Travelling to Work by AutoRickshaw

Many foreign writers have written well about India, but truly this is a country that must be experienced for oneself .It will provoke a reaction that either appeals or does not, there is no in-between. This is a country that does not like to be controlled or forced, perhaps there are just so many people, communities, traditions, religions and so on, but India does like to flow and if you allow yourself to be flexible, armed with bucket loads of patience and a great sense of humour, then you will find the India that people fall in love with.

Along the way brace yourself for many misunderstandings as they are part of the course, due to the fact that English is still the second or third or fourth language, and it is common for people to speak 3 other Indian languages also. People do speak and understand English however it is a unique flavour of the English Language. I now speak two new basic languages Indian-English and Pigeon-Tamil, which are necessary and fun to use in communication during day-to-day life here. The reaction I get from my Tamil is priceless, especially from the Auto-Rickshaw drivers, however when they ask ‘your native place madam?’ and I proudly say Ireland, there is truly no connection I have found yet (except for our Cricketers World Cup 2011, but most have forgotten that now) for the Indian people to our beautiful Island, so they respond Iceland? Holland?, no a small country next to England I say sadly.

My daily one hour journey to work is like a National Geographic programme in reality, which suits me as I have always been an adventurous person who loves travelling, new-cultures and an avid photographer/videographer. So by the time I get to work, I have a head full of images and feelings from what I have just seen and every day is truly an adventure! This of course is true in any place in the world, however I guess the difference with India is that the experiences here are so powerful and colours so vibrant, noise, smells and so on, it is more intense than the quiet sparsely populated island I come from called Ireland. Most days are amazing, but there are some what I have termed ‘India Days’ where the patience runs dry, the misunderstandings high and the answer to all your questions could be the same nod for ‘yes and ‘no or ‘naalaiku’ which means tomorrow, in these cases it’s best to lay low, breathe and find yourself what I call an oasis. There are a few I have as a backup here!

My job here is what is called a ‘bridge’ which means I have an understanding of both cultures I work with. Naturally the stronger would be my own; however when one lives and works in another culture the understanding comes naturally in time, when you make an effort to integrate. This is by no means stating that I am an expert in the Indian culture, but I do feel very comfortable here, with many Indian friends and can now call Chennai my second home. At our office I am one of a team of multi-cultural bridges both from Europe and India, therefore promoting our banner slogan ‘bridging culture, building quality’ in a global software development way.

Áine Edwards
Manager – Business Development

Of all the controls that are commonly used on web applications, Grid controls are probably the most frequently used. I am very fortunate to have been part of a control development team and I was recently involved in creating a custom Grid control using JavaScript and ASP.net (Appframe Grid). I also went on to develop a complete client based grid control using jQuery (I am yet to give it a name). I just wanted to share my experience.

Before developing the control I identified what was required from the custom grid control that is important to our application development
1. Performance
2. Rich UI
3. Interactivity
4. Reduce load on server (Render essential controls on server and do the rest on the browser)
5. Cross browser support
6. Customizable
7. Easy maintenance

To get a faster response from the server, I decided to render only essential controls and pull the data as JSON objects. This would also free the server from rendering the grid control on the server.
To make sure the grid works on all browsers, we needed a library that was proven stable on most browsers. We have found that jQuery is probably the best JavaScript library around and it was the most suitable for our requirements and it comes with a fantastic set of UI which makes our job even easier!

We also designed our grid to load and render data on demand. It even fetches data from the server when the user scrolls down in the grid. The grid sends a request to the server for a chunk of data and appends it to the end of the grid and will continue doing the same until the grid is scrolled to the bottom of the data set.

The Grid also supports inline editing and the editing behavior for each column cell can be configured.

I initially developed the grid for an inhouse product. But then we got a customer project where the same functionality was required and with just some minor tweaking I was able to put it to use in the customer project as well.

This was a very good experience, and I am really looking forward to develop more controls.

Peter Samraj
Senior Software Engineer

• The concept of team involvement
• The concept of continuous integration (more agile concept than Scrum)
• Active involvement of the product owners
• Making a lot of small releases (in the form sprint releases) than to show the product at the end
• Including testers as part of the team right from day one

I also listed things I am not yet confident about (I will need to apply and find out)

• Velocity measurement
• Accuracy of effectiveness of estimation points and poker estimation exercise
• Effectiveness of Scrum for the work we do – more consulting where we don’t have a product backlog ready in sprint 0 (for example)
• Without automated tests, regression testing would be very time consuming and costly in Scrum esp. when the number of sprints is high
• Unless we have a well-defined backlog and a clear vision, shorter sprints like 2-3 weeks may not work

I have been using some aspects of Scrum before, but I want us to become more Agile. Following are things that I would like us to apply immediately are:

• Active involvement of team and product owners
• Including testers as part of the team

Looking forward to reap the benefits

Vanitha Venugopal
Manager – Projects

http://www.ey.com/IE/en/About-us/Entrepreneur-Of-The-Year/Awards-and-events/Community-Events—National-Events—India-Retreat

Friday 27th May

Claes Boström
IT Director,
SIFO

Dr Ross Maxwell
CEO,
Aros Development Limited

Read more…

Erik Råwall
Project Manager,
SKF Nova