an innovative digital team that has launched a unique social media product Business Exchange and has completed several forward thinking upgrades to BusinessWeek.comWill BusinessWeek bring social media to Bloomberg?That's because BusinessWeek,

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-91634697159457381492009-10-12T09:02:00.001-04:002009-10-16T08:56:52.323-04:00

I wanted to follow up my post on the Top 5 Reasons Why Agile Development Spurs Innovation with a little more detail.We used to think of product development as one fundamental question; Build vs. Buy. Once a product was conceptualized, a search was conducted to find the most suitable software solutions and a feature point analysis was completed. An engineering team was only brought in to evaluate

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-80004223299924719182009-10-08T12:19:00.002-04:002009-10-08T12:20:34.710-04:00

Keeping social networks up and running is no easy task. Today's casualty, Twitter is down again. I suspect that their engineers are in the "war room" thinking about what the root cause is and resolving it quickly. Perhaps it's another denial of service (DoS) attack.Why are performance issues hard on social networking sites? A few reasons:Content sites are easy to cache. Social networks have

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-59747248201643178302009-10-06T09:05:00.000-04:002009-10-06T09:06:02.877-04:00

Developers need cloud development environments? Why? Bottom line, developers need more than one development environment, and they need cost effective, agile ways to manage their development environments. Consider the following cases:You branch your source code and need multiple environments to validate changesYou are in the middle of testing a software upgrade, configuration change, or

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-35499967653521965832009-09-29T09:10:00.000-04:002009-09-29T09:10:42.936-04:00

Last week, I was able to attend two IT executive conferences - the TCS Summit and Telwares Global CIO Forum. At both shows, I was given the opportunity to present my views on innovation, agile development, and enterprise 2.0 and also highlight BusinessWeek's social media product for business professionals, Business Exchange.Here are some of my notes on what CIOs are saying and doing in Enterprise

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-87681660930585899152009-08-24T22:36:00.004-04:002009-08-24T23:07:32.574-04:00

After yet another bad experience at a bricks and mortar this weekend, I pondered - what would life be like if the percentages were reverse and we did the majority of our purchases online instead of the store?If you asked that question even a year ago, there would be plenty of naysayers listing every item that's difficult to purchase without seeing the real product. Shoes, perishable items, high

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-85053756603727850672009-08-18T16:20:00.005-04:002009-08-18T16:29:49.835-04:00

Well, a bit of 24 hours a fame as I've been honored as the Business Exchange featured user today and am featured on the Business Week home page. Some of my important topics are Agile Software Development and Enterprise 2.0, or you can also check out my Business Exchange profile.

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-10293092035289262182009-07-14T08:51:00.004-04:002009-07-14T14:43:45.286-04:00

I've seen some good posts covering Chrome OS and now Microsoft on SaaS enabling Office. These can emerge as disruptive innovations especially to small businesses and students. Google is challenging Microsoft as the OS of choice for notebooks or said another way, we've got it all wrong and it's not about replacing the OS on PC'sSo if all you want to do is get online to browse the Web, check email,

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-8015571759784476262009-07-10T12:49:00.000-04:002009-12-08T00:03:55.277-05:00

I’ll get straight to the point, there are several reasons, and I’m going to focus this post on one primary reason. It goes like thisAgile is optimized when there is a single product owner that can own and prioritize the backlog.In an enterprise, there are multiple stakeholders often with different priorities and different (sometime conflicting) needs around specific enhancements.Enhancements

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-80995063147831317672009-07-05T22:28:00.004-04:002009-07-05T22:43:55.096-04:00

Agile Product Development: Why incremental development is better - Very interesting analysis on ROI, #agile vs waterfall. I'm going to need to review the tool/mathAgile Techniques, Agile Hype and the Essence of Agile [in IT and Business] - "Agile philosophy drives a new paradigm of cooperation between IT and business"8 Challenges To Address For A Successful Transition To Agile - A really good

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-26180757923437381852009-06-30T09:21:00.000-04:002009-06-30T09:21:55.934-04:00

It's been an interesting couple of months, so I thought I'd update readers of this blog on some exciting newsFirst, BusinessWeek.com relaunched its home page last week. As I tweeted last week, this project has been another success story on implementing the agile lifecycle in an enterprise. I can't disclose too much of the technology secrets behind this page, but what I can say is that we didn't

