Women balancing their personal & professional life.

Saturday was a special day for 20% of our workforce. Why only 20% - Oh I am refering to - we the special people on earth - the Women CIIans. The women CIIans hold different positions right from Project leader to the just entered fresher with great backgrounds - post graduates or Engg graduates or people who are about to get Masters Degrees in either Business Administration or Computer Applications.

Coming to the point of this email, we had an interactive meeting on 22nd November Saturday, with Ms Virginia Littlejohn, CEO and Co-Founder of Quantum Leaps, Inc., which shares women entrepreneurial best practices, and facilitates their access to markets. She is also Chairman of TradeBuilders, Inc., which provides virtual trade missions and online conferencing.

Her primary focus for several decades has been advocacy on behalf of women entrepreneurs. In the late 1970s, she served as an adviser to the Carter Administration's efforts to advance women owned businesses. and in 1980, Ms. Littlejohn was selected the SBA's first National Women in Business Advocate of the Year, She has held various position fitting into her role as a champion of Women Entrepreneurship not just stopping with her home country, USA, but also carrying it over to the rest of the world. She has won numerous American and international awards for her entrepreneurial advocacy efforts, including a Lifetime Achievement award she received in Beijing in 2007 from the America-China Business Women's Alliance.

The primary national activity that Ms. Littlejohn is currently working on for Quantum Leaps, in cooperation with the NWBC and the major women's business associations, is to develop The Roadmap to 2020 to fuel women's enterprise development in the United States between 2009 and 2020.

It was rare honour and privilege for CIIans to interact with her on how they can balance their personal and professional work in the IT industry. The questions from the participants ranged from ' what made you become an entrepreneur' to 'how do you manage your travel' to 'how do you manage to have so much of energy with so much of travel' to 'how she felt about having her daughter in laws from different countries'. It was her turn to ask how the women who had children managed to take care of them and what is the support system for them, how do they feel about arranged marriage, etc. With her vast experience, she was advising them about what the work place expects out of them, how they have to take care of their personal life, how they have to bring up their children whether it is a boy or a girl, with the mental make up to take the responsibility of the house, etc.

It was such a personalized wonderful experience for all the 25 people who were part of that meeting, At the end of the meeting, what she wrote in our guest book sums it all

It was a wonderful visit to a wonderful company! I dont think that I 've ever felt more welcomed anywhere!!

Virginia, you have become part of us. Most of us will look you up for our guidance in both our professional career and family life.

Thanks for spending time with us.

International Software Testing Certified Engineers in CI

Yes, I am proud to say that my Test Engineers are all ' International Software Testing Certification Agency's Certified Engineers.

There are a lot of things that we have been doing in our company since our inception. We went in for ISO certification, way back in 2000 itself, just 2 years into software development, more to build the organization in a process oriented way. This enabled all of us to think in terms of a standardization or streamlining of our operations, with back up, audit, etc. Of course, we may have 10 teams with 10 different process since we are in outsourced Product development. Our 10 clients want us to follow their way. So what has happened is that though we have 10 different ways, still within the team itself, all the members follow the same process without deviation.

Similarly, we went in for BS 7799 , which is now ISO 27001, which deals with Information Security. Here also, it was more our vision of getting a sanitized atmosphere rather than any client pressure or marketing needs that made us take this up.

Along with this certification, we went ahead with our BS 15000, which is now ISO 20000 which deals with IT Service Management Certification which includes, process, security too. CI was the 1st among the SMB segment in India, 8th in India and 58th organization in the world to secure BS15000 certification.

In CI, we have testing teams for our clients, apart from our internal testing teams, which tests the deliveries of our product and also our deliverables. I heard about ISTC, which is a not-for-profit entity which has been conceived to spread the quality consciousness and strongly supports the need for Qualified and Certified Software Testing Community globally. Immediately I felt that I can get my people to take up this Certification, as this will not only help me benchmark the talent available in my company, but will lead to a standardization of approach.

