Here is the worthless blog that the retards Prasanna Raghavendra and Pradeep Prabhu of CloudMunch posting at blog.cloudmunch.com

Everything in the blog is fabricated.

Thursday, 6 September 2012
Build is your hero!
A few months back, I was white-boarding the concept of what we were trying to build. The audience had some architects, some designers and artists. The context was product design. I was explaining what we are trying to achieve and how we should bring usability into this. The architects got this quickly and we got into the details of which tool, how does it compare with other platforms etc.

But Sridhar, whom I regard as the most creative person I know, kept on asking me more and more questions, and finally said this is too technical and I am not getting it. I then erased the white-board started all over. He said "hmm, it is still not cutting ice" and went out of the discussion room. We continued our discussion on what more needs to be done and how it can be done.

Suddenly, Sridhar appeared and said, "I got it, Build is your hero!". I was amazed at his eureka moment. He continued, "Look, I see a product like a movie". You need to first find your hero. Once you find the character of your hero, you can always weave a story around it by the interaction this character will have by bringing in various other characters. The main thread should always be around the "hero". Once you understand this it will become very easy to design the product as well."

And then he took over the white-board and started drawing sketches to define our hero's characters and how it should behave with other character's like Environments, Code, Defects, Requirements, etc. We went on to complete the movie and the product design came as a by-product!

That was just two completely different worlds meeting and creating something very interesting! Expect the creative design in the CloudMunch platform.
Posted by Prasanna at 12:05 0 comments
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Labels: Artists, Build, Creative, Product Design
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
How to find a great start-up idea. Try DNA+SMAC+GAP

> Answering this question is very tricky. I get this question frequently as I am now running my own platform start-up from last year. It is intriguing for those asking, because I am a business/sales guy and I selected a very established, technical domain. Also, my previous platform that I incubated  in 2007 was in Social Commerce - a domain most people had hardly heard of at that time and Facebook was still unknown.
>
> So, naturally my friends/well wishers are all very curious on why I selected an established domain - application dev/test/run/manage for my new start-up. And even more so, because I left a great job as VP & Head of SaaS business at an IT major. Now, to be frank, when I started CloudMunch, selecting the start-up space gave me sleepless nights for quite some time, even more than the fact that I was starting from the ground floor with nothing but my well worn out shoes.
>
> I brainstormed a lot of different ideas with my Co-founder/CTO and we selected application delivery PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). Here are the 3 reasons that guided our selection.
>
> 1) Your DNA & ecosystem - because many of the ideas will come from your own experiences and the ecosystem that you live in - you will be able to quickly assemble a world-class team, from your friends/ex colleagues as they may share the vision or get energized and will want to join you or support you in some way. Your first set of customers & partners will all come from the this ecosystem and they will help in defining  the problems better as well as contribute fresh ideas.
>
> Based on our experience of last 20 years in the IT industry, we now see the opportunity of solving some of the issues/challenges that exists in software development/delivery and helping customers/ecosystem extract faster results and higher value. An example is how CloudMunch delivers better visibility and traceability across the application lifecycle which leads to faster time to market and better quality. One of our customers loves this feature as their CTO is in US with dev team in India and customers across the globe.
>
> 2) SMAC stack - Social + Mobile + Analytics + Cloud - each of these in themselves are tremendous market opportunities. Is there an opportunity of bringing all of them together - the SMAC stack  in your industry/expertise?  Can you define the use cases? Can you create a blue print for your domain with the SMAC stack? If yes, you are on your road to creating something very useful.
>
> We are leveraging the SMAC stack  to redefine application delivery. One of the core tenets of CloudMunch platform is the 'In-context analytics" for the applications in development and in production with the Cloud as the hub collecting/analyzing these metrics, delivered on a iPad/iPhone with the dev team collaborating with the end customer.
>
> 3) Identify GAP in innovation - every start-up space will have the early innovators but there will be gaps or white spaces in their solutions where you can innovate.
>
> There are some great start-ups in the application development/delivery domain but none of them were addressing the entire application lifecycle nor are they looking at how distributed teams with an average age under 25 can use this. We saw the GAP/white spaces and met with VCs who funded these start-ups and got some interesting feedback. Also met with customers and partners and all signs showed that there are gaps that we could bridge.
> CloudMunch vision is to provide a hub in the cloud with plug and play to  developers favorite tools for the entire application lifecycle and  DNA+SMAC+GAP is showing us the way.
> Thoughts?






Posted by Pradeep Prabhu at 11:11 2 comments
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Labels: application delivery PaaS, Innovation, PaaS, software delivery, Software development, Software Engineering, Start-up, start-up idea
Friday, 31 August 2012
You cannot "innovate" if you cannot speak the subject from your heart
As we prepare to complete our first year of our company registration in Seattle (Sept 15th it is!), I go back to that common question I have been asked several time in the past year, "Why did you pick this area?" In-fact, this was also asked in a recent interview at techno-pulse.

The the answer has been very simple. All my corporate career, I have always been trying to find "How can I delver a zero defect project?" (Of-course, I have realized later that there is nothing called a zero defect project, and it is only a matter of time to be proven wrong). All we have done, has been Software delivery. When we decided that we should start-up on our own, we thought we should pick something that we knew the best. This led us to pick Software Engineering as an area. Cloud was an obvious choice later.

I have drilled down on this question, "Why did you pick this area?" with a few friends. I prod, "Why do you ask, is it a mistake?" The answers has been varied. "No, this is an area where there is a lot of  competition", "I hear this area does not pay well" and so on.

