Blog Lockdown

I will be travelling for the next couple of months and will have zero network access. Athe commenting facility on this blog have been disabled. I will re enable them when I get back to civilization in mid July. Au Revoir

The Decline and Fall Of India

The present government has proposed an utterly idiotic caste-based reservation in higher education and in private industry. In other words, get ready to fill in a religion/caste form to determine if you'll get an IIT admission, get a job, get promoted etc.

Atanu says it much better than I can. Read. Learn.

Well, I vote with my feet. I am getting out of this stupid country next year.

[tongue attached to cheek mode on]I wonder if China issues citizenships to foriegners. Of course I'd be arrested in 10 days for "anti communist beliefs" but it would be fun while it lasted. Might be worth considering if China ever became a democracy[tongue attached to cheek mode off]

Abandoning Agile

My friend Yogi said in a chat session recently, "I havent seen your blog entry renouncing all things agile!"

Yogi, your wish is my command. here it is.

Bill Caputo said it much better than I ever could. So I'll borrow from his blog entry.

"...In short,... I am formally retiring from Agile Evangelism (something I lost the heart for some time ago), and simply becoming an Agile Private-Citizen. Thus, I expect that the tone of my writing will shift somewhat as I no longer care (and truthfully haven't for some time) whether the world adopts XP -- or even whether anyone does -- I am simply interested in building software to the best of my ability, working with others of like mind, and flat-out outperforming others using the techniques and tools that I have learned how to use over the past several years. That anyone familiar with XP would immediately recognize its strong impact on the nature of our software development project is almost (but not quite) irrelevant to that goal. ..."

Of course the difference between Bill's position and mine is that he still continues to use XP. He just doesn't evangelize it. The kind of problems on which I'll be working for the rest of the year (and hopefully, for the rest of my life) shift the context of development so much that most of the practices and assumptions of XP/Agile just don't make sense anymore. The only surviving practices are the constantly growing test suite (no more test first) run periodically and a very attenuated Continous Integration step. Where Bill is an Agile Private Citizen, I am an Agile Ex-Citizen.

I have also stepped out of the Agile Software Community Of India, a non profit society of which I am a founding member. I may still need to attend one final meeting to elect the next year's office holders, and help resolve some residual organizational issues but that's it. I am done with all things Agile.

It is a great relief. Agile is "hot" these days and all sorts of weirdos crawl out of the wooodwork to scramble on the "Agile" platform and caper and scream to attract "agile consulting" assignments. The politics is sickening. Now I can just shut these folks out and focus on what is more important, writing good software.

Grounding "exotic" technology - The Banker's story

The machine learning system I was called in to design for a Telecom Fraud detection company is moving into production. I was told yesterday that the testing folks are "amazed at the high accuracy of the new codebase" and my client is extremely satisfied with the improvements. I was really happy to hear this. Nothing makes a programmer happier than news that his code/design is making a substantial contribution in the domain for which it was written.

My clients were leaders in their domain even before we added the new ML capability. With the enhancements (not limited to the fraud detection engines, they've added a lot of functionality in other areas) they should wipe the floor with the competition. None of their competitors has a fraud classifier system as powerful. And we have implemented only a small fraction of what could be done.

This datapoint just confirms by belief that powerful technology allied to a strong management vision can lead to massive value addition. What made the difference is the adoption of a key metric(erroneous classification/million cell phone calls) as the measure of the software's quality and the almost total freedom given to the implementation team (which included some of the best folks in the company). We had NO political or turf battles and the laser like focus of the manager in charge on the key metric helped us to evaluate alternate strategies and select the most appropriate ones. This (tying the software developed to key business metrics) is one way of "grounding" business software and preventing thrashing. (More explanation of this conmcept coming up in future blogs).

Back to Banking. One of the nuggets that came out of our conversation(see last blog) was the fact that most Indian banks still do manual verification of signatures on cheques. This has been automated to a large degree a long time ago in most banks in the West. The algorithms for this are available in the literature. Large chunks of software that made up the original solution are publicly available. All it needs is for someone to put together a hardware/software combination to provide this functionality and the banks would jump at it.

Why is this important? Here is the Industry context. In 2009, the Indian Banking sector will be opened to Foreign banks . (It is semi-open right now). That would mean(assuming India is doing well economically) that tidal wave of foreign banks would arrive and the existing banks would face real competition.

