SoftGram Bi-Weekly for 03.19.2006, Vol. 2, No. 6 SoftGram Spotlight: ______________________________________ SoftGram is a Softletter Publication and is published on the first and third weeks of each month. To Subscribe to SoftGram, please visit us at http://www.softletter.com/aspx/Profile.aspx ========================================================= To unsubscribe from SoftGram, please use the opt-out link below: http://www.softletter.com/aspx/optout.aspx?u=[[user_id]]&un=[[UserName]] To change your profile and various user options, please use the link below: http://www.softletter.com/aspx/Profile.aspx Before you can use this option, please login into your account. If you have not changed your profile, your username is the first letter of your first name and the first seven letters of your last name. Your password is "softletter." 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Technical product managers may also have titles such as Requirements Manager, Domain Specialists (or Analyst, or Business Analyst), or Requirements Engineer. If your primary responsibility at your company is developing requirements for your software products, please feel free to participate in this survey. If requirements development is part of your overall product management responsibilities, in addition to such traditional tasks as MRD development, marketing, and launch planning, please plan to participate in our ongoing product manager surveys, not this survey. As always, participants will receive a complete copy of the issue of Softletter in which the survey results appear (April 30th). Of course, all responses will be strictly confidential. We won't disclose or identify data about any individuals or about participating companies. Please note that we cannot send out copies of the survey to participants who do not fill out the survey form completely. To participate in our technical product manger survey, please go to the link below: http://www.softletter.com/survey/reqmgr1.htm Many thanks for your help and your patience as we break new ground in the compensation surveys! If you would like to invite your colleagues in the industry to participate in this survey, please forward it to them. Don Rosenberg, editor Softletter/Software Success 919 Monmouth Avenue, Durham, N.C. 27701 919/687-4172 don@softletter.com _________________________________________________________ The latest issue of SoftGram is brought to you by: **** The Product Marketing Handbook for Software **** The Product Marketing Marketing Handbook for Software, 4th Edition is the definitive guide to successful software marketing and sales. Completely up-to-date, the Hanbook's 16 chapters and appendices, 690 pages, over 2600 checklist items, 300 cost-of-marketing line items, 20 case studies, 30 illustrations and figures, sample forms, free spreadsheets, and product management forms make the The Product Marketing Handbook for Software absolutely indispensable for any software company looking to succeed in today’s ultracompetitive environment. Find out about the Handbook at: http://www.aegis-resources.com _________________________________________________________ Increasing QA Costs Squeeze Bottom Lines, Part I of II (Excerpted from the 03/31/2006 issue of Softletter) Last year as part of my work as a Codies 2005 judge, I tested a popular desktop utilities package and was not pleased with the experience. The program crashed and burned when the CD eject button was hit while installing, something any retail application should be able to handle. Then the package hosed my test system while supposedly cleaning up my registry; complete a reinstall of Windows was required. By the time I was done with my evaluation the software had received a poor rating from me and the other judges. The product had clearly not been vetted by a good QA team. I did some research into the application’s development via a contact at the company and discovered that this version of the software had been QA tested in India while most development had been done in the US. (I also found out that the firm was aware of the problems with the application and that QA had been moved back to the US.) Over the past several years we’ve tracked several software companies that have attempted to offshore their QA while keeping core development in the US. In the main, the experiments have not been successful. Development and QA seem to need to be in close physical proximity to work effectively together; those companies who are happy with offshoring their QA have also chosen to move their development overseas as well. Regardless of where it takes place, the cost of providing QA in the software industry is rapidly rising, with salaries for QA personnel ranging between $55K to $100K (a Mercury specialist). While a lot of attention has been paid to development being offshored, the cost of testing has escaped comparable scrutiny. That’s a mistake, as this recent quick “snap” poll of a select group of software firms we surveyed demonstrates: Company Size Development QA 10M+ 70% 30% 50M+ 65% 35% 70M + 55% 45% Our results back up an NIST report developed in 2002, which stated that the cost of testing accounted for 50% of the total cost of developing a software product (the report focused on costs for larger firms). We believe the lower costs we see for smaller companies reflects the fact that they are building less complex products and that development staffs are doing dual duty both as coders and