Using Groovy and Grails for Product Development

Posted by Rob James | Posted in General News, Software, Start Ups | Posted on 29-04-2009-05-2008

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I was recently interviewed for the IndicThreads website around my thought of using Groovy and Grails as the language and platform to develop a product on. I am a strong believer in this, and although there may have been some initial resistance, I encouraged the team to use it to develop Aegeon‘s flagship product Spaceo.us on.

The main benefits you get from are that you are actually developing on a robust base, being Java (Grails is Spring & Hibernate under the covers) and you are able to focus on building product functionality than writing plumbing code.

Read more about my thoughts in the interview.

Settle Down, Its only Twitter!!!

Posted by Rob James | Posted in Featured Articles, General News, Start Ups | Posted on 23-04-2009-05-2008

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After the BeachMeet earlier this week, there seems to be a whole lot of contreversy that followed. Secret agendas, PR overkill and blame games all round. So I have to say; GET OVER IT PEOPLE, ITS ONLY TWITTER FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!

If you missed it, the other day I blogged about my experience at BeachMeet. And guess what? I had a good time, met some new & interesting people, and felt that there was intelligent discussion going on with the people that were there. The participants and panalysts were not all experts in the field, but hey, who the hell is? The twitterati that are making all this after-noise? I think not…..

But the bottom line is, its just twitter guys, settle down. No reason to get so heated up over a 140 character tool :-)

The reaction frome some people is much like the reaction I have previously seen when someone underground indy band goes commerical; “You sold out dude!”. I don’t get why people are being so protective.

Look, don’t get me wrong, I though the PR was overkill that day, but if I ever need to get PR guys, I am not going past Mark Communications! Mark is da man!

Anyway, I have been sitting on the sidelines reading all the stories and hearing all the noise, but thought I was time to get my thoughts out. So before anyone starts flaming me; don’t bother, I’m not that passionate about it (I am writing this post with a smirk on my face).

What type of Twitterers are you Following?

Posted by Rob James | Posted in Innovation, Software, Start Ups | Posted on 22-04-2009-05-2008

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In a previous post I categorised twitter users into 3 groups; community, broadcaster & marketer. The relevance of this is when you are picking user to follow.

Most users, when they sign up to twitter, are aspiring to be part of a community. This includes broadcasters and marketers, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will all be part of a community. And the communities are created and identified by the relationships, which are the people you are following, and those that are following you.

As a rule of thumb, you will probably find that 85% of people that you follow will be community driven, 10% will be broadcasters and the last 5% are marketers. Now, this is not set in stone, but this trend I have seen from most twitter users that I have spoken to.

You will decide what type of communities you want to be part of, and that is defined by the tweets (yours and theirs). You may want to be engage with people that have interests in pets or model planes, or business related such as other professionals like yourself. You may want to find other motorcycle riders, or more specifically Harley Davidson owners. Or possibly, all of them. These are all communities based upon what they discuss. But once again, within these communities, you will find marketers and broadcasters.

So you have to decide then, apart from the interesting people you want to follow, what else is of interest to you? Firstly broadcasters. You may be interested in following CNN or New York Times for breaking news. Or you may find twitterers that broadcast for very specific things that you are interested in, such as model plane events, or motorcycle news. Remember that Twitter is first and foremost a communications tool, so you can follow anyone and anything that interests you, and as I have said on multiple occasions, in my opinion, broadcasters are a good thing on twitter. They provide an accessible channel for me to get my information. I am using less RSS feeds and relying more on twitter these days.

Some of you are going to be surprise that I included 5% of marketers in my mix. Remembering that marketers can be engaging as well, but their purpose of engagement is to sell you something. But there is a side effect that occurs here. Firstly, to be engaging, marketers need to do something to ‘engage’ you. And this is usually by providing information that may be of value. Secondly, you may be interested in this marketer and their product, so you may want to know the next time they have a special offer, because that is your time to buy.

As an example, many book authors are on twitter, and they are trying to flog their books. This is an interesting one, as you will find that if the topic they are writing on is of interest to you, so the information they provide to encourage other users to follow them may be of value. Finally, I have seen some of these authors give away e-books on twitter, and this may be exactly what you are after. Generally, I don’t think there is going to a lot of marketers in your mix (5% tops), but as you see there is some value there.