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-3613018841405054222009-06-23T09:34:00.000-04:002009-12-08T00:03:55.278-05:00

Following an agile software development process does not guarantee innovation, but following this development process does increase the odds of teams producing more innovation and innovative solutions. The list below illustrate elements of the agile processes that increase the likelihood of innovation:1) Agile development encourages cross functional teams and direct, frequent communication with

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-22125319148244040422009-06-09T08:20:00.000-04:002009-12-08T00:03:55.279-05:00

As you saw from my last post, I’m fairly bearish when it comes to maturity models. In many cases, maturity models are just tools used by consultants and sales engineers selling expensive ‘how to’ guides to senior IT executives. But even discounting these out, maturity models are guides to help managers size up their current processes, identify gaps, and leverage ‘off the shelf’ processes to gain

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-8007917632606019532009-06-02T08:55:00.000-04:002009-06-02T08:57:15.869-04:00

This post, Does Agile Need Its Own Process Maturity Model caught my attention. Now there's nothing wrong with the article or some of the concepts, but I feel compelled to throw in my two cents on maturity models in general and especially applied to agile software development.In general, I've only seen maturity models used in one way - to sell enterprise executives either software or services.

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-86587059165010995512009-05-27T18:10:00.000-04:002009-05-27T18:16:06.437-04:00

When Amazon Web Services came out with S3 and EC2, I was skeptical even though I was and continue to be a strong proponent of SaaS. Why would I buy hosting from a large internet retailer when there are so many companies offering inexpensive hosting models?One year later, I began using S3 via JungleDisk at home as a way to backup my hundreds of gigabytes of photos.Then a couple of weeks ago, I saw

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-1543873461405074692009-04-28T09:40:00.000-04:002009-04-28T09:41:05.612-04:00

I am from one of the last generations of ritual NY Times Sunday edition readers. I have fond memories of taking the tree with me to parks and beaches during the summertime to read the magazine and many of the other sections. I even found my first out of college jobs from a help wanted ad in the Times that my wife (then girlfriend) mailed to me while finishing grad school at the University of

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-29780457279144383642009-04-16T10:00:00.000-04:002009-04-16T10:00:59.774-04:00

See Business Responsibilities working with Agile Teams Part 1 where I cover some important responsibilities: Dedicating time to define requirements, setting reasonable customer expectations, and developing a methodology for prioritizing.The list below is a bit more tactical and technical:1) Learn the lingo and the process - Don't look at agile as a 'tech process'. When I discuss agile to business

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-11395497026955403542009-04-10T09:11:00.001-04:002009-04-10T09:11:32.573-04:00

I enjoy talking to General Managers, Product Managers, and other members of a business teams about the benefits of going agile. Their eyes light up when I talk about the basics. They get to see completed product at the end of each iteration, get the ability to change priorities and requirements, and there is minimal up front work developing requirements. They 'get it' - speed to market and the

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-17775485730628722562009-03-26T00:03:00.000-04:002009-03-26T00:04:42.375-04:00

I've been asked lately about the role of project managers on agile or SCRUM teams. While project managers can perform specific roles within the team, they often perform functions that go beyond the scope of an agile team's direct responsibilities. Some specifics:Scrum and agile are very team and inward facing. Project managers help manage all the external dependencies including vendors, suppliers

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-69572849936967020962009-03-18T00:02:00.000-04:002009-03-17T22:30:56.178-04:00

I just returned from Chennai, India where I had the pleasure of working with a relatively small team of developers. We started working with them a year ago with the simple goal of getting one project completed for Business Exchange. Over the course of the year, we've tripled the size of the team and now have several teams practicing agile development similar to how we do it on site.Myth: You

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-54544090488929093542009-02-23T08:39:00.000-05:002009-02-23T08:39:43.899-05:00

My colleagues and I from BusinessWeek gave a presentation last week covering our agile planning and development process and ended with an intro to SCRUM by @silviogalea. Roughly the same time, @jurgenappelo posted an excellent, easy to follow slideshare on The Zen of SCRUM 1.0. Here are my top takeaways (no particular order) from these presentations plus some of my own thoughts:1) Organizations

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-88072803263703793592009-02-12T22:38:00.002-05:002009-02-12T22:44:41.901-05:00

