(Note : le présent article n’est pas une apologie de l’indépendantisme Polisarien. Il s’agit d’un effort de dé construction d’une réalité confuse que très peu de marocains connaissent, car cachée par nos dirigeants depuis 30 ans)

- “What does attract you in the desert?”

- “It is clean…”

C’était la réponse du Major T.E. Lawrence (Al-Orance pour les tribus arabes). Le Sahara n’est pas propre. Il est plein d’os blanchis, de carcasses calcinées d’avions, de chars, de divers véhicules, des cadavres d’une guerre qui dure toujours (même avec un cessez-le-feu)

La cause du Sahara, c’est deux thèses antagonistes : Sahara Marocain vs Sahara Occidental. C’est aussi une survivance de la guerre froide, un point où Est et Ouest se mesuraient par marionnettes interposées. Mais au fond, combien de marocains connaissent l’histoire vraie ? Ou tout au moins, combien ont les bonnes informations pour se faire une idée à peu près correcte de la situation ?

I. A l’origine, l’opération Ecouvillon/Ouragan

Ecouvillon a certainement été à l’origine du problème. En 1958, Le Maroc avait une armée ‘officielle’, structurée comme les armées modernes et encadrée à l’européenne (les FAR) et une guérilla bien équipée, très mobile et en constante coordination avec sa consœur algérienne. Il s’agit de l’Armée de Libération Marocaine, qui opérait au nord du Maroc depuis 1955, et qui s’est infiltrée petit à petit au Sud, après la signature des accords de La Celle Saint-Cloud. Ceux qui sont passés par le système marocain se rappellent peut être (ou pas…) les cartes géographiques ou le Maroc recouvre peu à peu son indépendance et son autorité sur des territoires donnés. Au sud de Sidi Ifni, les français et les espagnols étaient encore présents, et l’ALM-Sud opérait souvent des incursions en profondeur pour détruire des installations militaires franco-espagnoles. Cette armée avait des chefs comme Fqih Basri, M. Bensaïd Aït Idder, A. Yousoufi, résistants qui entendaient prolonger la lutte armée pour libérer tous le Maghreb.

Dans ce contexte, la monarchie marocaine (ainsi que ses alliés ‘objectifs’ en Europe et aux Etats-Unis) s’inquiétait de ce rival potentiel, d’autant plus que l’ALM était qualitativement et quantitativement supérieure aux FAR : certes, les officiers coloniaux marocains reversés étaient compétents, mais l’expérience unique des combattants de l’ALM, rodés aux opérations de guérilla (urbaine et classique) et de style ‘commandos’ lui donnait un avantage décisif. Cette ALM était donc un danger pour la monarchie, qui tenta par tous les moyens de l’asphyxier : en essayant de corrompre ses dirigeants (Sanhaji raconte que tout chef de l’ALM qui faisait allégeance à la monarchie avec un groupe de plus de 25 combattants était automatiquement intégré à la fonction publique, aux FAR, était éligible à un agrément de transport, etc…)

Ou encore en coupant les vivres : sous sa primature, A. Ibrahim a souvent défendu Benhamou et Basri devant Mohamed V, et surtout, My Hassan, les premiers se plaignaient de l’interruption du ravitaillement, interruption initiée par le prince héritier, et de son conseiller militaire, le Cdt Blair (de l’US Navy et très probablement de la CIA)

En 1958, Les combattants de l’ALM avaient habitude de partir de leurs bases en territoire marocain –avec la discrète neutralité bienveillante des gardes frontières marocains- et frapper en zone occupée. Les franco-espagnols décident de couper court à l’impunité des combattants ALM et larguent un millier de parachutistes derrière la frontière marocaine (le 7^ème Régiment de Para Coloniaux et la Légion étrangère espagnole y participent) et prennent à revers l’ALM et les tribus sahraouies qu’elle arme. Elle est donc entièrement annihilée, et beaucoup de sahraouis garderont souvenir de cette opération. Les membres de l’ALM gardent le souvenir d’une trahison, les autorités marocaines les ayant abandonnés face à un adversaire bien renseigné et surtout, largement supérieur en nombre et en matériel (que peuvent faire les mortiers et fusils des combattants, contre les avions et les canons lourds du contingent Franco-espagnol ?)

Pour le Polisario, l’ALM était simplement un corps d’instructeur (mercenaires même). On comprendra plus tard pourquoi ce mythe fondateur est nécessaire à la littérature du Polisario pour trouver les racines d’un ‘nationalisme sahraoui’.

II El Ouali Mustapha Sayyed : Un patriote mal connu

« Fils de résistant, issu de la tribu des Thallat, le futur leader sahraoui grandit à Tan Tan, entre à l’école tardivement.[…] (Il) s’inscrit en faculté de droit à Rabat. C’est là que sa conscience politique se forme. […] Ses enseignants saluent ce “pur idéaliste dont l’adversité ne semble pas dévoyer la cause sahraouie”, ses camarades apprécient cet “esprit libre qui ne souffre aucun sectarisme”.

El Ouali n’envisage pas l’indépendance, bien au contraire. “Ces dignes héritiers de l’ALN veulent parachever ce qui n’a pas été permis à leurs aînés, réparer cette frustration, encore cruellement vivace, d’avoir été empêchés de pénétrer au Sahara armes à la main”, se rappelle un militant de gauche, qui les a côtoyés.

Entre-temps, El Ouali voyage, commence par l’Algérie où Bensaïd Aït Ider lui apporte son appui, jusqu’au jour où il lui fait état de ses projets sécessionnistes. “La révolution au Maroc, oui, mais la scission du territoire, non”, » (TelQuel n°210)

A l’évidence, quelque chose s’est passé entre le moment où El Ouali militait pour le rattachement du Rio de Oro espagnol au Maroc, et le moment où il fait appel à la Libye, puis aux Algériens pour armer et financer ce qui deviendra plus tard le Polisario. A Tan Tan en 1972, El Ouali organise une manifestation contre l’occupation espagnole du Sahara, est arrêté, puis enlevé par la police marocaine, puis relâché quelques mois plus tard. Bien entendu, cette arrestation en plus de ses activités politiques à l’UNEM, font qu’il passera par la torture ordinaire de l’époque. Dans l’optique makhzénienne, le patriotisme ne peut s’exprimer que par ses voies officielles, en proclamant l’attachement au trône et à la monarchie. C’est cette vision qui peut expliquer partiellement la décision de la monarchie pour étouffer l’ALM en la livrant littéralement, aux anciens colonisateurs. la majorité des combattants n’était peut être pas républicaine, mais aspirait vivement à un nouvel ordre des choses, ce que la monarchie, et –cette fois, ses alliés intérieurs- les anciens collaborateurs réhabilités, refusait catégoriquement.