I have pondered about this multiple times. We picked an area where we can relate to every problem we were solving. Frankly, I cannot relate to issues a teller has when he counts cash to hand over to his first customer in that long queue, I cannot relate to an insurance agent being asked too many technical queries which he is not able to answer. While I have solved these issues in my earlier life, I have only been party to the solution led by a domain expert. In our case, 'we' wanted to be the domain expert, and hence the area. I was clear from day one, "You cannot innovate if you cannot speak the subject from heart". And I think, once you innovate even a small piece, customers will appreciate it and start working with you, giving you more problems which you can relate again! We at CloudMunch just want to live in this innovation cycle!

We also know that we cannot pick an area where you have no competition, simply because we have limited resource of time and money. But the confidence is just this, "If we are in that innovation cycle, we will always look different from the rest."

Thoughts?
Posted by Prasanna at 15:20 1 comments
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Labels: Innovation, Innovation cycle, Software Engineering, Start-up
Wednesday, 22 August 2012
Google Maps for your code
How was life before Google Maps?

You used to buy those printed maps, open them over the dashboard, keep tab on where you are on the map, and not losing sight of where you want to go. It was quite possible that you do not see a left turn  on the map when you actually have one. With Google Maps, all these pains went away in one shot, it was almost as per actual, helped you monitor where you are, re-adjusts your destination with where you need to be, and also kept tab of where others are!

In a similar fashion, having a "map" of your application code-base will give you similar power to understand where your code base is against your principles, standard and policies and help you maneuver your application quality, security and performance the way you want. This is what we have recently created at CloudMunch. What we call as "Hunch" internally, is essentially a code visualization tool. "Google Maps for your code"

Pradosh sure is excited to talk about this at BarCamp Bangalore. Please be there!
Posted by Prasanna at 16:18 0 comments
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Labels: BarCamp, Code Visualization, Google Maps
Tuesday, 21 August 2012
Software creation, a software factory?
While it has been a constant debate to compare software creation process to a factory, (and we do compare in our own way in our concept video on our fresh website, you should check it out!), I should say that there are clear differences between the two.

One, while a typical factory or an assembly line can only scale by a margin with respect to average capacity, it will not be able scale-up or scale-down in multiplying factors. However, cloud based development platforms can enable this in Software factories. Such a platform can scale the velocity by multiplying factors, as the ability to scale in a cloud architecture is next to infinity. This is further made sweeter with auto-scaling capabilities of the cloud to make this scaling just-in-time! I did like this article by Nari in this context. Of-course, the only limiting factor is the ability to scale people.

Two,  factories typically create the same thing again and again, hence you spend a lot of time in design to create on correctly - this process goes through constant build-test-deploy cycle. But, once the design template is done, creating multiples of this can go with almost no testing. For software, you will never create the same one again and again.

Are there more differences?

This makes the term "Software Factory" questionable, I guess.
Posted by Prasanna at 11:47 0 comments
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Labels: agile, software factory
Wednesday, 8 August 2012
How many passengers do you carry?

I was having a chat with Kabir in my team on the train (discussed in my earlier blog), and he brought up the concept of "waiting room" that is used in the agile world to park a user story that is not yet "defined" to an extent that it can be taken up for development. The user story may be needing a spike to evaluate feasibility or not defined enough to roll it into an iteration. The concept in itself is a great one, but when I was linking this back to the train, it dawned on me that User Stories can infact be compared to a Passenger and the more the passengers, the more the scope that gets delivered. Bingo!

When you extend this, you will also realize the need to have stations go through the steps of Initial, Defined, Planned, Completed and Accepted. The faster you get a passenger to Accpeted, the better your 'velocity' will be.

A person outside the train can actually see the train delivering goods and its ability to to reach destination within the specified timeline. The dashboard will infact be a dashboard of a car helping you look at various views of how much goods is being delivered and if the consignment expected next will be coming on time.

It is also possible to see the trains velocity and see if it is well oiled and any impediments are removed. The impediments in terms of getting accepted ranges from (a) breaking an existing functionality (b) not coding to the new functionality completely (c) breaking during integration (d) breaking during integrated build (e) breaking during deployment (f) breaking during complete regression (g) breaking during tech stack verification before it actually hits Product Test groups to evaluate. It is important for the teams outside the train to have a view of this and ensure there are enough safety nets built to help accelerate the train.

We at CloudMunch intend to carry more and more passengers safe and fast, by being outside of this train.

Your thoughts?

Posted by Prasanna at 19:23 0 comments
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Labels: agile, Stories, Velocity
Monday, 6 August 2012
God of all teachers is my customer

I should say that I am humbled.

It has been more than 10 months since we have been operational at CloudMunch, and at that time, we knew we had picked an area where we are strong from a domain perspective having spent all career in delivering software. Our passion was to leverage cloud to change the way software is created and delivered. Our team got formed which shares the same passion, technically sound and with an unbelievable attitude to kill. I sure am proud of the team, which can stand next to any best team in the world. I was then thinking, this is it. we know what problems are faced in software delivery and what tools of this era can provide, and we have a great team to bridge that gap. "Lets go and Kill!".

After we released alpha and private beta, and started on-boarding customers, We have garnered an experience that has just humbled us. The issues our customers are facing in engineering software has been giving us tremendous opportunity. We are taking these home to bridge. As and when we add more customers, our learning has been growing and providing a broader perspective and that's when I realized, "God of all teachers is my customer".

I use this opportunity to thank them for their support and open feedback, and am sure as we go along, we find more and more interesting problems to solve. Mr. Customer, please keep that open feedback coming...