SupraDigit Solutions

When I was a quality manager in my earlier job in an MNC (Multi-National Company), a lot of my team members were quite misinformed about the “Power of Verification” in a software development process. I went through a lot of reflection around my own experience working on multiple projects related to doing “software verification” exercises. I gained profound understanding of how organizations can gain immense benefit just by understanding the true power of this activity (if done correctly). For the uninitiated, let me give a brief understanding about what “Verification” means. As part of ensuring quality of any software, the whole development process can be split into 2 simple parts – Verification & Validation To put this simply, “Verification” is always done before software code is developed & “Validation” is always done post development of software code. A “Verification” activity means, doing detailed analysis and reviews for – Customer Requirements Software Architectur

A decade back, when I was working on a huge enterprise program (with multiple projects) along with a big team (of close to 300 people), we were a group of managers who were evaluated and pushed by the senior management to “proactively” deal with issues and to work on finding new solutions. I used to think of how - we can become “proactive”, when we were already focusing our efforts on fighting our daily “fires” or urgencies of our project work. When I delved deeper into our daily work habits, it struck me that till the time we are not excited about “getting things done”, the willingness to explore more out of our comfort zone just doesn’t happen. The innate human behaviour is to follow a routine and establish a comfort zone over a period. The 1st factor – “an external stimulus” can upset us and force us to think or act out of our comfort zone.  The 2nd factor that can make us “move” out of our comfort zones is about having an excitement of a future or coming up with a vision th

In the last 8-10 years, I must have spent innumerable hours on the internet trying to figure out the cause of procrastination and lost productivity for my own tasks simply due to binging on social media and YouTube. I read many blogs, posts, videos by various celebrities, influencers on this and today, I do have a revelation to make specifically on the “ability to focus” . With greater access to huge amounts of information and specifically the well-made marketing videos that very easily draw our attention on the internet, I have found that our current generation is losing our abilities to “stay focused” for a longer duration of time. Let me elaborate this a bit with the levels of impact on the way we do things and the ways in which we expect things to happen: Different Expectations: Our expectations have changed with people we get in touch with, to give us immediate information or in a very short span of time. Less Patience: Our ability to “wait” (and / or being “patient”) with

When I was studying in class 10 th , I asked my English teacher a very basic question about why two words in English sound the same but mean different. That time, we never had a separate subject on “phonetics” and I was quite unaware of this part of the English subject then. She smiled and very smartly told me that – “English is a ‘funny’ language” and went away! I was amused by her answer the whole time. Only later I learnt that in English there are so many words with a spelling, that are used “as per the context” to mean different than their similar sounding words with a different spelling. In quality assurance and in general in project management, many testers and project managers make the same mistake with a misunderstanding and confusing these 2 words – “Metrics” and “Matrix”. They use them interchangeably! Metrics in the quality management context means “to measure” (check its meaning here - https://www.dictionary.com/browse/metric) and … Matrix has different meanings based o

"Do not judge me by my successes; judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again." ― Nelson Mandela When I started my career in the software engineering field 2 decades back, the only way to achieve success in my mind was – to do “hard-work”. From initial experience, I started believing, that it was not “hard-work”, but “smart-work”. I have been blessed, as I got opportunities to work with some of the best project managers and leadership teams. I was told, that “smart-work” combined with being flexible and taking new initiatives can take you to greater heights. I have been successful in following these mantras in corporate career, but then I faced a new dilemma. It took me many years to realize, that in-spite of my good programming experience, my daily-work (mostly managerial) was taking me away from understanding the core issues of my team members. My understanding of team-member real problems was no where near to what they were truly facing! I saw my leader

[U]sability exists in the experience of the person. If the person experiences a system as usable, it is. A commitment to designing for people means that, at base, we must accept their judgement as the final criterion for usability […] The starting point for usability engineering must be the uncovering of user experience. - Whiteside and Nixon, 1987  ( Understanding UX ) UI (User-Interface) design and UX (User Experience) in the software world is a hot market today, as gradually many organizations have started “experiencing” the need for it. A few years back, when I was tasked to find and evaluate the best recruitment software by my team, it opened my eyes to this most amazing thing about ‘User Experience’. At the end of my task, the only software application I could recommend was with the ‘best’ user-experience. We had a constraint on how much we wanted to spend, but at the same time, we also wanted to save time of a team member – which became even more important. When we evaluated t