testers. Agile methodologies have been touted as an answer to rising QA costs and at the component level, some of the companies we’ve spoken to are happy with the results they’re seeing. However, every firm we’ve spoken with is less enthusiastic when the issue of integration testing is raised. Agile has problems coordinating the small, independent teams it advocates to build products with active end user input. One developer we spoke with pointed out that corporate politics usually dictate that functionality be retained and unit tests decreased when a choice between the two has to be made. _________________________________________________________ INFO POPS are sponsored by: License Technologies Group Since 1996, License Technologies Group (LTG) has been the established leader in providing solutions specifically designed for software publishers to more efficiently manage their software licensing business. Our systems and services support software license management, renewals management, eCommerce, Digital Rights Management, Partner Relationship Management and global fulfillment. We understand all of the nuances and best practices necessary to harness the power and profitability volume license and compliance programs can provide. Our experience in providing these solutions helps softwa practices and gain a strategic advantage on their competition. Smart Tools. Big Savings. http://www.licensetech.com ******************************* INFO POPS "Ritter was very skeptical about companies that try to offer both online services and a version of their software that a customer can host on his or her own servers behind the corporate firewall. The concern is that once you let a customer host the app, you'll be tied into maintaining it, and you lose the agility that makes a Software as a Service company successful. He quoted a financial analyst who said, 'if a (Software as a Service) company offers just one customer a behind the firewall solution, I'll cut their projected market capitalization in half.'" Excerpted from: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/04/almost-live-from-software-2006.html ******************************* "Red Hat did not seem like a likely buyer on many fronts ranging from the relative small size of Red Hat, to their cash position, to cultural differences," said Donahue. " Excerpted from: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1948174,00.asp ******************************* Now students and faculty members can choose “the best tools for their specific needs,” Halamka said. Users who have tried the beta release of Boot Camp have reported that it makes Windows XP applications run “blazingly fast” on a Mac, he said. Not everyone is sold on Boot Camp, though. “It’s not as neat and clean as it might sound,” said Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc. in Wayland, Mass. “They’ve filled a hole here, but it’s more of an experimental thing. I don’t think it’ll change the game that much.” Depending on how users format Windows XP on their Macs, they may or may not be able to read and write data between the Windows and Mac OS X partitions, Kay said. And businesses still have to buy a Windows XP licens Excerpted from: http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/macos/story/0,10801,110322p2,00.html ******************************* This is Cringely we're talking about here. He's basically an inverse oracle: everything he predicts will not come true. Such classics in the past include: "Apple's future lies in computer-like devices" "Microsoft has already been crippled by the department of justice" "Sega may dominate personal computing" "Ending the culture of secrecy doesn't matter" "The next generation of processors will be clockless" "Intel will ride its new Merced processor to profit" "Y2K will be a bigger pain in the butt than most people think" "The stock market will continue to rise" "AOL isn't in the market to buy Netscape" Etc. Personally, I'd love to see some sort of Survivor style contest for that PBS columnist / NYT editorialist position. 19 Bloggers and Cringely are forced to live in a house together, where each week they make predictions about large announcements that companies make. Those with the most wildly incorrect predictions are forced into a future-past bakeoff, where they have to explain historical technological shifts to MIT professors while cooking representative food items. The professors then confer over dinner, and then walk up to the loser and shout in his face "You Fail!" I'm guessing Cringely lasts three weeks, soley on his love of food. Excerpted from: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182578&cid=15091747 ________________________________________________________ CHANGE YOUR SOFTGRAM SUBSCRIPTION : To unsubscribe from SoftGram, please use the opt-out link below: http://www.softletter.com/aspx/optout.aspx?u=[[user_id]]&un=[[UserName]] To change your profile and various user options, please use the link below: http://www.softletter.com/aspx/Profile.aspx Before you can use this option, please login into your account. If you have not changed your profile, your username is the first letter of your first name and the first seven letters of your last name. Your password is "softletter." To update your address or change your profile, please use the link below (this link takes you directly to your profile assuming you have chosen to stay logged in via a cookie exchange): http://www.softletter.com/aspx/myMain.aspx