One final point, I have mentioned marketers, but there is the dark side of the marketers, the spammers. We have absolutely no interest in them, and I think we all agree that they deserve to go to spam hell. But remember that one of the incredible advantages of twitter, is you really can’t be spammed. There is no way for you to be a target of unsolicited ‘messages’ (at the exception of direct mentions of your handle – but thankfully we are not seeing much of that). But you will not be getting Direct Messages (DMs) from spammers unless you follow them. The thing to remember here, is to look at the people following you, and decide wisely if you want to follow them.

What is the mix of twitterers that you’re following?

BeachMeet – The day twitter became mainstream in Australia

Posted by Rob James | Posted in General News, Innovation, Software, Start Ups | Posted on 21-04-2009-05-2008

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Today I attended BeachMeet at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney. Don’t let the name throw you, it was initially scheduled to occur on Bondi Beach but relocated due to weather. I must say, I didn’t mind the fact that I didn’t get sand in my shoes, and I am sure all the Suits there today agreed!

This was rather an interesting event, it seemed to be focussed on teh Twiter newbies, since most of the people there today had been members for less than 3 months (actually prompted me to check how long I have been a twitterer – 2 years baby!). Discussion was interesting and some really interesting views by audience and panalysts which all had varying degrees of experience.

For me the thing that was by far the most interesting aspect was the media coverage! There were news crews frmo all the major TV stations as well as some radio. For a Twitter event!!! Obviously Mark Comms did a great PR job on this one :-) On this news event – you can see the back of my head (black T-Shirt guy in the first cut to crowd), then me on the iPhone and my profile on screen. So, my back got its 15 minutes of fame…

But it did feel that with the twitter events over the last week, being Oprah’s “First” Tweet and Ashton Kutcher’s 1,000,000th follower, the BeachMeet event meant that Twittering has now hit mainstream in Australia. Good going down unda!!!

Some noteable highlights for me was that I briefly caught up with the guys from the longly anticipated Punch @congo & @penbo. Hope to catch up with these guys in the future, feel I might be able to add some value/ contribute to their project. Also met Travis Kalanik or better known as @konatbone. Little did many realise who Travis is, he’s probably the most successful Web 2.0 Entrepreneur in the room today. He’s the guy behind Scour and he recently sold Red Swoosh to Akamai for reportedly USD$19M. Cool guy, hope to catch up with hi for a beer while he is here before heading back to SF.

Check out more about the event here and the stream here.

UPDATE: Here is Channel 7′s report. Although the link is hopeless (thanks Yahoo!), go here and click the “Twitter comming to your Office” thumbnail! Again, my back played a staring role :-)

UPDATE 2: My back made another appearance as did those ‘quick typin fingers’ on SBS’s news report.

UPDATE 3: So there seems to be some contreversy about the PR on the evenet, and a conversation between myself (@snaglepus) and @silkcharm has been quoted in the story. There is a video as well.

There are 3 kinds of tweepel in this world

Posted by Rob James | Posted in Innovation, Software, Start Ups | Posted on 21-04-2009-05-2008

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OK, so I realise that sounds like the start of some bad joke, but whilst walking the dog tonight, I started thinking about how there are different types of users out on twitter, and wanted to try and nail it down to the lowest common denominator. First, let me say that I believe that this is a subjective view, and that although all of us will agree that there are different kind of people on twitter, what we may disagree is how they are segregated, and this is my view.

So here we go!

These are the highest order groups that I believe exist, and although you can probably break each of these down into lower groups, that is not important for my purpose. My purpose is to segregate the users that I am aware of, so that I know who I am following and why.

Community

Community users are the ones we all pretty much are and want to be. They are the users that want to engage and be engaged. They start with an account and build on the followers by following and tweeting. They are not necessarily a ‘nobody’, they may get hundreds or thousands of followers because of who they are, but their accounts exist because they want to engage.

Community users tweet to spread information that they are interested in – personal or business. They like to get responses, or for the better part they will try and respond and engage with the users that tweet to them. They may be interested in building a community of friends of followers on one topic or on several topics. But there interest is primarily for the community.

Sure, they may be looking at exploiting that community for their business benefit, such as potential customer leads or business opportunities, but that is not their main focus. They believe that by having a string network, and in this case through twitter, they will be able to tap into information and spread information within the communities of interest that they participate in.

Broadcasters

Broadcasters are really the other broad group. They are the other guys, the ones that aren’t interested in engaging. They have information, and that is the commodity that they are spreading. There are many examples of these; CNN, ABC News, New York Times, Twitter itself and even Britney Spears. They are extremely unlikely, if at all, going to engage with anyone that tweets them. But that is not their interest, they have information to share, and Twitter is one of their channels to share this information.
In some instances they aren’t even real people, but bots posting the messages. So they are unable to respond.