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” - by John Quincy Adams True Leadership… The Best Leader… The Star Leader… A Leader is Not a Manager… Leading from Behind… and the list just goes on for ‘being the best leader’ phrases. “True leadership” is hard to find. What makes it ‘hard’? Few years back, I used to work in a big program having 300+ human resources. I was one of the youngest project managers. I was looked upon by my team as a role-model on assertive leadership and a can-do attitude. This made me proud, but I later realized failure to understand the pulse of my team. I also went through a 360-degree leadership assessment during this period. I got my anonymous review comments (from my team) as part of this assessment. The feedback comments reflected how I was popular in driving my own agenda, rather than resolving my team issues. In a few years down the line, I managed a much smaller team of 5, where I also worked as

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off. - Franklin D. Roosevelt In today’s world order, the word “competition” has taken far reaching meanings and consequences. When we are born, our parents compare our growth and behavior with other kids. As we grow-up and join a school, our teachers compare, teach and behave in perspectives of competition. Human perspective itself is formed out of wanting others to be like their own selves and then behaving accordingly. This may not be true of all but for majority, it is a definite case. Competition doesn’t end here. When we get a job, appraisals are done based on “competition” again (with the famous or infamous bell-curve technique). When we become parents, we again want our kids to compete. Most of us, also look at life as a competition with our neighbours or relatives accrued wealth, or it could be with that of a

Let me tell you… This has been my favourite subject of all! Not that I may want to do research in psychology but understanding people and how they behave so differently in different situations - just puts me in awe! So… What is EQ? A very nicely written post from psychcentral ( Psych Central Link ) aptly explains EQ as well as its 5 categories (or components), which are – Self-awareness Self-regulation Motivation Empathy Social Skills With even more detail, positivepsychologyprogram ( Positive Psychology Program Link ) provides even more details with the 4 dimensions of EQ, which for ‘emotions’ are – Perceiving Using Understanding Managing For further exploration on EQ, starting with Wikipedia ( Wikipedia Link ) is a great idea, since it also talks about the 3 models of Emotional Intelligence (or also referred to as EQ). The above 5 categories are coming from the “Mixed Model”. I am quite influenced by the ‘Mixed Model’ than other models. It is much more comprehensive and connect

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. One begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. -           A Scandal in Bohemia - from Sherlock Holmes series of Arthur Conan Doyle Yeah… I understand… The IT development, software testers (and other teams) may want to emphasize their importance as well here, but trust me… I am not comparing the Business Analysts job across teams! 😊 Below are few of the most important work attributes for a business analyst (software development): Networking Capabilities – The ability to establish connects with the customer (first), management and the development team members. o    Connect with customers to establish trust in organizations capabilities o    Connect with team members to understand best practices and common features, which can be explained to a customer, to again establish greater amount of trust. Requirements Elicitation and Negotiation  – The ability to elicit requirements with limited

Trust is built on credibility, and credibility comes from acting in others’ interests before your own. - Stephen Denny (Killing Giants) Effective communication – has been a buzzword in corporate circles for a long time now. I used to ask my team members… What do you think, is the meaning of effective communication? I used to get varied answers, such as – ‘the ability to read, write and speak English (or other languages) effectively’ or ‘the ability to clearly understand another person’s point-of-view’ or ‘the ability to concisely put or share your points across’ and so on… Communication is a subject, where not only our intelligence, but emotions as well, are deeply involved. We are amazing creatures on this amazing planet! Our bodies give out subtle signals, for others to create multitude of interpretations. It just puts me in awe about how, people try to interpret unsaid words / logic / thoughts of others by just looking at them! My write-up is not to share my ideas about effective co

Creativity thrives when managers let people decide how to climb a mountain; they needn’t, however, let employees choose which one. - From this article ( HBR article ) The word urgency has become synonymous with the daily work of so many corporates today. I am referring this, not to degrade the importance of urgency, but to understand how the ‘false sense’ and ‘frequency’ of urgency impacts everybody and the organization. The worst impact is on the product and / or services. In almost 2 decades of my career life, I have seen innumerable instances, whereby corporates just love managing things on fire… not for a few days in a year, but almost every now and then. This creates a belief in the minds of majority of employees, that something worth doing has to be defined as urgent! Such beliefs create “belief systems”, which in turn creates the appropriate organization culture. As rightly said by Mr. Martin Zwilling ( Martin Zwilling's Blog )… “Many confuse the Sense of Urgency with a S