Modern testing for modern stacks

This is a famous article and one that the first few employees at early stage companies should be aware of. The ideas in this blogpost are one extreme view of how to build a company. I find most people are familiar with the other (also valid) extreme view which treats the idea or the customer as central, and employees as substitutable. What I'd like us to realize is that there is a wide range of ways to approach building a company. Not just the traditional 'king david' approach that we are used to.

Its a different approach to start a company, though it may not succeed in all the cases. It would depend on type of the company. Joel Spolsky rightly says a good developer will produce more than 5 to 10 average developers. In some cases we may want to recruit such people but again it depends on type of company you are building. Its not possible to always produce a great movie by recruiting all the best actors and technicians and also not able to win all matches by having all great players. The team work also matters

The author is telling about what should be the real goal of the software companies and actually what happens in reality.If we think about starting an organization each organization is unique and has unique requirements.Always we should think how we can differ from other companies,how we are going to achieve it.This is the first groundwork of next steps.The next step is we have to identify the requirements.If we start the testing,what technology is being used in this field,how long this technology was there,before what technology is being used, any upcoming technology is there or not? .The next step is very important,what kind of people will be recruited,always don't hire the people what they know,but what they can learn.Once we set with all the previous points start implementing it.Start evaluating the success and try to improve always.

This is a different article which talks about the approach to building a company. He's given good examples of successful products & his liking towards iPod. He does value good programmers than just mediocre which is arguable. I agree that we need a good working condition company before we hire the good programmers. This article can be used for early stage companies. Though he talks about iPod, it's features and appreciates them, somewhere the iPod developer team did think about customers first right.

Mr. Joel Spolsky is co-founder of Trello, Fog Creek S/W & CEO of Stack Overflow. We mostly use Trello and Stack Overflow in our daily routine. "Hitting The High Notes" is very nice article written by Mr. Joel Spolsky. He summarized his formula for starting the company very well and in just four steps. He explained all these four steps with examples of Wal-mart, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Winamp, Apple i-pods and Microsoft Word. I agree with his 1st step i.e. "Best Working condition" this is a foundation step of most of formula's. Creating good working condition is very important to produce best outcomes. I remember we discussed about it during one of our big topics. But I am not agreeing with his second step i.e. Best Programmers because hiring best programmer is very critical task. I observed most of good programmer have a hobbies to watch cartoons and play video games. Playing games and watching cartoons will increase imagination power of person. Combination of Imagination power and analytical skills are very important for programming. I fill his last 2 steps i.e. Best S/W and Profit is totally depends on first 2 steps. .

I cannot completely agree or disagree with what was given. I have also come across contradicting claims that you need an idea in ur company to be successful. There are a few things i agree on though. The reason why this topic could be very relevant is that we are a testing company. No matter how good we are going to seen as 'another Indian outsourcing company' until they work with us and see what we have to offer.We have been able to stay different as we foster a good testing environment. The internal wiki,training process are steps in the right direction. The internal standards are higher that what a client may expect. It also helps that we are small, we are able to make changes to the system if it doesn't work. This might be a challenge when we grow, we need to be aware of man-month mythical.This good environment we create can help us create good testers and hit high notes.

To some extent I disagree with the author about recruiting good programmers. Good programmers are necessary to produce good results and for the success of the company. Different companies think differently, Large companies think that person who has good soft skills, presentation skills, professionally driven along with technical skills are good programmers.Since they can provide best working conditions they take up the students with entry level skills and tune them into best programmers and get the required results. Small companies think a person having strong technical skills are the expert programmer. Not only technical skills, a good programmer should also have decision making skills and ability to handle the failure situation then only he can work with people and produce good results for the company

All I found about this article is, Its just made complicated with all the contradicting happenings of the past. The author says, Its wrong that You need an idea to start a new company .And mostly people think that - Find out the best current problem to solve and develop solution of it, and make fortune. He says company's success or failure is directly a result of the quality of their code.He suggests a Company Model as follows:" BEST WORKING CONDITION -> BEST PROGRAMMERS -> BEST SOFTWARE -> PROFIT. "He talk all about the relations. Here BEST WORKING CONDITION and BEST PROGRAMMERS does not affect negatively, rather enhances each other.(Goes Positive only). Working condition is very important and its the key to start any new company. Well, its common sense that BEST SOFTWARE gives you GOOD PROFIT.(both are directly proportional.)Now rest of the article talks about Relation between TYPE OF PROGRAMMERS and TYPE OF SOFTWARE PRODUCED.He talks about, Brooks' Law : "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." .That's true.Its good to have a team with minimal number of expert programmers. A single good programmer working on a single task has no co-ordination and communication overhead and five programmers working on the same task must co-ordinate and communicate a lot which requires a lot of time.At University of Yale, Students were given the same project from 1980 to 2003 and those projects were time bound. statistics force us to the conclusion that "The quality of the work and amount of the time spent are simply uncorrelated."So, Still is a debating question for Whom to hire, Not good, Mediocre or The expert coders?Lets see how quality of prigrammers affects quality of software.?- Many Mediocre Programmmers with Medium salary,Few Expert programmers with High Salary(Or they wont work).History proves that :Mediocre have not developed anything so far good, where only experts have done.(So i feel we should stick to expert only).Well, what i think is author is saying all the happenigs with proofs, now its us who choose what talent to keep at what levels and areas, that means, its resource and talent management we gotta do. You cant opt expert developer to sales or a web dev to do test a product. Its like impedance matching, You gotta manage who's gonna interact with whom.People like to feel in control, or people like to feel the product more than to use, Have the best. Like Social Tables - it give client and hotels to feel in control of each others.FINAL CONCLUSION : The company work flow model is very good, and author is unnecessarily made the article to be complicated. Which can be put in fews lines as follow : Few expert programmers with Good talent management with all the laws of IT - are enough for starting company / Making Fortune !

It was a very good article and i really liked the theory Best Working Conditions,Best Programmers would lead to Profits.Article completely relates to my previous company i was working in.Idea behind the product was good but the Quality of the code was not upto the mark,database queries were not optimised so product was very slow compared to other competitors.So i agree that Success or failure of company depends upon quality of their code.Also he says that,Adding manpower to a late software Project makes it later yes,in previous company when i joined our teams size was 6 and they went on hiring developers making team size to 18 which many a times lead to crossing release deadlines out of which some were not hitting high notes so i think finding best people will add some value to companyAlso he speaks about,Quality of the work and amount of time spent is simply uncorellated,you cant judge productivity based on the time spent.

It is a good article to follow for software company software company start ups , his formula was efficient that a "Best Working Condition", "Good Programmer" and "Best Software" can definitely make the Company "Profit".Joel also had an experience that, He got a offer from other company,The CEO of company instead hiring the best programmers He used one King David, and an army of soldiers who merely had to be able to carry out orders. His company's stock price promptly dropped from 20 to 5.He also said that Microsoft has a great recruiting strategy. They hire inexperienced, smart people right out of college... people that haven't learned from dysfunctional corporate cultures elsewhere. These kids get to Seattle, not really knowing anybody, work their asses off, and absorb the Microsoft way of doing things like a sponge.Joel also gave a good example that If you want to be the number one restaurant in town, you have to worry about how to get the best chefs and the best ingredients. You are a factory that converts raw ingredients and chefs to a dining experience. If you are a movie studio, you have to worry about getting the best actors, directors, and writers. You are a factory that converts talent into entertainment.So if you are a software company, you have to get the best chefs and directors: you are company that converts talent into code. The right talent knows how to make the right code which will make you successful.