Post a day challenge – Who deserves more credit?

Who deserves more credit? hmmm… very interesting question. I can think of two sets, one in the business world and one in my life as a software engineer.

In business world, I feel TATA motors deserves more credit that it gets. Ratan Tata has invested in  in-house R&D way before other Indian automobile companies. The result is that Tata indica was the first truly Indian car. Also, the way R&D has progressed in tata needs to be applauded more. From the initial less-than-great Indica, they have moved on to awe-inspiring Tata Nano, which despite being the cheapest car in the world is able to pass EURO N-Cap test successfully.I would like to see Maruti or Hyundai cars do that…. Unfortunately Indian media likes to focus on the negatives rather than praising good engineering efforts. Just type “lamborghini” or “ferrari” car fire in google and you will get hundreds of images of these supercars burning. Yet, these foreign cars do not get any adverse publicity.

I just hope for the sake of innovation in India that Nano is a huge success. I wish that it becomes the best-selling car in year 2011.

On the software engineering side, i find that QA does not get the credit it deserves. Many people, including in my company, believe that testing is not skilled work. If someone leaves the company, he/she can be easily replaced with another person. However, I have been working with excellent people who have shown me what real testing is. The ability to test a piece of functionality in numerous different ways is true talent and skill that cannot be easily replaced. I also find that the more a person works on a product, the better the person tests.Most of the credit for a successful release will be hogged by the development team while QA gets only the blame if some issues crop up. The faster a company realises this, the better it is.

I realised this when we started working in agile. Scrum makes people work closely. Working closely helped me realise the skill that a good tester possesses. It helped our team realise what a big factor they are in the success of our team. So, the solution to “How to give people more credit” is work in agile mode. 

Who do you think deserves more credit? Let me know.

Post a Day challenge – 3 countries

WordPress has started a Post a Day challenge. They are doing this to encourage more people to blog and hence build a community. They will post a topic every single day through out 2011 to help all the bloggers. I have decided to take this challenge up. Of course in keeping with this blog’s nature, I will be trying to relate every topic to the world of business or to software development using Agile. It is going to be tough to relate everything to these two topics. It is called  2011 “challenge” for nothing. 

The first topic is – ” List three most interesting/important countries related to your blog”…hmmm…. here goes…

1. USA – United States of America has the largest share in global economy. It might not be growing its share,but it will take years for other countries to catch up to it. Naturally, business world revolves around this country with most of the biggest companies headquartered here. Also, this is the land of 1000 management Gurus. With so many writers/consultants, most of the books I read are focussed on US economy and still has the biggest influence on the best practises of a company.
2. China – The growth of China in the recent years is unbelievable. Their strength in manufacturing is unmatched and acknowledged worldwide. Many a time we see the “Made in China” tag and wonder “Why can’t we build it in India?!?”. Though I have not read many books on the “China phenomenon”, I am pretty sure that it will overtake USA in the future to become the center of the business world.
3. India –  Clearly, being an Indian I am biased :-). However, India currently has the population and the skills required to rise up in the world. It was first recognised exactly 10 years ago when Y2K bug was successfully exterminated. In the following years India’s strengths in IT has been recognised world over. Indian management is also being recognised and many of the fortune 500 companies have Indians in top management. Finally, in recent years India is being recognised as the place to go for “Frugal engineering”.

 

There you go. Thats my list. What do you think? Do you agree? Do comment.