El Ouali est donc dégoûté, mais ne se tourne pas directement vers le séparatisme. Il rallie les dirigeants de gauche, exilés en Algérie ou en France (Bensaïd Aït Idder ou Fqih Basri) pour participer à leurs projets (notamment l’organisation du Tanzim.) : ‘Arrivé à Tripoli le fqih Basri enrôle (El Ouali){…}, très vite, Mahmoud (Bennouna) et Basri découvrent en El Ouali les qualités d’un chef capable d’ouvrir un troisième front dans le Sud’

Remarquons que jusqu’en 1973, El Ouali opère avec des marocains, en tant quel tel, pour combattre le despotisme hassanien de l’époque. Après ? On peut lier deux évènements à l’intervention des services secrets algériens : Mars 1973 a été échec pour le Tanzim, car ce dernier a été, entre autres, infiltré par des agents marocains avec la neutralité bienveillante des algériens, ces derniers ayant aussi opposé toutes sortes de difficultés pour l’approvisionnement et les communications. Du côté d’El Ouali, il n’est pas impossible de penser qu’une manipulation algérienne et libyenne l’ait conduit à envisager de plus en plus l’idée d’un Sahara indépendant. Quand il est question d’Algérie ou de Libye ici, ce sont des forces occultes, manipulées à leur tour par les services de renseignement de pays plus grands : CIA et KGB ont déjà eu l’occasion de coopérer pour dévoyer des mouvements tiers-mondistes à leur propre bénéfice…

10 Mai 1973, le Polisario est officiellement créé, et engage des raids contre les postes espagnols : il ne s’attaque pas au territoire marocain, et se focalise sur la lutte contre les espagnols. Juin 1976, sa petite colonne est éliminée par l’armée Mauritanienne (avec le soutien de l’aviation française ?) devant Nouakchott. Sa mort ouvre la voie à une nouvelle phase dans le problème du Sahara.

III. Le Maroc, La Marche Verte, la guerre des sables

En 1975, la Monarchie ne tient que par la terreur policière. Hassan II a besoin de reprendre l’initiative face à un mécontentement populaire croissant (on enregistre de plus en plus de révoltes populaires dans les petites localités perdues du Maroc inutile) et des dates comme 1971, 1972 et 1973, prouvent qu’on peut dangereusement menacer le pouvoir. C’est ainsi que la marche verte allait permettre à la monarchie de reprendre l’initiative, et réactiver -à son bénéfice bien sûr- le vieux nationalisme marocain. Curieux retournement de situation : la Koutla (Istiqlal, UNFP puis l’USFP qui se créé en 1975 par scission de l’UNFP) qui compte beaucoup d’anciens résistants, perd une revendication qu’elle a longtemps fait sienne : la récupération des territoires marocains encore sous domination colonialiste (y compris la Mauritanie) à un moment où la monarchie souhaitait d’abord consolider son emprise sur les territoires de 1956. La Marche verte, est, en ce sens, une initiative audacieuse, plus dirigée vers des buts de politique intérieure, que par des considérations de ‘libération nationale’. 1975, c’est aussi l’année de la mort de F. Franco, dictateur de l’Espagne et, comme son collègue Salazar, inconscient des changements du monde après 1945.

La Marche verte, c’est aussi l’infiltration des FAR en zone sud, et dès 1976, des accrochages avec l’APLN Algérienne, et le Polisario, qui se renforce des milices espagnoles, composées de soldats Sahraouis. le Polisario, en plus de disposer d’une force armée disciplinée et en parfaite connaissance du terrain, reçoit du matériel moderne de Libye, d’Allemagne de l’Est, le Yougoslavie et de Tchécoslovaquie, et des renseignements précieux des Algériens. le Maroc reçoit le soutien de la France et des USA, mais le matériel reçu n’est pas très utile dans une guerre du désert, où la mobilité et l’armement léger et rustique obtiennent plus de résultats qu’une armée conventionnelle, à l’armement certes de qualité, mais fragile sous le climat sec du Sahara, et l’incompétence de militaires ayant peu ou pas d’expérience. Ce n’est qu’en 1991 que le climat se détend, et les deux belligérants signent un cessez-le-feu.

IV. Quel Sahara pour quel Maroc ?

La proposition marocaine d’autonomie sahraouie suppose un référendum constitutionnel : une partie du territoire marocain disposera d’une autonomie accrue, et le principe d’extension de ces avantages à d’autres régions marocaines suppose un changement profond du système administratif du pays. Un changement de telle ampleur doit s’effectuer à travers un réaménagement de la constitution. Une solution parmi d’autres serait de faire du Maroc une fédération de régions avec de larges attributions, mais qui se rattachent à l’idéal du Maroc pluriel mais indivisible. Une réforme constitutionnelle, redistribuant les pouvoirs au bénéfice du peuple marocain, sera nécessaire pour faire en finir avec ce ‘grand malentendu’

Bibliographie :

TelQuel n°210

‘Héros sans Gloire, Echec d’une révolution’ Mehdi Bennouna

‘Les Trois Rois’ Ignace Dalle

‘سنوات الصمود في قلب الإعصار’ Mohamed Louma & Abdellah Ibrahim

‘La Grance Encycolpédie du Maroc – Institutions’ Collectif

Last night I hosted a session about the Visual Studio 2010. Speaker was Gerard van der Pol from Microsoft NL. This time it wasn’t about what’s new with the (obviously) improved IDE and .NET Framework 4, but it was all about the features regarding Team Foundation Server (TFS). Of course, there are lot of new features to talk about and so little time. I’ll describe some features Gerard was demonstrating.

First, let me say that the title of this post is a bit wrong. The brand Team System will disappear, so it is only Visual Studio 2010.