Ask some CTO’s about how their product scales and they’ll whip out a logical diagram showing you redundant networks, redundant firewalls, load balancers, clustered application servers, redundant databases, and SAN storage. If you’re lucky they’ll tell you about their software stack and then throw in a bit about their software development life cycle.If this is how your SaaS vendor responds to

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-85861858126753301712009-02-08T21:10:00.003-05:002009-02-08T21:35:13.550-05:00

I really like this post Agile Product Owner and Agile Product Manager in the Enterprise that highlights the organizational issue of trying to staff agile product owners in the enterprise's technology organization. Staffed this way, product owners are bound to contend with product managers because their responsibilities somewhat overlap. On the other hand, trying to get a product manager to take

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-20940393968655340872009-02-03T21:30:00.003-05:002009-02-03T21:45:05.260-05:00

For those of you who don’t know, I was CTO of a SaaS vendor a number of years ago. In addition to building a SaaS platform (back then in 1996 when we started we were an ASP – application service provider), we acquired and merged with a number of other SaaS companies. Part of my job was to evaluate the viability of the SaaS company's technology platform and operations. So I have a few things to

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-41272191007052498302009-01-27T00:01:00.000-05:002009-01-27T00:02:13.701-05:00

I was disappointed with last weeks eWeek articles covering SaaS reliability. They covered KITE for measuring reliability, but did not cover similar offerings such as Gomez or Siteseer. Their top 10 things you should know now about SaaS read like a bunch of scare tactics; is it really cost effective, can they maintain SLAs, is the vendor viable - all real, legitimate concerns, but somewhat an

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-25666778336870277512009-01-20T21:15:00.001-05:002009-01-20T21:19:02.953-05:00

I got some questions about my tweet from last week on 4th down audibles and pulling goalies. Here's what I meant in more detail...When you start an iteration, the team makes some best estimates on what can be accomplished in an iteration. The estimates are partially based on effort, but also based on risk. When a story's implementation requires familiar technologies, developers will often rate it

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-29236334092775313352009-01-14T23:40:00.008-05:002009-01-15T00:21:55.468-05:00

I expect that there will be a boom in storage device and services for the home market over the next couple of years. People are already consuming larger amounts of disk for audio, video, and images. With larger storage needs, backing up onto CD's or DVD's becomes more cumbersome. At the same time trends show that people are upgrading their PC's less frequently. The result is that they are

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-35865155097071948292009-01-05T22:48:00.012-05:002009-01-08T00:18:44.086-05:00

I have to admit, but when I first heard about Twitter I thought it was a tool for the young and well connected. Instead of text'ing friends individually, a college student could Tweet her thoughts and let her friends know what clubs and parties to attend that evening.Boy, was I wrong.Then the bloggers and social media enthusiasts picked it up. PR picked it up. And today I saw to what extent

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-3639701897237072962009-01-05T08:33:00.000-05:002009-01-05T08:34:23.230-05:00

Looking back to 2008, I shifted this blog from covering startups and issues for CTOs (re: Startup CTO) and covered a lot about the agile software development life cycle. Having moved from a small company, to a startup, and then to an enterprise, much of what I wrote covered agile in the enterprise. Some titles included big questions enterprises should consider before going agile, ingredients on

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-33971849469921284892008-12-29T15:05:00.001-05:002008-12-29T15:12:33.676-05:00

Instituting the agile development life cycle in an enterprise requires technology talent. I made this statement in Getting Enterprises Executives to buy into an Agile Development Lifecycle. Here are my top 5 attributes of talented agile developers and what I meant by 'technology talent':1. Agile thinkers are fast thinkers. They solve problems quickly and look for easy solutions. They are not

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-28293085790827654122008-12-04T00:02:00.001-05:002008-12-04T00:06:01.313-05:00

What happens when an Enterprise wants to 'go agile'?One of the beauties of agile is in its name. Who doesn't want to be agile? Can you imagine CIO of X Enterprise saying he or she doesn't want their IT departments to be agile? Agile proponents did themselves a favor adopting the generic 'agile development' to represent processes like SCRUM, Extreme Programming, etc.But enterprises have a few

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-33303303129099847922008-11-24T00:30:00.000-05:002008-11-24T00:37:04.126-05:00

People have asked me, "how do you get executive buy in on moving a department or team to an agile development software lifecycle"? The answer isn't straightforward, but I feel it largely depends on three key elements:The business drivers on investment or change in the software delivery modelOrganizational dynamics and cultureTalent in the technology organizationWhen people have talked to me about