But it is not important that there may not be a real person here, and they server a purpose. They are not BAD. If you are interested in news broadcasts, your best channel to get this information may be to subscribe to some of the news channels. If you are a Britney fan, why not subscribe to her to get the latest. They serve a purpose.

Marketers

The marketers are a fine line. One could argue that they are broadcasters in one sense, spreading information, and then become engaging for the purpose of selling a product or services (and therefore part of a community) when communicated to.

And yes, this includes the “read my 10 reasons why you can be rich” twitterers as well as the “Buy my latest book” twitterers. But I put them in a category of their own, because their purpose is different, and therefore how I as a user engage with them may be different.

Marketers will attempt to use twitter to build a community around something they are selling. But in this instance it is not under the pre-tense that they are building community. They are blatantly using twitter as a channel for sales like they would use email. In many ways they could be considered the spammers of twitter, because much of the information is unsolicited advertising.

Why These Classifications?

I am basing these classifications on how I use twitter, because although there are similarities between each of the above, when I look at a user, I try and put them into one of these buckets before I decide whether to follow or not, engage or monitor closely.

How do I do this?

If I see the user is not replying to users, but is simply putting out tweets, or I see that they have thousands of followers and yet not following many. This is a broadcaster to me. If the user’s timeline is many conversations going on with various users sprinkled with random tweets that are either business or personal driven, then this is community. Finally, if after identifying a Broadcaster or a Community Twitterer, but their tweets read like product advertisements, then I put these guys into the Marketer Bucket.

Do you think there might be other broad categories that exist?

The 7 Myths about Outsourcing Development

Posted by Rob James | Posted in General News, Innovation, Software, Start Ups | Posted on 08-04-2009-05-2008

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Recently, I have been having various conversations with people about Offshore Development Centres (ODCs). Offshoring was quite popular some years ago, and it has become a standard practice by many development shops these days to be able to leverage a (diminishing) development budget.

I have worked with various development teams, many of which have been offshored, and last year, whilst CTO of Aegeon Corp, I was responsible for moving much of the development of Aegeon’s products to an ODC. In the selection process, I screened dozens of companies and ultimately travelled to China to make a final selection.

In recent discussions with people, I realised that many people (developers and managers) are quite uninformed about the issues of outsourcing. They tend to get quite hung up on items that have become redundant, or at the very least, are issues that are quite common that many ODCs have more than adequate mitigation in place, and overlook some of the more important issues.

In this blog posting, I intend to uncover some of the myths that are being spread around when managers plan to set up an ODC.

1. You must stick with the Major Tier 1 Cities

When sourcing offshore providers, we tend to go to the major technology hubs in popular offshoring countries such as India and China. And although there is a certain advantage working with companies in these countries (since they have now reached a certain level of maturity and experience in the industry), you do not necessarily need to put your teams together in cities such as Beijing, Mumbai, Shanghai or Pune. In fact, doing so means that you are likely to be paying a premium rate for little business benefit.

When travelling to these countries, you soon realise that many of the resources that are working in the capital cities are actually sourced from many of the Tier 2 cities. Since cost of living in the tier one cities is higher, rates for resources are higher. For example, in China, you will pay 10-25% more for resources in Beijing and Shanghai, than you would for the same calibre of talent in Dalian, Chengdu or even Guangzhou.
Remember the talent pool to choose from in these countries is greater than the entire population of some countries.

2. Beware – any IP developed offshore is going to be pirated!

This is always an issue regardless if you offshore, but there is a certain amount of uncertainty knowing that it may be difficult to prosecute any pirates in foreign countries. But in reality, there is a lot going on both abroad and locally to combat this.

For example, any technology parks, and any half decent companies are very stringent and provide a high level of control an police this quite effectively. For example, when in China, I discovered that technology parks in Beijing and Dalian had their own prosecutors and courts to administer fines and even jail terms for any individuals that are accused and convicted of piracy (particularly in ODCs).

Additionally, you have to consider what the real risk is. In some instance, if you are developing an autonomous desktop application, you may want to be careful how to approach this. But if you are developing a web application, remember that the technology is only a small portion of the product. The strategy, go-to-market and marketing in general is what is going to make the product a success. Do you really think the pirates are going to have the wherewithal to successfully pirate and market such a product?
If there are certain aspects of your application that are unique that is sensitive to the success of the product if it were to be pirated (such as algorithms or particular workflows), you may want to consider ensuring the development of those aspects locally.