Also, the editions will change a bit:

Regarding to Team System (or should I say ALM) there are 2 new products: Visual Studio Test Elements and Visual Studio Team Lab Management.

With Lab Management it is possible to create and configure your environments to help testers more easily test a variety of configurations in a virtual lab environment, and help developers more easily repro bugs by delivering snapshots of those virtualized environments after bugs are discovered. For more information, watch this Channel9 video.

With Test Record & Playback you can actually record and playback your test plan and steps. The video’s will be accessible for the developer from the work item. For more information, watch this Channel9 video.

Do you recognize this:

• You’ve received reports of a crash from a tester, but on your local box you can’t get the bug to reproduce.
• You’ve received a crash dump from the tester along with the bug. But the call stack that actually caused the crash was just a cascading effect and you can’t trace the bug back to the root issue.
• The bug that you are currently working at resolving has an extremely long set of reproduction steps and you just accidentally stepped over the function that is returning bad data.

IntelliTrace, formerly known as Historical Debugging, can help you out now! IntelliTrace is similar to that of a black box in a plane. It’s keeping track of important points in your programs execution and allow you to play back what happened at those points at a later time. For more information, click here.

With the new Profiler you get a really great look at how your code is performing. It comes with couple of new features for developers:

• CPU Sampling
  Measures CPU-bound applications with low overhead.
• Instrumentation
  Measures function call counts and timing.
• .NET Memory Allocation (Sampling)
  Track managed memory allocation.
• Concurrency
  Detect threads memory for other threads.
  • Collect resource contention data
  • Collect thread execution data

Profiler includes a new page called the Function Details page, which will depict the caller/callee information in a graphical way along with the performance metric. You can also view your code which includes the line-level performance measurements.

To end this post, I want to tell you about Gated Check-in. We all have colleagues who are checking in their code and you end up with a non building solution. With Gated Check-in you can prevent users to check-in their code unless it all builds! And it is also possible to run your tests too, before allowing to check-in.

For more information, click here.

I was truly amazed with all the new features of Visual Studio 2010 regarding ALM and had a great night. Go explore for yourself!

Folgende Aufnahme entstand an einer Hanglage in Blatten (Wallis/Schweiz). Das gelbe Fächli könnte auch als Post-it durchgehen.

10 декабря 2009 года, на конференци “Разработка сложных систем и приложений с базами данных: инструменты, технологии, принципы”, Дмитрий Никонов (Amazon.com) и я будем рассказывать о новых возможностях Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 для разработки баз данных.

В частности, мы расскажем о новом продукте Project Fuze, расширяющем функциональность Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010  и позволяющий вести полноценную разработку не только под Microsoft SQL Server, но и под Oracle.

Приходите, будет интересно! Зарегистрироваться можно на сайте Careerlab.

В конце октября в Москве прошла международная конференция SECR 2009, на которой я читал доклад Team Foundation Server – роскошь или средство передвижения? Практический опыт разработки «коробочного» продукта. Презентацию можно скачать здесь.

Recently, I got asked this question by a prospect – a large bank’s SEPG head. Their exact question was – How does Digité help with the developer experience? Clearly, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools have made the life of the PMO, the SEPG, the Quality group, the Project Managers and the executive management better. But how do they benefit the folks doing the actual development?!

Here was my response to them about specifically what we, at Digité, have done to improve the life of the Development Team – the Business/ Functional Analyst, the developers and the testing team.

• Digité’s Unified Inbox automatically collects all the tasks and artifacts that a team member needs to work on, sorted by project, priority and urgency. No more time wastage in search and follow-up to figure out what work they are supposed to do next!
• Digité’s integrated set of products ensure that there is minimal wastage of effort in learning the tool itself, in navigating from one tool to another due to an integrated UI and a single repository, other than the code repository.
• Our Requirements and Change management features enable Business/ Functional Analysts and users collaborate continuously to identify, build and manage requirements collaboratively. They work on individual requirements, decompose them online, baseline and review them; and track any changes to them throughout the development lifecycle. For the Agile practitioners, Digité provides User Stories and Iterations to plan, prioritize and build their user stories in iterations assigned to specific releases.
• Digité’s Integrated Traceability ensures that developers understand a software requirement along with other related items – user requirements, change-requests, test cases, documents – all thru a single integrated view – so that they can work with a holistic understanding of the business. Similarly, the developer’s ability to view a defect holistically – through viewing associated failed test case(s), the related software/ user requirements, etc. means that a developer gets a full understanding of what failed, why it may have failed and do a full impact analysis – thus ensuring that the developers do an effective job of fixing the defect. This prevents a significant amount of rework and ensures a much higher level of initially delivered quality and conformance to requirements.
  
• Our Eclipse/ Subversion/ CVS/ VSS adapters ensure that navigation between the developer’s environment and Digité is minimal – and developers and testers can focus on doing their work rather than managing their work. Within Eclipse, they get to view all of their tasks and other work items and are also able to post their effort to Digité Timesheet without leaving the Eclipse environment.
• If tracking effort is important to you, you may like this. Our customers report that their developers take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours each week (!) to update their timesheets.  We provide an automatically populated timesheet and integrated time-logs available alongside each work item for immediate update as soon as a developer completes working on it.

All of the above have resulted in anywhere from 20-35% direct impact on developer productivity and equally importantly, 45-60% improvement in initial quality of product delivered and overall organizational productivity.

At Digité, we use our product for pretty much everything we do – as Sudipta, our VP of Engineering and Services, explained so well in a related blog post – Are you still without an ALM Tool? I can’t tell you how many times our team members have given us the feedback about how convenient and time-saving it is for them to use Digité for managing their own development/ implementation work!

I would also love to hear from you about your experience using Digité or any other ALM tools in terms of Developer experience and productivity.

In the last ten years, we have had major problems from Credit, Natural Catastrophes and Equities all at least twice.  Looking around at the risk exposures of insurers, it seems that we are due for a fall on Interest Rate Risk.

And things are very well positioned to make that a big time problem.  Interest rates have been generally very low for much of the past decade (in fact, most observers think that low interest rates have caused many of the other problems – perhaps not the nat cats).  This has challenged the minimum guaranteed rates of many insurance contracts.

Interest rate risk management has focused primarily around lobbying regulators to allow lower minimum guarantees.  Active ALM is practiced by many insurers, but by no means all.

