WatTF? - Jim Murphy

The SOA space continues to consolidate and Cape Clear’s acquisition by Workday is the latest headline.  I’m not in the know of how Cape Clear has actually been executing lately but suspect they don’t have as much customer momentum as they portray on the outside.  Hence the viability of becoming internal technology to a Saas provider like workday - and ceasing availability of thier ESB offering.

Details from the Release

• Workday has reached a definitive agreement to purchase Cape Clear Software, Inc.
• Cape Clear has been recognized as the industry’s leading ESB by top research firms, including Forrester.
• The acquisition will allow Workday to accelerate its efforts to support customers with packaged and custom Integration On Demand.
• Cape Clear will become Workday’s integration team, based in Dublin, Ireland, with additional resources in Walnut Creek, Calif.
• Annrai O’Toole, chief executive officer of Cape Clear, will join the Workday management team as Vice President, Integration.
• The Cape Clear solution will no longer be offered standalone and will be available only as part of Workday Integration On Demand.
• Workday will continue to support existing Cape Clear customers.
• Financial terms are private and Workday expects to complete the purchase in 30 days.

So is this a portfolio consolidation on the part of Greylock?  Given the level of investment over the years (sine 1999)and the fact that its really an internal private acquisition by another startup I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision. It does allow Annrai to continue to operate in Ireland which may be mostly whats its all about - dunno.

eWeek reported that LinkedIn will be launching the LinkedIn Research Network.

I’ve been an active LinkedIn user for years.  I like the ritual of adding folks to my network as a next step after you exchange cards/intro emails or face-to-face meetings.  Its a handy tool to keep building “relationship momentum”.  But I’ve been waiting to see what LinkedIn would do with this stream of social info.  It was my first exposure to a social network since it appealed to my stoggy business networking needs but has clearly been outpaced by the likes of mySpace and Facebook - at least for the < 25 group.

The financial research use case seems like a well targeted tool.  I’d be curious to track uptake - maybe through the number of unsolicited research requests I get about my customers or associates?  It sets a precedent for others directly taking advantage of MY social network connections - that isn’t directly tied to advertising.

My pet concept is to track rate of change by person and company of individual profiles and make this available to recruiters or others interested in tracking what a company is really doing.  Funny how obvious this semi-public resume primping telegraphs a person’s intent or taken in aggregate a company’s direction.  Seems like I get recommendation requests from people right before they plan to jump ship.

As I said earlier, 2 Chimps vs. 1 Gorilla? I’ll take the Gorilla every time.

1. Google doesn’t mind this deal going through at all. Google knows they will be able to outrun a “Microhoo.” Why do they know that? Because they’ve been able to outrun them both separately. As I said on Channel 5 news on Friday night: put two turkeys together and you don’t get an eagle.

Read more about the challenge of monetizing Email and IM - or the inability to in the rest of the post.

Presentations are emotional events, even when technology is the subject. So many technical presentations fail that. This is one of my favorite technology presentations. Its by Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip.

He used Lawrence Lessig’s “influence” presentation format, who this past November gave an incredible, 18 minute presentation at TED entitled: How creativity is being strangled by the law.

Cool.

The news breaks on Marketwatch today that ailing MS makes a $44.6B bid for ailing Yahoo!. What’s the odds on 2 Internet Chimps vs 1 Gorilla? Any takers? So many questions! PHP.NET?

After a tag and a poke from Mr Rodgers I’ll provide 8 things you probably don’t know about me, being the new kid in town it seems like a great opportunity to explain myself:

1. My wife Angela and I underwent 8 years of infertility treatments, unsuccessfully. Now, I’m the father of 3, the first 2 (Josie and Carl) we adopted privately from Arizona, the 3rd was done “the old fashioned way” to our great surprise - mind blowing actually.

2. I’ve been 100 feet below sea level, intentionally here, here, here, here, and here.

3. August 2004, I was duped by my pal David Coarsey into doing the  London Triathlon, damn near died.

4. Since I’m old and out of shape I now ride motorcycles thought not this well.

5. In high school I played trumpet, occasionally with an umpahpah band during K-W Octoberfest.

6. I used to raise pets with the specific intent of eating them. Mmmmmm pets.

7. I’ve participated first hand in a mennonite barn raising, cool weekend, awesome food.

8. I sing Karaoke, badly.

+1. If you met me in person recently you probably know that we just moved back to Waterloo from Boston after 12 years.

