Ajay Jain - WoW - Watch out World

Web Analytics is awesome

2010-01-06T16:08:00.000+05:30

The more you read/study/implement/collect/analyze metrics and data, more your interest grows in web analytics.

Data is huge but you need to take care what exactly to look for. Thats the key. An interesting case study I am currently thinking is how do the IT staff measure the benefit being acheived by created a knowledge base articles/quick pointers to issues/help webpage. one User is staying on the web page for 50 minutes and another for 5 minutes, which one is earning benefits to the company? also which one is exiting happily from the website?

Think

My International Publications reaches 5 :)

2010-01-05T08:49:00.003+05:30

1) Jain, A. (2009): “E3 – 3 effective ways of increasing test coverage”, International Conference of Information Systems andSoftware Engineering, India 2009.

2) Jain, A. (2009): “Retrospective Analysis and Prioritization Areas for Beta Release Planning Improvement”, 27th Annual Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC), USA, 2009.

3) Jain, A. (2009): “Sprint Retrospective Checklist – Method and Mechanism to Track Project Health and Dev‐QE Goal”, 9th International Software Testing Conference (STC), India 2009.

4) Jain, A. (2009): “Well Processed, Well Done”, Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination Conference, Finland, TUCS General Publication No. 54, 2009.

5) Jain, A. (2008): “Power of Glide Path: Statistical Approach for Controlling and adding Predictability in a Testing Project”, 8th International Software Testing Conference (STC), India 2008.

Enter the Mysterious world of Web Analytics

2010-01-05T08:23:00.000+05:30

that's my latest love on technology front. Web Analytics, hot happening and interesting subject. Would like to share the 10/90 principle as called out by Avinash Kaushik. (Courtesy: Avanish's blog). I will be sharing more on web analytics practicalities and optimization opportunities and building your websites better for each user.

Goal: Highest value from Web Analytics implementation.

Cost of analytics tool & vendor professional services: $ 10.

Required investment in “intelligent resources/analysts”: $ 90.

Bottom-line for Magnificent Success: Its the people.

The rule works quite simply. If you are paying your web analytics vendor (Omniture, WebTrends, ClickTracks, CoreMetrics, HBX, etc) $25,000 for a annual contract you need to invest $225,000 in people to extract value from that data. If you are actually paying Omniture, WebTrends, HBX etc $225,000 each year then…. well you can do the math.

Most people reading this post probably think this is way overblown or silly or just plain stupid. I can understand that. Here are some of the reasons I have come to formulate this rule:

If your website has more than 100 pages and you get more than 10k visitors a month you can imagine the complexity of the interactions that are happening with your website. Drop in marketing campaigns, a dynamic site, SEM, more pages, more traffic, promotions and offers and you have a very tough situation to understand.

Most web analytics tools will spew out data like there is no tomorrow. We seem to be a rat race, one vendor says I can do 100 reports, the next says 250 and the one after that says I can measure the eye color of people who look at your web pages and on an on. Bottom line is that it will take a lot of intelligence to figure out what is real in all this data and what is fake and what, if anything in the canned reports, is meaningful in all this.

It is a given that if you open most web analytics tools that they show the exact same metrics, almost all of them measured and computed differently! You are going to have to sort this out.

Finally actionable Web Insights (or as I have now copywrited: KIA’s, key insights analysis) does not come simply from ClickStream, you are going to have to have people who are smart and have business acumen who can tie clickstream behavior to other sources of data / information / company happenings.

10 habits continued...

2008-11-12T16:17:00.002+05:30

Recently I submitted this topic to a conference and watching if this will be published :)
anyways moving to the habits that makes a tester inefficient, here we discuss the next habit
//This is a hypothetical picturization as if there is an interview being conducted of an in-efficient tester.

Habit # 3: Ask yourself: “Why should I Test?”
This habit motivates me to ask the very first question when I start any project. This question is very thought-provoking and pushes my senses to think again and again as to why I am testing. I am surrounded by lots and lots of good friends, effective developers—believe me, I trust all my friends, I trust my developer friends, I trust my designers, I trust my product management folks. This trust gives me confidence as to why my testing is needed. I trust all people who are contributing to the software development life cycle, I trust their activities and contributions and being friends I should not be identifying faults in their deliverables.
When I think of these points I get answers to the question that starts coming in as soon as we have new projects, that why should I test when I know my experienced friend has developed the code and unit tested it.