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-12126977538593111322008-11-18T23:18:00.005-05:002008-11-18T23:35:30.291-05:00

As technologists, we all know bad customer service and poorly designed IT systems when we see them. Folks, that's exactly what I saw last Thursday night when I flied from Newark to Charlotte on Continental Airlines. Flights were delayed due to weather and I went to have my flight changed to an earlier flight. Here's what I went through:Went on the customer service line. Waited five minutes. Agent

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-3456840903180450662008-11-13T00:19:00.007-05:002008-11-24T00:59:26.717-05:00

Here is the presentation I gave at Mark Logic's Digital Publishing Summit last week:Achieving Content Agility in a Web 2.0 EnvironmentView SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: agile web2.0)

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-9998072548843287722008-11-06T22:34:00.004-05:002008-11-06T22:59:39.014-05:00

Thanks to Dave Kellogg for inviting me to speak at this year's Mark Logic Digital Publishing Summit. I spoke about how the publishing industry is at a crossroads:Traditional media faces revenue challengesWeb 2.0 startups challenged, short runway on funding, needs to become cash positiveMany technology options for web 2.0, contentXML publishing technologies matureAgile processes become ‘enterprise

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-25097101600229292432008-10-30T07:01:00.000-04:002008-10-30T07:06:59.096-04:00

Next week, I will be speaking at the Mark Logic Digital Publishing Summit on the topic Achieving Content Agility in a Web 2.0 Environment. The timing is impeccable as the NY Times Mourns Old Media Decline covering layoffs at Time and Gannett among other cutbacks in newspapers and magazines. Business Exchange has topics on Newspaper Revenue, Newspaper Companies and the Magazine Industry covering

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-75756480105574295032008-10-15T22:43:00.005-04:002008-10-15T23:15:50.916-04:00

I gave a short talk today to a group of VPs and CIOs on the nature of Agile. In a true startup, it's very easy for the team to adopt agile. But in an enterprise, agile development is a relatively new software lifecycle. Only recently, maybe the last few years has the agile community established best practices and methodologies that can apply to development performed in larger companies.In

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-73148470380002671422008-09-23T22:16:00.005-04:002008-09-23T22:49:27.409-04:00

As I read all the news on the G1 Android, it reminds me of the platform wars (Windows vs Unix) and the browser wars (Netscape vs Microsoft and now Microsoft vs Firefox vs Chrome). Mobile is truly maturing into a competitive environment for application delivery and today's battlefield clearly is IPhone vs. Blackberry vs. Android.I'm not an expert in mobile technology, but I am intrigued on how all

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-24415609918803466672008-09-18T23:02:00.009-04:002008-09-19T00:04:49.382-04:00

Just over a year ago, I joined BusinessWeek to lead the technology efforts around a new product called Business Exchange. One year and many agile development cycles later, the product is live and gaining activity.Business Exchange started with a simple vision statement. Aggregate content from business oriented sources, organize them into business topics that users can create, and prioritize the

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-18071811092615671992008-09-07T22:27:00.003-04:002008-09-07T22:52:19.334-04:00

More and more teams and companies are considering agile processes, SCRUM, Extreme, or hybrids to either pilot new initiatives or to establish the practice. Unfortunately, adopting agile is often sponsored by the Development Team and they can easily underestimate the organizational changes and boundaries needed for success. Below are seven key ingredients to kicking off a successful agile

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-50353867578463269262008-09-01T22:01:00.003-04:002008-09-01T22:18:39.866-04:00

Back in January, we had one team at BusinessWeek practicing agile software development. The team was successful completing iterations, demoing to stakeholders, and releasing product to a growing audience.We then needed to scale. We added a second team and a third team offshore. We segmented the work so that there was minimal overlap between teams. Things got a little more complicated because we

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-56516249557066629742008-07-15T22:32:00.004-04:002008-07-15T22:41:19.893-04:00

I'm always looking for good articles describing real security issues on Web 2.0 sites. Web 2.0: Communication, Collaboration -- and Danger is a really good read. Good quotes below if you don’t have the time to read through the article.Application layer technology can be expensive and hard to implement, however:…finds it appalling that 97 percent of organizations are still using packet filters as

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-51516252214359980732008-06-30T23:44:00.000-04:002008-06-30T23:44:25.675-04:00