Finally, you have to accept your ODC partner exactly as that, a ‘partner’. So there needs to be a certain level of trust. You have to accept that ODCs are not in the business of pirating your software but developing software for clients like yourself. You will be one of many, and the best reference for this are the testimonials you will receive from their other customers.

The quality of the code is going to be poor

This is one of the most prominent myths I come across, and sure it may have been true several years ago, the reality is that most of the resources working on the projects are going to be quite senior. When you talk to the companies running the ODCs, you realise that they have extremely stringent resource acceptance criteria, such as high IQ, top percentile of university graduates and high expectations of English language.
In most cases, the quality of code I have seen is as good and sometimes better than a lot of the code developed locally.

But don’t let this myth get mixed up with the reality that sometimes, your ODC does not clearly understand your requirements. So you have your requirement, you believe that you have documented and described the requirement to the n’th degree, and then when you finally get the code, it is not what you expected. This is a communication issue (which could happen to your local team if left unsupervised as well), and does not mean that the quality is rotten.

It is not possible to run projects using Agile methodologies with an offshore team
Because of the fact that your team is remote does not mean that the team cannot be run using Agile methodologies. In fact, I believe ODCs lend themselves quite nicely to Agile development, particularly if you select an ODC that is in a relatively good timezone as you.

You can have daily stand-ups, write your requirements as stories, manage them into sprints and allow your remote team to use disciplines such as TDD and pair programming. You just must accept that the team is remote, and the biggest challenge is communication and interaction with that team, particularly when clarifying requirements. So make sure you pay close attention to the communication aspect (hence why timezone helps). But see point 7 below for more detail.

Stick to the large ODC providers

Sure there is more security and better processes with the larger ODC providers, but there are 2 downsides that you will have to take on board (in my opinion outweighing the benefits). Firstly, you are likely to pay 25-50% more for resources from larger ODCs as they have greater overheads, and secondly, if you are a start-up or smaller organisation, you are not going to get the top class developers or attention from these companies. They will be reserved for their blue chip clients. Remember, companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, SAP amongst others are outsourcing as well and pumping millions of dollars into these companies, and those customer will get the top notch service, no matter what you think.

As long as you shop wisely, and do your homework on your ODCs you will find some great smaller ODCs where you will be one of their premier clients and will receive the attention you deserve. The quality of resources are still going to be fantastic, and you will be able to screen who works on your project anyway.
I cannot recommend enough the benefits of physically visiting your team and ODC. The cost to travel there a couple of days will probably be the equivalent of a few days of development time from that team, should be budgeted in the project and is money well spent.

Language and Culture are a huge barrier

Sure, this is a barrier, but I do not think that these days it is a huge barrier. Most resources that you will be working with in your ODC (particularly the senior ones) will have exceptional English. Many ODCs encourage all their resources to speak English constantly in the workplace so they can get the practise.

This will be a diminishing issue as the project carries on, you will soon discover what the constraints and difficulties are, and how to best communicate with the team. For example, in a project I ran with one ODC, I initially conducted stand-ups over IM chat (as written English was more comfortable for the team), but after that became impractical, we moved to telephone calls with the team leader who would convey updates on behalf of his team. As the rest of the team became more confident with their English, they would start to participate and you would all soon be working as one autonomous team.

A big no-no is to alienate the team and treat them as outsiders. The sooner you accept them as part of your team, and ultimately your company, the sooner you will get better results from them. Remote teams, like local teams, will take great pride in their company, and if they feel to be part of your company, that can only benefit you

Give your ODC team instructions and let them write code

This is not as much a myth as it is an expectation that most people adopt that infuriate me when they finally admin that the ODC failed! I constantly find local teams (product managers and subject matter experts) passing on their instructions and then walk away from the development hoping to get a great result at the end. Managing the ODC team is a full time job, just as it would be managing a local team.

I have found that the best mix for a local team to manage a remote team is a product manager and one technical lead. Both these resources need to be available 100% of the time to the remote team, but as the project progresses, the demand on them will be less.

The product manager will be responsible for clarifying requirements and final user testing, whilst the technical lead will partially act like the architect and review the results of what is delivered. I believe that the cost overhead is certainly bearable considering your remote team would cost 60%-75% less than a local team.

So there you go, that is what I have discovered in the last few years working with ODCs, do you have any opinions and your own experiences? I would love to hear about them.