10 habits of highly in-efficient tester

2008-09-18T15:23:00.002+05:30

1) Believe in Assumptions: Core aim of testing is to defy assumptions. If the tester is having assumptions (and that too not getting clearification around those) then it will be very dangerous.
Testing means trying different scenarios where some bugs may or may not be expected.
If the tester is assuming that the developer is right or the code is already tested once or the end customer is not using this platform or this application is running from last 10 months why will it crash now...then you can be sure that the product will be left untested...
2) Not using his thinking power, if the tester can not imagine sscenarios, if he can not replicate the user then he is not an efficient tester...

remaining habits to be shared later..Enjoy reading

Google Chrome Beta is out...

2008-09-17T14:06:00.001+05:30

the latest buzz in town...Google came with a bang and this time with none other than Chrome.
The killer browser (for definitely) killing Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera browser, Firefox etc....

The damage has already started with lots and lots of internet users moving to Chrome. I too tried for 1.5 weeks but I am really fed up with chrome...I am moving back to IE and installed the beta version of IE 8.
Google Chorme is nothing but a mix of all best qualities from each browser and since Google has no issues on the infrastructure/customer base/applications they are able to push Chrome so far...Old concepts in new bottle, I have already crashed Chrome 3-4 times with my testing...

Let's see what all you have to say...and yes their Comic Strip was really nice...

Grapevine - The Power of Rumours

2008-07-14T10:41:00.001+05:30

Hi,

I am doing a sort of research on the power of rumours which when nicely planned can help in getting the nice feedback before the actual decision is to be made.
All Rumours are not 100% bogus, there are some ways say as Grapevine where the roumours can be crafted in such a way to get early feedback before getting the public respose...

my recent visit for Campus Interview

2008-03-19T16:44:00.002+05:30

last week I went to one of the prestigious engineering college (in UP) for selecting few engineers for my company. The response was really great, 160+ people appeared for written test and finally 42 could clear the round 1.
During the interview session, I felt that the student's knowledge base is not upto mark (which we as a company expects). They have the bookish knowledge but not practical aspects of using the same theorm/logic. All were speaking the same answers, seems like there is a strong need of teaching them what exactly we as a company wants in them. what to speak, what not to speak, what areas to focus and what areas to simply ignore in calling out in interviews. what should be the body language etc...we could finally select only 5 candidates from the 165 odd batch...
Had they been trained in campus interviews training, they could have got good number of offers.

Cut Piracy, Get more Jobs

2008-03-19T15:57:00.001+05:30

Reducing software piracy in India by ten per cent over the next four years can generate an additional 44,000 new IT jobs, $3.1 billion in economic growth, and $200 million in tax revenues, according to a study released today by the Business Software Alliance (BSA). The study predicts an additional $208 million in revenues to local vendors alone. Further, reducing software piracy in Asia by just ten percentage points can generate 435,000 new jobs, over $40 billion in economic growth, and over $5 billion in tax revenues above current projections, the study revealed.

(sources: Ciol.com)

Campus Interviews

2008-03-04T23:45:00.002+05:30

Seems like the US economy slowdown is impacting directly/indirectly the software companies recrutiment too for the fresh hires (ie the students/employees) who comes via campus interviews. With campus interviews round the corner, many of the companies are shying away from the heavy recruitment that they do in various colleges, companies who generally selects 50 odd engineers from single college are now targetting only 5-10 engineers.
Lot of students asks me on how to get the best job in the current time, the best method for engineers to score a nice job amidst this slowdown is to concentrate on 2 factors:
1) Projects tuneup as per the latest market needs and demands: Planning your final or pre-final year project in such a way to match what the companies are actually doing or are planning to do that. This requires expert guidance from industry experts.
2) Improving Interview and behavioral skills to get automatic advantage over other class fellows.

With this even if the economy is slow, you will be getting the best job.

iPAPER

2008-03-04T23:16:00.002+05:30

Scribd, the online document sharing site, announced today the creation of a new document format built for the web, dubbed iPaper.

iPaper has been designed to be a new web-based document viewer that is "more like a YouTube video than it is like a PDF." Says Trip Adler, Scribd co-founder and CEO,

Monetized Content
iPaper also allows content publishers to make money from their documents by the inclusion of contextually relevant ads. This optional feature uses ads that are powered by Google AdSense, making iPaper the first application to display AdSense in Flash. Unlike Adobe and Yahoo's recent move to put ads in PDFs, iPaper users don't need to have the latest version of Reader to see the ads - if the PDF is in iPaper format, the ads are there.

Where Scribd.com allows anyone to publish to iPaper on the internet, the Scribd platform allows for the use of the iPaper format either internally or externally. There is an Scribd API for developers to use or non-programmers can use the provided embed code or take advantage of Scribd's new QuickSwitch tool.

Mobile Marketing

2006-11-24T11:02:00.000+05:30

The latest hot cake...Mobile Marketing...My killer application addresses the same...