Rates cannot get much lower.  The full impact of the historically low current risk free rates (are we still really using that term – can anyone really say that anything is risk free any longer?) has been shielded form some insurers by the historically high credit spreads.  As the economy recovers and credit spreads contract, the rates could go slightly lower for corporate credit.

But keeping rates from exploding as the economy comes back to health will be very difficult.  The sky high unemployment makes it difficult to predict that the monetary authorities will act to avoid overheating and the sharp rise of interest rates.

Calibration of ALM systems will be challenged if there is an interest rate spike.  Many Economic Capital models are calibrated to show a 2% rise in interest rates as a 1/200 event.  It seems highly likely that rates could rise 2% or 3% or 4% or more.  How well prepared will those firms be who have been doing diciplined ALM with a model that tops out at a 2% rise?  Or will the ALM actuaries be the next ones talking of a 25 standard deviation event?

Is there any way that we can justify calling the next interest rate spike a Black Swan?

Visual Studio finally builds a bridge, to Eclipse…

Will really help Microsoft, down the road; and be an additional challenge for Rational, Borland, MKS, et al.  Very smart move.

Jhilam Nandi, Head of India Sales and Marketing, informs a curious visitor at the booth about the various tools offered.

Dear Kovair Friends,

I’m posting this blog from the Kovair Kolkata office where I am spending the week with our Product Development group. The content of this blog, however, focuses on my visit to Bangalore last week where Kovair participated in the SPM-ICON event from October 29-30, focusing on IT Project Management. Kovair participated as the Gold sponsor of the event along with Microsoft as the Platinum sponsor and IBM as the Event sponsor.  As you can see by the names, we were in very good company and received great reception and recognition! This was the 5th annual event and we participated for the first time. This was also our first major marketing event in India where we started focusing on since Spring 2009.

Kovair CEO and Chairman Bipin Shah (myself, right) gives one of three cash prizes to an ecstatic winner.

The first day of the event primarily comprised of tutorial sessions where we networked and conducted a quiz on ALM and ITSM and gave out cash prizes to three winners. On Day 2, we had some very interesting sessions with a keynote address by Bob Hoekstra, former CEO of Phillips and a well-known face in Bangalore based on his past there. The day’s sessions were managed by individuals from some major IT companies in Bangalore such as Program and Project Management from Wipro, Challenges of Managing Projects to Improve Efficiency by HCL, Managing Software Product Portfolio with Real Insights & Real Metrics by IBM Rational and Managing Changes by Infosys. Kovair was provided with a vendor speaking slot where we presented the “Kovair Value Proposition for IT Projects and Service Management.”

Colonel Ravindranath shares his experience at the conference.

For those who wanted to hear something about project management from a non-IT perspective, there was an excellent and somewhat emotionally charged presentation by Colonel Ravindranath from the Indian army where he described the Project Management aspects of recapturing the Tololing peak by his battalion during the Kargil war between India and Pakistan a few years ago at an elevation of over 16,000 feet! The project included many details of planning, communicating, training, rehearsing and logistical planning, including the manual lifting of ammunition at night by couple of hundred soldiers and support personnel for over a week without the enemy realizing what was happening in the darkness of the night! While it was interesting from a planning and execution perspective, it was very sad to hear about the casualties of such an undertaking and realizing the tragic part of any war and how it affects the people and their families who get sacrificed in any such conflict!

Our booth drew several people and it was interesting for this writer to see the Bangalore IT crowd in action with attendees from the “who is who” of IT companies in India such as IBM (yes, you can also call it an Indian IT company with an employee count of 50,000 in India), Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, HCL, Mindtree and many others!

For further details and to view presentations and/or download the Kovair presentation, please visit http://www.qsitglobal.com/spm-icon-2009/.

On another note, I would like to mention that Kovair is in the process of signing up two VARs in the Bangalore area — Vedasoft and GenXT so that we can better serve our customers in the India market – particularly in the Bangalore area with it’s large presence of both Indian and Global IT and Technology companies.

Thanks for reading this and I hope you will visit the Kovair website at www.kovair.com for other information and updates!

Sincerely,

Bipin Shah
CEO and Chairman

My bulk email this week included a message from the IBM developerWorks team with a link to their narrative about using IBM Team Concert as the hub for an organization’s software engineering process.  After last week’s analysis of VS 2010, I was curious if an apples-to-apples comparison between these two mega-vendors would turn up material price differences.

The Question: How does Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 pricing compare with IBM?

In last week’s model, I created baskets of Visual Studio products with ALM functionality for teams sized from 5 to 50 people.  This week I added baskets for IBM Team Concert at the same sizes.  I use public pricing straight from both vendors web sites.

I’ve changed the displays this week to compare price per seat, while last week I was showing my estimate of total costs per team.  I think this view is more useable when comparing vendors.

The IBM baskets were a little trickier to build.  For one thing there are more dimensions to their solution than Microsoft.  You can deploy Team Concert on open source infrastructure or you can choose IBM proprietary infrastructure.  In my analysis below I assumed a deployment to open source infrastructure, so there are no costs for WebSphere or DB2 built in to these comparisons.  This decision helps keep an apples-to-apples comparison. I ignored TCO, like the cost of servers and rack space, and maintenance cost.  Both IBM and Microsoft licenses come with one year of maintenance.

Again, like last week, I tried to be sensible with product mix in each basket.  You will get different values when you model your own choices and discounts, particularly in the small team sizes (and over 50!). If you’d like my Excel file feel free to contact me directly. If you tell me who you are and a little about your team and what you’re doing with ALM tools I’ll be happy to send it along.

Here’s the analysis.

Table 1:  Per Seat ALM Tooling Costs: Visual Studio 2010 and Team Concert

Figure 1: Per Seat ALM Tooling Costs: Visual Studio 2010 and Team Concert

From this analysis we see Microsoft’s announced VS 2010 pricing will be lower, except for teams less than five people, than IBM’s current pricing.  Remember Microsoft just announced their reduced price structure, before that, these comparisons would be close to equal.  Also, the apples-to-apples comparison applies only when you target Windows (irony of Windows as Apple not intentional!).  The IBM tools enable teams targeting multiple platforms and application frameworks including Linux , Java and Windows.  Visual Studio is for Windows only.