The scariest part of this impending shift in the landscape, from the point of view of Indian Banks is the massive technological advantage that western banks enjoy (relative to the Indian banks). And in the Indian banking scenario, market share is almost directly in proportion to the technology level of each bank.

Here is an example. For years, only ICICI offered an "at par cheque" facility, ie, the ability to present a cheque drawn on an account in another city and get it cashed instantaneously (vs. waiting for few days for the cheque to be couriered to the city in which the account resides). Thousands of businessmen did not have an alternative but to bank with ICICI because no one else had anything similair.

By the time the other banks caught up with this technology, ICICI came up with a feature by which transfers between accounts could be transacted on the net (even if the target account was in another bank). As of today no one else has this feature(unless they go through ICICI) and this gives them an edge.

I forget the domain term for this. But the point is that the ranking in the technical arms race almost directly determines the marketshare. And this marketshare is what is under threat when the big boys land with their deep pockets and massive mainframes. So even something as simple as automated cheque signature verification could provide an edge in the impending blood bath in the banking sector.

So there. Now you have an idea on how to make millions. If you do, cut me a cheque for the idea. :-)

A Thought Experiment

I recently had a conversation with a friend who works in ICICI, one of the largest banks in India. Contrary to my "image" I am deeply interested in Business and the "enterprise"; I belive the practice of outsourcing the software at the heart of an enterprise to body shops flogging mediocre programmers is indefensible. My friend was kind enough to enlighten me on how banking really works and the context in which Indian Banking operates. The next few blog entries will be devoted to insights which spun off rom that conversation. First though, I'd like to focus on the gaps between image,ideal and reality

As with all industries (e.g the outsourced software "industry") there is an image, ("intellectually challenging work done by extremely bright people trying to change the world" in the case of the Indian software industry) which people outside the industry believe and a not-so-cool reality which only insiders are aware of. The reality of India's software "industry" is that most "hackers" working in it are comparable to the illegal immigrants from Mexico who come to swanky Wall Street offices early in the morning to vaccum and dust. The difference is that the average mexican immigrant who does these jobs does not fool himself into thinking he is doing "cutting edge" work.

The interesting thing is that beyond these two perceptions ("What does IndustryX look like from the outside?" and "What is IndustryX really like (from the inside)?") there is another question "What could IndustryX be like if we tried to really deliver superior customer value and create first class working environments and did first class work?".

Very few companies are trying to envision and implement the last question in any industry,whether it be software, banking or anything else.

Let us do a thought experiment and envision a future in which India did less of the "janitorial" programming, and becomes a true "software super power". In such an imaginary point in the multiverse,

1. India would be home to innovative companies like (say) Apple and Google
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2. At least one popular language (like, say, Ruby), Operating Sytem (like Linux) , or widely used tool (like say, emacs) would be invented by an Indian.
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3. People all over the world would expect a newly announced fantastic advance in software to have an Indian (vs an American) origin. At least afew "iconic" thought leaders (of the calibre of Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs) would be Indian.
4. Many Indians would be publishing the "killer books" in various subfields of software theory and practice. Take the best technical book you have read. Now imagine it having an Indian author to see what I mean.
5. India would have annual events like the DARPA Robotics Car Race, with relentless pushing forward of the frontiers of knowledge and possibility every year.
6. The most talented and ambitious students from other countries would apply in droves to Indian Educational Institutions and the selection commitee would have the luxury to pick and choose the best.
7. Harvard and MIT would learn from IIMs and IIT and try to imitate their methods and "best practices".
8. Bangalore would be the California of the world, with the most innovative people , companies, and ideas finding their natural home there.
9. People all over the world would want to immigrate to India and acquire Indian citizenship. Our consulates in the USA and UK would be forced to impose quotas on work and other immigrant visas.
10. The core of a new software system would be designed and implemented in Bangalore and the "janitorial" work would be "outsourced" elsewhere. (Yes, I see you ROTFL :-) I told you this is all imagination. A man can dream can't he? :-))

Ah well, time to stop dreaming and do some useful work. But the future is not all doom and gloom. There are a few faint glimmers of light in an otherwise dark horizon. More on that later.