Why Value Stream Mapping (VSM) Is One of the Strongest Tools for Any Transformation

In an era of rapid technological advancements and evolving customer expectations, businesses must continuously adapt and improve to remain competitive. So, businesses need to transform into a competitive self with efficient processes and collaborations for delivering their products and services. One of the most effective tools for achieving this is Value Stream Mapping (VSM). VSM is not just a tool; it’s a powerful methodology that helps organizations identify and eliminate waste, streamline processes, and drive meaningful transformation. Here, we will explore why VSM stands as one of the strongest tools for any transformation journey. What Is Value Stream Mapping? Value

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Microservices – Panacea or just another pattern?

Microservices is the keyword these days. And it is solving many problems, helping applications become agile and the support team getting better sleep. But, as it is catching the fire, it also raised eyebrows – is it necessary to have microservices in my application? The other day, I faced this question from such an angle. And, here I want to express my thoughts and experiences with microservices. First, let us accept that Microservices is just another design pattern. Each design pattern has a scope and is actually a path or approach to the solution to a design problem. So, microservices

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Why Shift Left? And how much?

The new mantra in town – “Shift Left“. So we wish to shift everything to left (except in the case of right-to-left, we shall do it otherwise). This is called the mantra of DevOps. Left of what? The delivery pipeline. The great thing that we often call CI/CD in the vocabulary of DevOps. The primary concept of DevOps is to reduce friction in the pipeline and enable early feedback to the stakeholders. This is more relevant when the team is using Agile process or methodology. It started with builds shifting left to have early feedback for success of a build.

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Breezing Devops on Bluemix

Bluemix is designed and build ground up taking care of Devops (the way to go for today’s development). It has very minimal task for the developer. As a developer, I remember the pain of going to a continuous integration system 10 years ago. It took so much of effort to convince the operations and infrastructure team to allow us to use a server as build server. And possibly doing all these took a very long time – around a year to demonstrate. The delay was not because of the technical issues, but operational issues took most of the time. Then

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Bluemix: The killer Blue!

IBM is bit new into the Cloud Based PaaS market, but came loaded with arsenals to make the competition blue! No wonder that market statistics is showing people moving from AWS and Azure to BlueMix. The base reason could be the simplicity and presentation. Let us look at few features I found to be so interesting to be put here: 1. Boiler Plates: Boiler plates are the basic application framework ready for extending to bring out a working app in little time. This is a great feature. Today when all startups are trying to grab the market with the leanest

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SharePoint App on SP2010

Almost everyone is waiting for SharePoint Apps that will be a reality with SP2013. However we started on SharePoint app on SP2010 itself. Hold on! Its not exactly what App will be on SP2013 but presents the same concept and that can be implemented on SP2010. The core pieces- HTML (prefer some SPA framework or CSS3 framework like Foundation or Bootstrap), jQuery, jQuery UI, Knockout and of course the SharePoint server(s). How we did it? There are two ways to use HTM within sharepoint: Using content editor webpart – you can keep the content of the html in a text

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Integrating IBM-Jazz: Some Pain Some Gain

Certain issues brings in a whole lot of frustration to the developers while integrating different products from different vendors. However it is generally expected that different vendors might implement different standards for certain thing. But one issue really gave me a good point to think about. Why products from same vendor implement different ways for same feature? Probably I am keeping you away from the issue and that might be again frustrating. But yes, try integrating IBM Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) and IBM Rational Asset Manager (RAM) at the same time, and the authentication techniques are quite away from each

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Integrating IBM-Jazz: oAuth for OSLC API

IBM has jazzed up their products and Jazz is the way to go. They are doing one good thing about integration, moving from traditional inconsistent API for different products to a consistent standard based API. And the standard is OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration). But for .NET people, stepping into IBM products is always need some additional effort as the support system is not very active on .NET based technologies. This is to share some initial exploration and results for such an integration. We were working on a .NET client for integration with Jazz RRC. The scenarios include creation,

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Importance of Up-Front Design or formal design discipline

Design-before-you-code is a school of thought that believes that what code is to be done (or what classes to be made and how they will interact) should be thought of and documented, reviewed looking at alternatives and also checking for the necessary and sufficient condition of fulfilling the need with probable extensibility in case of changes. So if we see, any one who is not doing "design" before coding, must also be having these thoughts in mind while firing up the code editor and writing the classes and its methods. If someone is thinking about the classes and its interaction,

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Goal Management -Goal partitioning for Construction phase

This is the third part in continuation to my earlier post Goal Management – Goal Management – Goal partitioning for Elaboration phase The goals that are set in the construction pahse is looking at the business goal of delivering some usable system to the end user or consumer. The goals in this phase are broadly:       *  To describe the remaining requirements     *  To flesh out the design of your system     *  To ensure that your system meets the needs of its users and fits into your organization's overall system portfolio     *  To complete component development

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