I propose two cost factors applicable to a general budgeting model are $1,300 for a seat of base developer tools and $5,550 for a premium seat.

Finally, the 4x price difference between base and premium products begs for deeper analysis, for either vendor.  Obviously, optimizing the blend of products will make a material difference in your overall spend.

For kicks, I ran out the analysis to larger team sizes, but the values I calculated for IBM pricing jumped so dramatically, I concluded I wasn’t getting an apples-to-apples comparison anymore.  I don’t want to speculate here why that is, but in your modeling you should be aware comparing deals over 50 seats requires modeling other considerations beyond the published pricing.

Build a model!

-k2

Future Considerations has looked at the top five draft prospects as well as some of the draft eligible talent the CHL has to offer for 2010 in part I and part II of this introduction series to the NHL Entry Draft. In part III, FC looked at prospects on US soil and in part iv, Russia’s contributions to the 2010 NHL Entry Draft is revealed. In part v, we examine the contributions the rest of Europe has to offer.

While the 2010 NHL Entry Draft is looking like the year of the Russian revival, they are not going to be the only contributors of quality prospects coming from Europe.

Finland, Sweden, Slovakia, Switzerland and even Germany have some promising talent that could hear their names called early in the draft next June, though the Czech Republic looks as though it could be an off year with no real high-end talent.

Along with Russia, Finland looks to have the other top end European guys for 2010 such as HIFK Helsinki pint sized forward Mikael Granlund who has offensive skills to burn. He is tearing up the top Finnish men’s league, the SM-Liiga, with HIFK at a point-per-game pace.

The five-foot-10 forward is never going to be a player who uses his strength to his advantage but that is okay because he possesses the tenacity, quickness, smarts and elusiveness that have made such diminutive NHLers like Patrick Kane, Saku Koivu and Martin St.Louis successful.

Granlund is a phenomenal skater who has loads of skill and offensive creativity. He does not shy away from contact or rough play and has learned to use his leverage to compensate for strength even at such a young age. The Finn is an accomplished playmaker with outstanding vision that makes his line mates better because he has great timing on his passes and puts them in positions to succeed. While he is primarily a playmaker, Granlund can also finish off plays or do it all himself when give the time and space.

Granlund’s countryman Teemu Pulkkinen plays in the top men’s league SM-Liiga with Jokerit Helsinki and is also considered by many as a first rounder for 2010.

The right winger is just a tad larger than Granlund at almost six-feet and has shown his impressive wares during many past international tournaments, especially at the U18 tournament last spring in the US. Pulkkinen has incredible Datsyukian hand skills and can really make defenders get twisted up in their own jock straps when they defend him one-on-one when he’s got the puck.

Pulkkinen’s passing ability is also his best strength as he makes some beautiful tape-to-tape passes but he also has one of the better shots to compliment his skill set. He is not as productive as his fellow countryman Granlund thus far but is still doing well. On the negative, Pulkkinen has been accused of being a bit of a cocky “hot dog” that will hopefully improve once he matures.

After such a strong group of Swedish prospects in 2009 this seasons ‘Tre Kroner’ prospect pool pails in comparison but that does not mean that there is no talent coming from the small Scandinavian country for the 2010 selection process.

Malmo left winger Victor Ohman has played in both the Junior-20 SuperElit League and in the second highest national league, HockeyAllsvenskan, this season.

The Redhawks forward plays a bit of a power game with a nice blend of skills and a solid skating stride. He is a double threat as he can equally distribute the puck with solid tape-to-tape passes and also has a nice shot and the ability to shot off the rush as well as finish in close. Early this season Ohman has been productive in the SuperElit U20 league with a around a goal per game production but has yet to make an impact at the HockeyAllsvenskan level.

Small but highly skilled is best used to describe Brynas forward Calle Jarnkrok, who is plying his trade in the SuperElit. He is burning up the league to the tune of two points-per-game and it will only be a matter of time before he is an Elite League regular.

The Gavle, Sweden native is a very quick, elusive skater who has a great set of hands and the shot to compliment his hands. Jarnkrok is a playmaker who predominantly looks pass before he thinks about how he could create a scoring chance for himself.

Another top Swedish forward prospect for the 2010 selection process is centre Adam Pettersson playing with Skelleftea in the SuperElit this season.

Pettersson is a prototypical Swedish two-way forward that spends a good portion of his ice-time paying close attention to defensive detail. The six-foot-one 200-pound forward is a solid skater with a smooth stride and nice top speed. Pettersson is considered primarily a playmaker that sees the ice well and has solid offensive instincts but is also equip to finish around the net with an excellent shot. He distributes the puck very effectively in the attacking zone using high percentage plays.

After the 2009 draft produced some of the best defenders to come out of Sweden in generations, the top defenseman this year looks to be Frolunda rearguard Johan Alm.

The six-foot-two solidly built defender blends a solid defense first style with some underdeveloped offensive abilities. He will never be a major point producer but he does have the ability to make consistently solid outlet passes.

Defensively, he is strong in his positional play and uses his reach and strength to his advantage. Alm doesn’t take chances and pinch but instead knows his strengths and sticks with them. He also has had his first taste of Elite League play early this season and did not look out of place.

The top first year draft eligible goalie coming out of Sweden looks to be big Skare BK stopper Johan Gustafsson.  The six-foot-two Gustafsson has the size that NHL organizations are looking for and the technical skills to compliment it.

Playing Division 1 hockey with Skare BK on a loan from the Frolunda organization he should get see loads of time between the pipes which will only help develop his skills although his exposure may suffer. The Koping, Sweden native is more of a shot blocking goalie with nice positioning than a reflex style keeper but he does possesses solid lateral mobility and overall quickness.

The 2010 draft has a Swiss “Can’t” Miss in Portland Winterhawks import winger Nino Niederreiter. The new age power forward is a nice blend of size, skill and strength and has had good success in transferring his game to the WHL this season.

Although not overly physical Niederreiter does use his size to his advantage and is strong on the puck protecting it well while not shying away from dirty areas of the ice. His ability to place a pin point accurate pass is outstanding. The six-foot-two forward has a good shot and a quick release which is complimented by his determination and solid on ice vision. He skates very well and has nice acceleration that he uses to throw defenders off.