This Certification is based on BOK of one of the best selling book " Software Testing - Principles and Practices"

The Certification Procedure as follows:

1. This certificate is issued only to those participants who got a minimum of 70% of marks
2. The questions for the exam and correction of answers are done by the author of the book, Mr Srinivasan Desikan
3. A class room section by the author is part of this certification introducing various topics on testing
4. The certification process includes exercises that are implemented in live projects, a combined internal assessments by Organization and Certification boards
5. The certification process involves approx 30 days of preparation time (attending class room training, reading the book, practicing techniques in live project and preparing for written exam)

Topics covered

1. Basic principles, concepts of testing
2. Black box testing and techniques
3. White box testing techniques
4. Component testing standards
5. Integration testing types and methodologies
6. System testing types and methodologies
7. Acceptance testing
8. Regression testing methodology
9. Software test automation
10. Adhoc testing types
11. People aspects in testing

Of course, this certification is at the basic level or foundation level only. There are 2 more levels in the certification, which CI will undertake shortly.

If you or your company is interested, do let me know I can be a bridge for you to get introduced to either founders of this society.

CI at Sage Summit

So it is Denver now. CI.COM, the Gold Certified Development Partner for Sage Software has a booth # 729 at the upcoming Sage Summit to be held in Denver between 17-29.

The Sage summit is focused towards the end users of the Sage product lines. with CI expertise in handling the custom programming requests of the end users through the resellers, CI makes it a point to be in the Summit where it can exhibit its Products and Services to the user community. The flagship product is Mobile SalesPerson which is providing the last mile connectivity for the Sales team to the ERP package by providing a complete solution for Order Entry on the move. Not only that, the Mobile Inventory suite, caters to the needs of the Warehouses too. The other software Commission Manager is an excellent product which provides the Accountants to give out the commissions based on various in house rules that they can set in the software.

Just check out in the booth for further information.


Wishing the CI team at Denver all the best for great show.

CI.COM becomes " Gold Certified Partner"

I am really very thrilled to share the happiest news of the year with all of you.

CI.COM has become a “Gold Level Development Partner of Sage”. The Gold Level Partnership with Sage has been the biggest and best yet and a perfect way to highlight the talent readily on display in all areas of CI.

To become a Gold Level Partner the important pre-requisite, inter alia, was that one of our products should be Sage Certified.

We submitted our flagship product “MobileSales Person” for Sage Certification. On behalf of Sage, Lionbridge VeriTest (globally ranked the #1 Outsourced Testing & QA provider) has subjected our product to a rigorous testing and declared that it has ‘passed’ all the necessary requirements.

The Gold Level DP of Sage is an endorsement of how far we have come and will undoubtedly affirm our commitment and increased credibility of our service range to product development companies and their resellers and end users.

Bringing something new into the marketplace and getting the same certified by a world renowned international company is never easy and and I have to acknowledge the great work done by all the CIians past and present who have made the company come this much ahead.

This is an external certification news. In my next post let me share with you the internal certification that has happened.

ajax

Ajax is the acronym for asynchronous JavaScript and XML and is one of the main usage technique in web 2.0. It is highly helpful in loading the data onto the browser and enables the user to get that interactive nature of the web 2.0. In commercial applications, by the virtue of Ajax, the user can customize the reports as she or he wants it. It was made very popular by the Google with Google suggest. Ajax is not a new programming language but a new way to use the existing standards which enables you to create better, faster and more user friendly web applications.

Coming to the technicality of Ajax - it is is a group of interrelated web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. Ajax enables the web applications to retrieve data from the remote server not in the conventional way of loading all the information at one go, but those data that is requested only in an asynchronous manner. Data is retrieved by the use of remote scripting or the XMLHttp Request Object


The first coinage of the term was done in the article written by Jesse James Garreet who explained how it is used

While XHTML and CSS are used for presentation, the document object model is used for the dynamic display, and XML for interchange and XSLT for manipulation of data, and XMLHttpRequest object for asynchronous communication. The JavaScript helps bring all these technologies together. Even VBScript is also capable of doing the same functionality.
The main Advantages comes where the pages on a website consist of much content that is common between them. Using traditional methods, that content would have to be reloaded on every request. However, using Ajax, a web application can request only the content that needs to be updated, thus drastically reducing bandwidth usage and load time. The use of asynchronous requests allows the client's Web browser UI to be more interactive and to respond quickly to inputs, and sections of pages can also be reloaded individually. Users may perceive the application to be faster or more responsive, even if the application has not changed on the server side. The use of Ajax can reduce connections to the server, since scripts and style sheets only have to be requested once

The main Disadvantages of not being in a position to create a history or bookmark the page and the dynamically loaded/changed state can be overcome by only workarounds.
Any user whose browser does not support Ajax or JavaScript, or simply has JavaScript disabled, will not be able to use its functionality.

In the next post, let me write some more in depth about Ajax