In a traditional development practice, a product manager writes a long document describing the software requirements. Hopefully the document is diagram heavy, clear and concise. The document is handed to analysts who break the requirements down to development tasks and a project manager develops a schedule and assigns resources to tasks.In my experience, this rarely happens. In the real world,

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-33084654774752851242008-06-19T22:56:00.006-04:002008-06-19T23:40:40.431-04:00

Most agile product planning revolves around the commitment of stories to an iteration. This specifically addresses how many stories, story points, or features can be completed in an iteration. Stories are estimated in points and a team's velocity is measured as the total number of successfully completed story points in an iteration. If the velocity is consistent, the team can estimate the stories

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-3711300704485260042008-06-10T22:24:00.004-04:002008-06-10T22:51:39.899-04:00

When a CIO, development manager, or a team decides to 'go agile', what does this mean for other colleagues that work with this team? What does it mean to Product Managers that are responsible for developing business cases and delivering product requirements? What happens if there are technical teams that are on the periphery of the core software development group such as QA teams, operations,

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-85502810226304633542008-05-05T22:44:00.004-04:002008-05-05T23:03:39.673-04:00

At a recent industry event for publishers, I sat at a table with a number of agile development leaders and we discussed the ScrumMaster role. Do you have a dedicated ScrumMaster? For the most part, the answer came back as a ‘no’ for a number of philosophical and funding reasons. Agile practitioners love to talk about roles and responsibilities. You need a product owner, largely responsible for

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-61811479310689677992008-04-18T22:45:00.004-04:002008-04-18T23:16:22.583-04:00

Several years ago right about when Extreme Programming (XP) became popular, one of the developers on a team I was managing wanted to give pair programming a try. He paired up with another programmer and went to work on some of our more complicated algorithms. I can't tell you today whether that pair produced better quality code or if they were more productive, but they certainly felt proud of

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-14919509106617714892008-02-16T08:58:00.002-05:002008-02-16T09:25:05.768-05:00

Someone recently asked me, "How do you implement load testing so early in the development process"? I thought about the question for a second before coming up with the following answer:1) Don't just say you're going to load test, do it - If you're a team lead, manager, or qa engineer it's easy to make excuses why you can't start testing early in the development process. But there are always some

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-49732805298047754642008-02-07T21:00:00.000-05:002008-02-07T21:40:05.753-05:00

I recently purchased a Sandisk e250 so that I can take advantage of Rhapsody On The Go's music subscription service. I opened the device and plugged it into my USB port thinking that I needed to charge up the device before I could use it. Unfortunately, my system churned and produced an error message "unrecognized device". With very little troubleshooting help, I was forced to call Sandisk for

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-85398891193868831142008-02-01T23:17:00.000-05:002008-02-01T23:51:26.330-05:00

Here is a typical, very simplified load testing scenario:The tester defines one or more workflows through the application and simulates them in a tool. The tool allows setting the number of virtual users, the delay between clicks, and other parameters that determine how much load to generate. The tester determines an appropriate load based on the website's metrics or projected metrics. She then

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-66580770609232145522007-10-15T21:59:00.000-04:002007-10-15T22:15:26.976-04:00

My team is currently exploring Freemarker as a web view and template language. "Jsp is overkill for what we need", "no code snippets in view code", "it supports tag libraries", "the macros are powerful" were all listed as top benefits. In addition, there is some interest in developing tests that validate the output of views.I'm scratching my head on this one. Another template language? I used

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-78544638789586856412007-09-30T09:09:00.001-04:002007-10-01T22:38:20.061-04:00

I've had two different development teams over the past couple of months try to convince me that implementing either nightly or automatic software builds is critical. Now I've been a part of many software development teams and none of them employed any of these builds. This includes a shrink wrap software package company that had a half dozen products built from a very large common code base and

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-85541542178211421972007-09-05T23:24:00.000-04:002007-09-05T23:57:11.151-04:00

Version control is a fundamental software management tool and process. If you're looking to setup a development environment for a startup, I highly recommend getting version control in place as a step 0. Even startups that have very few developers (even one!) will find long term benefits in having version control configured before development begins. In more established development teams,

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-88043887496675062122007-07-29T00:04:00.001-04:002007-07-30T23:55:01.662-04:00