The top German prospect, winger Tom Kuhnhackl, currently plays with the Landshut Cannibals in Germany’s second division but has seen some action in the countries top league as well.

It can be a little difficult to follow your fathers footsteps when he is named the nations hockey player of the century but that is exactly what Tom has to do after his father, Erich, was granted that honor in 2000. Luckily the younger has some of his father’s skills and size. He is a goal scorer who has quick hands and the natural sense of knowing where the puck will end up on the ice. He is relentless in pursuing the puck and in battles and is also willing to play physical around the net.

Defensively he has some holes as well as the bad habit of trying to do too much on his won. With that said though he is considered a solid top fifty prospect and one of the best overall prospects to come out of the German development system ever.

Kuhnhackl was selected by Windsor of the OHL in the 2009 CHL Import Draft although it is unknown if he plans on ever joining the team.

Lastly, is a Slovakian defender that has shown good talent and development for the better part of three years now in Martin Marincin of HC Kosice.

The towering rearguard, at just over six-foot-three, is considered a solid two-way contributor but his main strength is his ability to carry the puck up ice and create plays from the backend. Marincin has added some weight this off season but still needs more strength which will help his physical game.

He is a solid defender but still has a lot to learn in his own zone like keeping better position on attackers. Overall he has the tools to develop into a good pro prospect.

While there are many other talented prospects who look like they could be top round picks developing their games around the world, these are just a few of Future Considerations’ early favorites to keep an eye on as the season rolls along.

Proverbs 29:17: Discipline your children, and they will give you peace of mind and will make your heart glad.

For many the word discipline brings pictures to mind of being beaten, [I mean spanked] with a belt, made to kneel on raw rice, made to stand in a corner and so forth. But what does that word really mean?

The Hebrew word for discipline is yasar, which means to chastise, literally (with blows) or figuratively (with words); hence, to instruct — bind, chasten, chastise, correct, instruct, punish, reform, reprove, sore, teach.

Wikipedia says: To discipline thus means to instruct a person to follow a particular code of conduct or “order.” In the field of child development, discipline refers to methods of modeling character and of teaching self-control and acceptable behavior”.

As parents we need to discipline our children not for immediate results but for their future. If a child doesn’t get disciplined he will not possess the character trait of self-discpline which is a necessary tool for success as an adult.

Note to self: I model the behavior I expect from my children. that is the best way to teach, and discipline. What’s caught is retained longer than what is taught.

I have spent a lot of time over the last 10 years discussing or working with a large number of our customers who have moved away from the ‘traditional’ methods of managing software projects to a more centralized and “institutional” method. An overwhelmingly large number of these companies have evaluated Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools as their first option for moving away from their disparate solutions, which usually would be a combination of MS Project on the desktop, email, spreadsheets and a lot of hand-waving!

The promise of PPM tools is enticing.  From the capability of management dashboards that unambiguously tell you whether projects are in Green, Yellow or Red status, to being able to smoothly make Fund/ Kill or Go/ No Go decisions about a project that is not exactly meeting its objectives, the case for PPM appears crystal clear.  Who would not want such capability?

The reality however has been somewhat different for a number of companies.

Can I really trust my PPM dashboard?

In other words, is the data reliable?  How is it being collected, collated and consolidated?  Is there a reliable process behind this?  Are basic steps such as estimation, time tracking and baselining of projects in place? 

When organizations and project teams attempt to move away from managing projects using office productivity tools and other point solutions, they are not just switching tools, they are very often changing fundamental processes of how they work and how they manage their work.  PPM tools demand a significant level of data reliability – which translates to process maturity – at the ‘operational’ level; to ensure that all aspects of project effort are being looked at, all the project deliverables – not just tasks but various deliverables and work items – from requirements to documents, from test scripts to defects – are being considered in computing the ‘real status’ of projects.  This means that execution/ operational level processes need to be in place and automated so they can feed reliable data to the PPM solution.

A lot of PPM efforts have resulted in failure due to this fundamental problem of lack of automation at the operational level of project teams and the lack of project team buy-in. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools that include or integrate with PPM/ Process Governance tools can much more effectively help in this regard.

Where do I file my time for this issue?

One of the basic challenges of project planning tools such as MS Project is that they are great at project planning but not at managing project execution.  While PPM tools have ensured that some of the earlier challenges of over-dependence on the lone project manager have been taken care of, they still do not take care of resolving such basic issues as tracking effort on unplanned work. 

It is humanly impossible for a project manager to put down every last bit of work as part of their WBS.  On the other hand, filing time in a common “Miscellaneous” task means losing visibility to where 15-20% of the project effort might be being spent, so that one could plan better in the future!  Very often, PPM tools miss out on all the effort being spent on unplanned work in projects and thus relying on incomplete data for providing management status update.

Integrated ALM tools help by focusing on the project team and making them more productive rather than just providing a dashboard for senior management which may not be fully reliable.

Why are so many defects still open?

Have you run into these questions – “Is that project really green? Or did the PM omit to take into account the large number of unmet requirements?” Or, for that matter, “Is the testing task really completed?  Then why are all the defects still open?” 

The ability to drill down into a project’s ‘real’ status is most important for portfolio management teams.  PPM tools by themselves, do not and cannot provide this visibility and still continue to rely on the abilities of the project manager and project teams to ensure that they collect data from all sources and tools manually before providing that update. 

ALM tools with integrated PPM capability make the project managers far more effective by one, providing the PM a comprehensive view of the project and in fact, proactively alerting them of potential red-flags; and two, by dramatically reducing the overhead of collecting data from myriad sources and putting it all together for status reporting, resulting in as much as 40-55% increase in Project Manager productivity.

Where is the final revision of the requirement??!

The value of a single repository for all project artifacts cannot be measured.  Having managed projects directly and indirectly for over 20 years, I have seen project teams struggle with the simple task of  managing all the information and artifacts – requirements, change requests, documents, issues, defects, test cases, deliverables – related to their project across a combination of email, portals, network directories, configuration management systems and team members’ desktops – resulting in horrendous loss of productive hours and project delays.  Just to be able to go to a single place for all of that – makes team productivity go up by as much as 20-35%!  PPM tools do not address this crucial business need; and thus do not contribute to mitigating the very factors that lead to project failure.

