* Agile Coach Camp is an unconference for Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Agile Trainers, Leaders, Change Agents and Mentors. (Last coach camp in June was completely sold out 2 weeks in advance. Since we had a waiting list of 43 coaches, we’ve organized another coach camp in July. Last few seats left – register today – http://booking.agilefaqs.com/accb13/
* Agile India 2014 conference is Asia’s largest & premier international conference on Agile and Lean Software Development methods. Unlike previous years, next year, each day has a specific theme. Also each day is a stand-alone event and participants can register for 1 or more days. We’ll limit the participants to max 500 on each day to ensure higher collaboration.
Based on consistent feedback, in 2014, we’ll focus on have more practitioners sharing their Case Studies and Experience Report.
Themes:
** Day 1 – Scaling Agile Adoption
** Day 2 – Offshore/Distributed Agile
** Day 3 – Agile Lifecycle
** Day 4 – Beyond Agile
Master your addition and subtraction skills using the abacus, the most ancient and the fastest calculation tool.
Take our unique challenge to do as many additions and subtractions on the Abacus and dodge the asteroids that come in your way. Enter the final answer before the door shuts down.
Recently I wanted to create a video demo of my iPad apps. So I thought, I would just walk-through the apps and capture the screen on my iPad. It turns out that its not as simple as I thought it would be. While the desktops have a ton of screen-casting software, iPad simply lacks any of these sophisticated software.
When I googled for screen-casting apps on iPhone/iPad, I found a huge number of apps, but all of them are mostly whiteboard apps, that let’s you capture the screen inside their app (more useful for teachers.)
Searching some more, helped me find a few viable options:
Use an iOS Simulator with a Desktop Screen-capture tool – The most widely used and probably the first approach to creating demos was using the iPhone/iPad simulator on your Mac, while recording your Mac screen with QuickTime. Sound Stage looks like a cool app for recording your screen and adding some nice mojo to it.
Use camera mounts for usability testing of mobile devices - This approach is great for usibility testing where you want to see the hand-gestures and facial expression of the user, but in our case this might be an overkill. BTW I really like Mr. Tappy, a kit for filming mobile devices. Originally designed as a filming rig for iPad usability testing, Mr Tappy lets you capture or share user interaction with mobile devices during user experience research, product demonstrations or classroom presentations.
Mirror the iPhone/iPad screen via AirPlay and record it – This seemed like the easiest option for me. There are a couple of apps (Reflector, AirServer) available, which you need to install on your desktop. Once installed, you can go to your iOS device and start mirroring the screen on to your desktop. Not only does it mirror the screen, but it also uses the desktop to actually play the sound. And all of this over a wireless network. Once the iOS device’s screen is on your desktop, you can use QuickTime to easily capture the video.
Once I recorded by screen-cast using AirServer and QuickTime, then I used iMovie to do some minor editing and adding some annotations to the video. That’s it. I recorded the following 2 videos if you want to have a look.
What: Unconference for Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Agile Trainers, Leaders, Change Agents and Mentors. When: 7th-8th June 2013 Where: Hotel Ramada, Bangalore Theme: True Essence of Coaching
Role of a Coach?
Many of us have embraced an agile coach’s role, but do we really understand what coaching is all about? How coaching is different from mentoring?
To help us learn about the true essence of coaching, during this Coach Camp, we’ve dedicated one full day to work with Judy van Zon, who is
Over the last few months, multiple friends and connection from US have asked me to share my experience with pricing Agile related tools and services in Asia (specifically India.) Following is my perspective:
Disclaimer: Asia is the most diverse and dynamic continent out there. Any reasonable generalization is bound to have loopholes. Take it with a pinch of salt.
Since the topic on hand is pricing & positioning agile related services and tools, let’s focus on senior managers at software companies, who are interested & responsible for procuring (or at least recommending) a service or a tool for use inside their company. These folks mostly belonging to upper-middle class or above. Its important to focus on these folks because we can draw the following behavioral patterns based on their profile:
1. They are very value-for-money conscious. .i.e. while they are very price conscious these days they are also getting quite brand conscious. Feature-richness or “fully-loaded” appeals to them because they associate it with value-for-money.
2. Premium pricing model works well with them. .i.e. price the product or service artificially high in order to encourage favorable perceptions among buyers. Exploits the tendency in buyers to assume that expensive items enjoy
an exceptional reputation,
are more reliable or desirable,
represent exceptional quality and distinction
3. If they can’t bargain the price while buying, they feel they did not get a good deal.
4. In my experience, Freemium model generally does not work very well. People will somehow find a way to stay on the free plan. Software Piracy is still a notable problem. Things like sharing a license with others is considered wrong, but people will still go ahead and indulge in it. May be because they don’t fully think through the implications or can’t empathize with IP related regulations.