I’ll tag a few folks to expose their 8 items: Evan Leonard, Aaron White, Jeff Fedor, Larry Borsato, Tim Ewald, Glen Daniels, Simon Fell, Sanjiva Weerawarana.

Larry Borsato gives me a warm feeling inside.  Ok, its not that warm - I haven’t even met him in person - but I appreciate the fact that he calls bullshit on the things that he does.  Thanks Larry.

80 Rules for ordering Tim Horton’s Coffee.

Oh boy.

Its people like Larry that make my re-integration into Canadian society go so much easier.

I love what the guys at Manager-Tools have to say. They have a podcast and series of tools that are incredibly practical for improving your management chops. Increasingly people I know are on self-managing teams where a little management general knowledge can help everyone.

I found the show on “Improving you Feedback” to be the most personally helpful. I was provided this link from someone who thought I could use it - thanks you were right. Its based on thier DISC model for personality and helps you create n environment where feedback is provided, expected and necessary. Incredibly powerful at reducing the level of passive aggressiveness you may be experiencing on your team.

http://www.manager-tools.com/2006/02/improve-your-feedback/

Here’s a couple of other tools I thought are pretty useful:

Management-Tools Basics: http://www.manager-tools.com/manager-tools-basics

Discussion forum @ http://www.manager-tools.com/forums/

Today, many developers I know heartily embrace agile development methods, especially scrum. Its an increasingly  popular approach that directly addresses the inherent non-linearities in software development - the human parts.  Some see it right away and some take a little more time but agile has clearly crossed the chasm for software developers - not so with QA people.

Most QA people I’ve worked with are pretty strange, but so are product manager, developers, architects and for Pete’s sake don’t even think about marketing folk.  Now that that accusation is safely couched let me re-iterate: QA people are weird.  Good QA people - not devs who can’t cut it as devs - but real honest to goodness QA people have a personality that makes them want to stop the presses, damn the torpedoes and call bullshit - regularly. They seem to enjoy it even thrive on it. So much so that it encourages the team splitting dynamic between devs and QA. I’m not sure if we’ve created these people via broken process or if we attract them but in my experience QA and agile have a hard time with each other because the episodes that give QA people their joy should NOT happen on an agile project.  But to keep them from happening dev and QA need to come together on the same crass functional team.

In many ways agile leaves the QA group behind by requiring developers to add testing to their primary activities.  In a perfect world this means the software produced in a given sprint should actually work as designed.  Instead of the status quo where QA is the quality feedback loop for a very significant number of bugs and overall quality.  Another way of looking at this is that QA is a co-enabler of bad software development process.  Its clear that development is a culprit by engaging in code and fix but it does require that they have a QA group to catch the swill produced and generate the bug list.  Being good at this process is like being a good crack addict.  Even if you do it with style and panache its still only a matter of time before your world comes tumbling down.

Mary and Tom Poppendieck describe the Lean and how it translates from the manufacturing world to software development - a comparison I’m generally very skeptical of - but I think there are some very interesting ideas.  Lean defines “waste” as “anything the customer doesn’t value” and espouses the goodness of continual waste reduction over time.  From my limited understanding of it, Lean comes from the Toyota Kaizen management style.  From a Lean perspective, a process that creates excessive defects (waste) is a buggy process that needs to be fixed. Imagine sending every third car that rolled off the line to the scrap heap because “bugs” were detected. This is completely unacceptable of course but its what we do in software development.  In a well run lean process QA would ensure quality is within tolerences by measurement but generally not find rework.  Obviously in the physical world testing must often be destructive so you can’t test everything that comes off the line.  In software its not which is why I think we’ve fallen into this mode.

If you have a QA heavy culture - otherwise known as a good QA team if you are a QA person - then you are probably enabling this buggy process. An ideal situation is to have QA teams verify that the software works right and have 0 bugs to report - imagine if this were normal. Then QA could spend more time on exploratory testing and making sure the features that are built are built properly - according to customer intent.

We need to spend less human effort “shooting bugs in a barrel”, and spend more effort figuring out if our product features are really mapping to customer need - thats a take on quality that I’d love to have in the products I use.

Congrats to a genuine Internet startup in Waterloo, Ontario - home of excessive software brilliance but a derth of B2C, Internet, Web 2.0 companies….at least so far.

AideRSS announces funding from TechCapital + Angels

Good luck to the AideRSS guys and kudos to TechCapital for staying on top of things.