I believe PPM tools are great management tools for executive decision making.  However, they do not focus on or deal with the operational processes that need to be in place so that PPM tools get reliable data.   In order to have a good executive information system, it is imperative that the operational processes are cleaned up and automated through a good set of execution/ operational tools.  In the world of applications, products and software, ALM tools do precisely that. To have a good PPM implementation, ALM solutions are not only necessary but are also a pre-requisite!

WE SHOULD ALL VOTE. We know that, but we, the so called educated elite have found certain excuses to skirt the issue.

Excuses for not voting:

1) My 1 vote does not count!!

Ask Shri. C.P. Joshi,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._P._Joshi

Shri. C.P. Joshi, currently Minister of Rural Development in the Union Cabinet under Manmohan Singh, lost his election to the Nathdwara Assembly seat in Rajasthan in 2008 by one, yes, ONE VOTE!!

HIS MOTHER, WIFE & DRIVER NOT GO TO VOTE that day!!!

He was the President of the Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee at that time and was credited with the Congress victory in the 2008 Rajasthan Assembly Elections. He would naturally also be a contender for Chief Ministership, but I guess that 1 vote made all the difference.

2) Whom should we vote for, they are all the same !!

Select the best candidate, not necessarily the best party…

3) Why waste our vote voting for those Independent Bankers and Professionals when they are not going to win…..

How many seats did Raj saheb Thackarey and his Maharashtra Navanirman Sena (MNS) win, 12/13 ….
How many seats did they make others loose. Many have put that figure close to 40 seats.

So, if for example, the Professional Party of India, or the like, are able to garner more votes than the margin of victory or defeat in many of the 38 Assembly segments in Mumbai alone, won’t that be a big chattering point on our news channels.

Politicians try to sway a block which is decisive in their victory or defeat.

Just visit any slum and see if Coastal Zone Regulations or CZR regulations are a speed breaker in an extra slum or an extra floor coming up near the sea shore.

Just visit your friendly neighbourhood slum to see if:

a) It has paver block tiles (or newspaper reading stands, or a temple, mosque or whatever) installed thanks to Corporator / MLA / MP LAD funds,
b) at a time when your tap runs dry to see if water is flowing through theirs
c) to have cold sherbet with water from their fridge, sitting on their sofa and coffee table set on a marbled floor watching your favorite cricket team playing on their telly (I have visited more than 1 such “slum”)
d) Try buying a slum, it may cost you more than 10 lakhs. They are truly slumdog millionaires! and they got their slum for free. oops, sorry, they voted for it !

If you, or your building, or club or community or ALM has the power to make some one loose an election, you will be wooed. Your problems will be heard and redressed.

So, we must learn from the MNS and make it matter where it hurts. If not in “our” victory, then at least in “their” defeat.

Unfortunately, the next (& the most important) elections are the BMC Corporator elections and they are still 3 years away!!

So in true Middle Class Mumbai voter tradition, lets plan where to head to for a well deserved holiday when that E-Day comes.

Jai Hind,
Jai Maharashtra,
Jai Mumbai

(And for my dear football crazy fellows,
Go Man U !!)

This week Microsoft provided preliminary pricing for its upcoming Visual Studio release, which Microsoft executives blogged to be March 22. The new packaging is a return to a small-medium-large model, and the 2010 names are Professional, Premium and Ultimate.  We knew this in the past as Standard, Professional and Enterprise.  Gone are products aimed at specific roles like Architect and Database Professional.

On first read, the document Visual Studio 2010 Packaging and Licensing Fact Sheet dated Oct. 19, 2009 made me suspect the US pricing was changing.  After a little Excelery, I believe the cost of ALM in 2010 products will be lower for most teams, substantially for some.

Here’s the analysis.

The Question: Does the cost for software licenses needed to outfit a team with ALM enabled development tools change from 2008 to 2010?

I chose to model a progression of team sizes: 5, 10, 25, and 50.  The mean and median sizes of teams tend to fall in this range.

For each team size, I define a basket of products that reasonably support that team.   Microsoft is making a significant change packaging Team Foundation Server with the desktop tools, so the contents of the baskets change between the two versions too.  Finally, I separate the baskets into two tiers, ALM Tooling and High-End Tooling.  The ALM Tooling includes core Visual Studio connected to Team Foundation Server with all team collaboration scenarios enabled.  High-End Tools add to ALM scenarios the special purpose tools like test impact analysis and code profiling.

I ignored TCO, like the cost of servers and rack space, and maintenance cost. Microsoft licenses come with one year of maintenance. I also ignored the upgrade promotions, assuming Microsoft is doing right by current customers.

I tried to be sensible with product mix in each basket and you may get different values when you model your own choices and discounts, particularly in the small team sizes. Mine is a simple model. I used the prices listed in the earlier linked document.  If you’d like my XLS file feel free to contact me directly. If you tell me who you are, a little about your team and what you’re doing with ALM tools I’ll be happy to send it to you.

Table 1:  ALM Tooling Costs with VS 2008 and VS 2010

Figure 1: ALM Tooling Costs with VS 2008 and VS 2010

Table 2: High-End Tool Costs with VS 2008 and VS 2010

Figure 2: High-End Tool Costs with VS 2008 and VS 2010

With this analysis, it looks like the cost of acquiring software licenses for ALM enabled Visual Studio is coming down.  Don’t be surprised to see Microsoft fine tune packaging and pricing before going final, so build a model to make it easier to keep track!

-k2

Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Landesmedienanstalten (ALM)

Según la constitución alemana, tanto la televisión pública como la comercial está bajo la jurisdicción de los Landers. Por este motivo,  es posible encontrar 14 consejos respectivos a cada Estado Federal Alemán. Estos consejos tienen cierta autonomía para regular sobre su territorio y a la vez existe un organismo que une estos consejos llamado ALM, que se encarga de establecer parámetros normativos a nivel nacional. Los 14 consejos son responsables de la concesión de licencias, así como la supervisión y desarrollo de las emisoras comerciales de radio y televisión.  La misión de la ALM es:

1. La salvaguardia de los intereses de los Estados miembros en el ámbito de la radiodifusión a nivel nacional e internacional.
2. Información y el intercambio de opinión con los organismos de radiodifusión.

