SupraDigit Solutions

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

"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”— Steve Jobs Everybody loves to avoid a disaster, but there is a “proactive” effort to do activities that can prevent a disaster from happening. Most of the executives do not want to “get involved” in such “proactive” efforts, simply due to the love of fixing urgencies Or having a mindset that it’s not important.   I remember, when once I was working with the Quality Assurance team on a product. The development team simply refused to spend efforts on the most essential “unit testing” for their developed components! The intent was to release the software to the QA team as soon as possible and focus more on so-called “core development”. Over the years, looking at multitude of projects failing in-spite of highly experienced resources, reasonable time and the intent, I have uncovered that, prevention is the “Most Important” and “Ignored” part of software development. Why should we

A Test Strategy is created to guide all teams on steps to achieve software quality objectives. With software companies adopting agile practices in a big way, an effective Test Strategy becomes even more important with iterative / sprint-based application development. A test strategy being a live document, should ideally plan to integrate the business, development, testing, and management teams, define the quality objectives for the intended application and chart-out a path on how all the teams can help achieve these. The test owner and the team can build an effective test strategy with these 4 best-practices: A)   Focus on Prevention – Helps avoid major issues and rework on projects. ü Prioritize requirements and business rules. ü   Communicate changes in priorities immediately and effectively to important project stakeholders. ü Strictly review and implement common require

“Why do we never have the time to do it right the first time, but always have time to do it over and over after the first time?” – Anonymous  Quality is something that happens at every stage of Software Development! When I talk about Software Quality, almost everyone in the Information Technology world thinks about “Software Testing”. Unfortunately, this is a myopic view of Quality as a specific team effort and not as something, that should be embedded and part of the complete Software Development Life Cycle! Quality can be defined and need not be an “ambiguous term” for an organization. For any software, quality is more aptly seen from a view of what the customers considers as ‘Quality’. Although, this is not the only way to consider ‘Quality’. Quality must be seen from the viewpoint of ALL stakeholders involved with the product. Apart from this, ‘Quality’ should be considered as everybody’s res