Php, Perl, Ruby, Java, or .Net. Many startups kickoff with one or two engineers and will often pick 'the best' technology stack, or just the one that they want to work on. The latest greatest framework.It's my blog, so I get to be biased. I've seen about two dozen different startup environments. Not a huge number, but not a small number either. So my opinions are largely based on what I've seen

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-58951650554979745382007-07-09T11:27:00.000-04:002007-07-09T14:54:37.709-04:00

Are you a Linux guy or Windows? Java, .Net, or LAMP? Or are you a Ruby gal?These questions dominate the early discussions in a startup's technology. Yes, this is a very important question because once you start investing in a development platform it becomes costly and complex to switch or even upgrade. So for a startup, choosing the development technologies is pretty much a permanent decision

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-581326017270873372007-06-25T11:32:00.000-04:002007-06-25T12:29:43.279-04:00

Eweek has a great title, Is Open Source Dying? that's sure to get lots of people clicking. But the article's title should really read Is Open Source Hard To Implement For Government Institutions? They are the only examples provided in this article of organizations having trouble implementing open source.I expect that large organizations will continue to have trouble implementing open source

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-43350374144009657842007-06-07T08:05:00.000-04:002007-10-16T22:25:16.228-04:00

Below are five tips on using Facebook's API. These techniques were all used in TripConnect's Travel Profile Application that allows Facebook users to add a travel interests to their Facebook profile. I know they work in this app, but they may not be the perfect solutions.The first two tips are specific to the JAVA kit. The others are more general.1) Installation - I saw several posts in the

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-11423037902240340102007-06-05T08:59:00.001-04:002008-11-13T02:00:58.809-05:00

On May 24, Facebook officially released its Developer API. It's probably one of the first (and definitely one of the biggest communities) to open a social network up to the development community. It's also a sharp contrast to MySpace's tactics in blocking widgets (See: MySpace security measure disables viral spread of widgets).At first, I thought it was just a proprietary widget API. In fact,

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-41448730834155802722007-05-22T08:37:00.000-04:002007-05-22T09:39:01.527-04:00

In my last post, I provided some tools to help estimate the overhead in software development. The basic formula goes like this:The business plan should project a budget and desired time line for the alpha release.Subtract out some fixed costs for hardware, software systems, databases and components.Subtract out ramp up time needed to complete the software requirements, hire the development team,

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-58073231124769918042007-05-07T09:17:00.000-04:002007-05-07T22:53:11.047-04:00

In my last post, I suggested that startups plan their alpha release as a fixed cost software project. The budget is somewhat easy to work out off the business plan. You basically need to answer to fundamental questions: When does the product need to launch and how much can you afford to spend on your initial product?With those two variables as fixed, you now have to consider several scenarios to

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-28057210349687953032007-04-24T18:53:00.000-04:002007-04-24T19:08:45.030-04:00

In my last entry, I discussed the basics of software project estimation and some simplifications that may exist in a startup. But the underlying point of the entry was to illustrate why estimating the development time on a startup’s alpha product release can be flawed. The bottom line is, estimates require detailed requirements, managed scope changes, and accurate effort estimations – things that

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-50420545747850677522007-04-10T12:35:00.000-04:002007-04-10T16:23:47.029-04:00

From What Really Happened At JetBlue"While most other airlines cancelled dozens of flights in preparation for the storm, JetBlue management opted to wait it out. The airline's policy is do to whatever it can to ensure a flight is completed, even if it means waiting for several hours""[passengers] had only one option to rebook their flights: call the JetBlue reservation office. The Navitaire

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-33395344230092049022007-04-09T15:32:00.000-04:002007-04-09T15:37:33.783-04:00

In my last StartUp CTO post, I talked about the need to build an initial development plan. To start, I suggested a very simplified framework whereby screens and functional components are itemized. In the best of situations, the features are given some type of priority. Sometimes that is done using versions (this feature can wait till version X), Must/Should/Could categorizations, or some

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10332387.post-9639123133739556242007-04-03T13:40:00.000-04:002007-04-03T15:59:54.021-04:00

Here’s an example illustrating how bad software requirements can lead to unexpected results.I was searching the web for a simple algorithm. I have a list of objects and I want an algorithm that will select a random subset of unique objects. No dupes. In my search, I found a forum post with this similar question: > how do i write a java program that prints a list of 4> sets of numbers each

Isaac Sacolickhttps://profiles.google.com/109747073147504760416noreply@blogger.com1