3. El manejo de los asuntos comunes en el ámbito de los medios audiovisuales, especialmente la programación, cuestiones legales, tecnología, investigación, medios de comunicación y la financiación.

4. La obtención de opiniones de expertos sobre cuestiones que son de importancia fundamental para las tareas de las autoridades de los miembros,
5. Observación y análisis del desarrollo de programación, así como la preparación de dictámenes e informes en relación a esto.

Jordi Torquemada

Scrum and Extreme Programming currently dominate named Agile processes. Less well known, but equally important, Agile processes include Crystal, Dynamic Systems Development Methodology (DSDM), Feature Driven Development (FDD)

Today’s typical Agile process, no matter what name you call it, takes the best from the buffet of Agile practices to create a typical process where:

1. Project needs or requirements are expressed in user stories placed in a backlog, and ideally written by Product owners (in Scrum), or customers (in XP) in collaboration with the development team. (Sometimes they magically appear.)
2. Developers give high-level estimates saying how long user stories will take to complete.
3. Product owners arrange user stories into incremental releases that take typically 6 weeks to 6 months.
4. Product owners choose the next stories, highest value first, for each development time-box. The stories chosen need to “fit” into the time-box based on how quickly the team can produce software.
5. At the end of each development time-box the team should have incrementally built some of the product. The team (proudly) demonstrates the finished product to product owners and other stakeholders.
6. The team adds up the development estimates for the user stories completed during the time-box. This is the velocity (from XP) that’ll be used to estimate the amount that can be completed in the next time-box.
7. The team holds a retrospective to evaluate how well they’ve done and what changes could be made to the process to allow things to go better, then the next time-boxed development cycle is planned.
8. Time-boxed development continues through to release — which is a short way of saying “rinse and repeat.”

There’s more common practices, such as daily standup meetings to synchronize the team, and burn-down charts to show development progress

Many links are laced through the essay — but here are a bunch in no particular order:

• Toyota production system
• The Poppendieks on Lean Software Development
• Software by Numbers
• David Anderson on Kanban
• Corey Ladas on Scrumban
• Arlo Belshee’s Naked Planning
• Aaron Sanders Kanban ground rules
• InfoQ article from Kenji Hiranabe on Kanban
• My simple Powerpoint presentation on Kanban

via Kanban development oversimplified: a simple explanation of how Kanban adds to the ever-growing Agile toolkit.

This mini-conference will feature software development experts from ALM leaders AccuRev, Coverity, Electric Cloud, and VersionOne.

SEMINAR AGENDA

via Agile Journal, AccuRev, Coverity, Electric Cloud, and VersionOne Seminar.

Dear Friends,

There are two items that I would like to communicate to all of you in this blog.

The first one is that Kovair has recently completed a complete integration with the Eclipse Development Platform for all of you developers who love to work in the Eclipse environment.  This bi-directional integration allows you to connect with other tools in your development environment such as Test tools or SCM tools through the Kovair integration without leaving your Eclipse environment.  The Eclipse Plug in adapter is available from Kovair by contacting our Sales@Kovair.com   We would love to answer your questions.  A brief article on the subject written by Kovair VP of Engineering was contained in the Kovair October Newsletter that may be accessed from our website home page at www.kovair.com.

The second is to request you to look into attending our upcoming  webinar on the topic “Why Implement ITIL based IT Service Management?”  The webinar presentation by Mr. Bob Aiello a well known IT Consultant and a member of the IEEE Committee on ITIL Standards and Sky Basu, CTO of Kovair may be of interest to many of you who may be considering the ITIL Standards for your IT Service Management approach or for tools considerations.  It is free and you can register by going to the Kovair website homepage at www.kovair.com.

Thanks for your time in reading this update and hope to communicate to you at a regular frequency!

Sincerely,
Bipin Shah
CEO & Chairman
Kovair Software
www.kovair.com

Sorry for the lack of activity, have been working on a new whitepaper :^)

But be  sure and check out this great description of the updated Rational Requirements Composer 2.0

And have a happy Thanksgiving, one and all.

Version Control Systems(VCS) only covers a portion of Application Life cycle Management(ALM).  Its important to understand what your needs are and use the correct tools.  VCS will fall short if your looking to manage application life cycles.  If you are building enterprise solutions and run with large teams, making the investment in ALM pays off almost immediately.

Modern software projects tend to be very complex and require fast and efficient delivery cycles, that leave simple VCS systems lacking.  Even in small teams, ALM has many advantages.  I find very few cases where simply having a source control system is sufficient.

In the world of ALM, there are two approaches.  You can cobble together an ALM system from many tools or you can get an integrated solution.  I always prefer the later, because the cost of doing the tools integration is high.  In addition, it tends to create pockets of knowledge of the process workings and in some cases a single point of failure among the skill sets.  You can get integrated solutions from vendors like Borland, Microsoft or Serena.

There are cost differentials to consider.  Many of the ALM products or commercial and come with a price.  While you can probably get VCS, Defect, Project tracking tools to create an ALM process, you still pay for that in time and complexity.  A home built solution takes time to get off the ground and usually has that one guy that knows how it all works.  To everyone else it tends to be a mystery.

If your producing software, the quality can be directly impacted by the process that is applied to the production of the software.  Using an ALM tool can greatly amplify a software engineering teams ability to create a quality product.

Some of the benefits of ALM:

• Better collaboration and communication among teams
• Increased productivity and faster development through tool integration
• Improved quality and defect tracking
• Adaptability to business changes and market demand
• Improved project governance through visibility and transparency

Managing the life cycles around code are fundamental to leveraging your teams most effectively.  Everything that interacts with that code, from new requirements to maintenance support and defect corrections, can cause the code base to experience entropy.  There are already very complex process and problems and chaining effects of change that need to be mitigated.  Using tools that allow developers, testers and project managers to have visibility into the process and make adjustments quickly help to keep the product in a stable and manageable state.

As projects grow, the importance branching, merging and conflict resolution become extremely important.  And the ability to map artifacts to code and trace it through the process becomes vital to releasing features while maintaining existing features.  Planning and scheduling work against branches and communication with quality teams can be cumbersome when your process and tools are not integrated.

How you organize your teams and the tools they use can make or break the product you are trying to produce.  Simply using a VCS will limit your ability to be competitive in the marketplace.  He who has the best people and the best process wins.