5. Price Discrimination strategy appeals to these folks. .i.e. pricing the product differently for different companies. Bigger discount for larger number of licenses is common. But doing something more like: bigger discounts for startups or discounts for specific verticals like Telecom can attract customers.
Based on my experience consulting and coaching IT companies in India, I would categorize Indian IT companies, who are interested in Agile, into the following 5 categories:
2. Large ODC (Off-shore development centers) for giant software product companies (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, McAfee, EMC, Philips, Dell, GE, Siemens, VMWare, Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, Aricent, Huawei, etc.)
3. Large ODC for large non-software product/services companies (Banks and Financial Institutes [JP Morgan, Citi, RBS, Fidelity], Store Chains [Tesco, Walmart, Target], Transportation [Volvo, John Deere], etc.)
Category 1 is highly obsessed with process adherence & compliance. Typically they have an internal process & tool which all projects have to use. In addition, clients of most projects might have a different process & tool required. Teams end up using both. Most teams use different tools because there are concerns regarding how much transparency is healthy for an outsource client-vendor relation. They want only limited data to be shared with the clients. In fact in my experience, to ensure company-wide consistency and compliance, most companies even have their own home grown tool/solution to deal with this issue. If majority of customers are using a process/tool, its an easy pitch to the companies to use the same approach, provided there is an easy way to share limited info with clients. Using same process/tool could add to the company’s marketing/credibility pitch. These companies are price conscious, but if the value proposition (better customer acquisition) is shown, they have the budgets to buy the tool or service. Might require multiple rounds of negotiation. They are willing to commit higher numbers if bigger discounts can be offered. Fairly long sales process.
Category 2 is fairly process conscious, but certainly to a lesser extent compared to Category 1. For these companies majority of the process and tool decisions are made by their counter-parts from west. They do have a say, but are not going to make the buying decision. However they can sabotage the process/tool decision if it does not work for them. Because of the “distributed & off-shore” nature of work, their needs might be different from the folks making the decision. These guys appreciate higher attention/care to their specific needs. Sales process tends to be much faster than Category 1.
Category 3 is also very process conscious. They are predominantly cost centers. Any tool or process which can show clear cost saving, better accountability & tracking is a big hit. Buying decisions are jointly made, however offshore folks do have a big say. Typically these folks require quite a lot of customization to the service or tool to fit their specific needs. Sales process tends to be very long.
Category 4 is out of the startup mode, and are the “wanna-be-enterprise” scale. These are in my opinion the best companies to chase for process change and tool adoption. They have the right attitude to change. Typically they also have the cash and they generally don’t bargain much. They have a strong desire to scale and standardize. Perfect pitch for a Industry Leading Tool to come in and steal the deal. Again these guys don’t tend to bargain too much, but if you give them a discount it will help make the decision faster because they are still price conscious. These guys will do a very detailed market study & competitor analysis. If possible, they prefer to pick the best in category. Sales process tends to be either couple of days or 6+ months (extremes.)
Category 5 is the least process conscious. However are very efficiency & savings driven. They won’t even talk to you if they feel the product is priced and targeted at Enterprises. They would assume/feel the product is expensive and too heavy-weight for startups. A clear pitch for startups in your offerings is very important. These folks will hunt you down. Again very price conscious, but can be good brand ambassadors. Sales process does take some time.
Hope this helps. Also would be keen to hear your experience.
If you are building a web-app, which needs to use OAuth for user authentication across Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media, testing the app locally, on your development machine, can be a real challenge.
On your local machine, the app URL might look like http://localhost/my_app/login.xxx while in the production environment the URL would be http://my_app.com/login.xxx
Now, when you try to test the OAuth integration, using Facebook (or any other resource server) it will not work locally. Because when you create the facebook app, you need to give the URL where the code will be located. This is different on local and production environment.
So how do you resolve this issue?
One way to resolve this issue is to set up a Virtual Host on your machine, such that your local environment have the same URL as the production code.
To achieve this, following the 4 simple steps:
1. Map your domain name to your local IP address
Add the following line to /etc/hosts file
127.0.0.1 my_app.com
Now when you request for http://my_app.com in your browser, it will direct the request to your local machine.
2. Activate virtual hosts in apache
Uncomment the following line (remove the #) in /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
