Role Model

1Let me start with what exactly is role model, it is seen as a person who younger people aspire like to be. How many of you here have a role model? Is it mandatory to have role model, may be yes may be no, It is totally a personal choice to have or haven’t any role model.

2.      What do role models do, when you have role models you try to follow their footstep, they influence your decision making, action you take. Role models help to bring out the best out of you.

3.      Who can be role model-I would say anyone can be role model, each and every individual is blessed with capability to influence life of others in positive way. Anyone can be role model for anyone.

4.      How to find a role model: Anyone can be your role model if your heart and brain tells you to follow his/her footstep, remember every individual is unique, something which has worked for your role model may not work for you, use your judgment and follow the trail. While trying to be like your role model don’t lose yourself.

5.      Although I like to carve my own pathway and no one is my role model yet, my life, my personality and character has been highly influenced by my grandparents and parents. I have learnt how to be humble and grounded from them. I have learnt how to be a devoted wife, mother, sister etc.. etc. How to keep doing the deeds without any expectation. How to deal with ups and downs of life by keeping calm. They have been my pillar of strength till date, my mom’s food can still make me happy, my dad’s guidance still help me to come out of difficult situation. My grandma’s smile still touch my heart.

Everyone in society should be a role model, not only for their own self-respect, but for respect from others.by Barry Bonds so go ahead setup a personal improvement goal for yourself and lead by example be a role model for yourself and others, with this I would conclude my speech for today. 

What does self-improvement mean to you?

              What does self-improvement mean to you? This is interesting topic  and I am sure everyone can relate to it one way or other. Self-improvement means a lot to me, it gives a whole new perspective and freshness to yourself, this brings out a new you !

As with any improvement process self-improvement starts with where are you where do you want to go and how do you want to improve, find a mentor if needed and lots of patience before actual goal could be realized.

Self-improvement could be for anything to improve on your personal relationship, expand your circle of friends re-establish, re kindle family relationship.

Self-improvement helps you to hold on to relationships, hold on to professional recognition explore and reinvent your new self.

If you ask me how do I connect with self –improvement for myself I will say that there are so many areas I have improved on since the time I realized that one needs to continually improve to adapt changes ,make people happy around you. When my kids were able to handle themselves and less dependent on me for day to day activity I determined I need to catch-up with technology =this determined where. I did setup a goal for myself to improve on knowledge in Information Technology, I was clear on my goal ,I scanned through several certification ,read books-this answers How. I wrote exams and achieved the desired certification-This answers what. This gave me good recognition at workplace I saw boost in my morale. I was happy myself, gladly updated my LinkedIn profile, signatures etc.

That was about my professional improvement.

At personal level as well I do setup improvement goal. I am born and raised in India ,I have 3 siblings ,being first born I was pampered a lot, nothing used to move in home without my consent. We had all comfort of world at our disposal, nice home, car with driver, doting parents. Once I married I was blessed with loving and caring in-laws, same level of life style continued. However when I came to North America within 2 years of marriage, it was a new world, everything was new to me and there was no way to fit-in without improving myself. I had to learn to manage household chores on my own, learn to drive when driver ready car is not in front of home. I would say I am little introvert and takes a lot of time to share and open with people around me, I had to make new friends in this news country and continent, I did that and I am proud of my close circle for their input in shaping up my personality.

Here I have shared a brief overview of my self-improvement professional and personal. I continued to identify self-improvement opportunity, just latest one is I have started learning swimming. I must say it is fun now that I know I can handle myself in water well.

At closure of this topic what does  self-improvement mean to me I will conclude with determine where are you, where do you want to go and how? And this is not limited to any age anyone can be better, happy and confident version of themselves.

I will leave you with this quote:

Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.by  Norman Vincent Peale

Cloud Computing-Latest Buzz word

We are hearing lots of initiatives being underway around Cloud Technologies . This cloud is supposed to obsolete the need of on-site servers and data centers. It is based on community and cooling concept, use what is need and release what is not required in close to real-time.

Important question to wonder is are we ready as Big organization to let give control of our organization into the hand of Microsoft or Amazon, in the wake of recent internet outages, data breach including MasterCard and Visa it is quite obvious that we  need thorough testing that our data doesn't get into wrong hand.

Truly we are entering in to new era of application and product hosting, moving to cloud will help in disaster recovery but keeping it secure should be first priority. Hard Drive->Floppy->CD->Digital tape->External Storage->Cloud- wonder whats next ??Virtualization, 3D data visualization.

Being Thankful

​I started attending Toastmaster meeting as a guest when my office colleague kind of forced me:). I am thankful to her that she took me to introductory meeting and since then I have taken various role and in Toastmaster group everyone get an opportunity to be themselves.

Topic determined for one of toastmaster speech was "I am thankful for __", and each speaker had a chance to fill in the last word with details they want to share and as speaker. Few years ago I read an article in Reader's Digest, that being thankful and showing gratitude for any person is one of the most overlooked human emotion. It is easy to look half glass empty but we hit resistance when time to be thankful for half glass full.

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. William Arthur Ward
Being thankful helps us to differentiate between have and have-not and take us more towards contentment. It also harness the feeling of completeness and help to uncover our emotions and we act in better way. There are so many ways to show your thankfulness, it doesn't have to be "Thank You" or "Thanks" all the time. It could be as simple as making favorite food for the person, or bringing flower or spending quality time with the person. That too without electronic devices.

Personally I am thankful to my family, friends, colleague who make me what I am today .If you haven't done so or missed someone to thanks who has helped you in accomplishing your dream, goal, helped you in one way or other. This can range for person making morning tea for you or helped in landing you your dream job, helped you to find your better half, make you laugh, stand by you in high and low's.

I would like to conclude my post with wonderful quote from Marcel Proust

"Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."  

7 Year gap in blogging

I was reviewing my linkedin profile and noticed a link to my blog ...can't believe my last post was in June 2010.Where did 7 year go??wondering,sent 2 kids off to university,aged more,communication and writing slowly and steadily changed from blogging to Instagram,snap-chat,twitter,Facebook messenger,whatsapp. Facetime, skype took over need of in person meetings. We are getting technologically advanced but in this advancement loosing personal connectivity,talk over the phone has become thing of yesteryear.This loss of personal connectivity is impacting all of us alike we are living in our own world which doesn't even have room for constructive feedback.While I appreciate all technology advancement and have adapted few of them I appreciate in person meeting more,I still prefer phone over snapchat,beautifully crafted email over instant messenger.Call me old school-probably ....:)

Cloud Technology & Quality -How does it go side by side?

Cloud has become the latest buzzword in Technology. In an effort to reduce the operational costs, many companies are moving to Cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon or IBM. All of these providers are expending lot of effort to capture Cloud market share as much as possible. Many startups are already preferring cloud based solutions to meet the need of fast product development and quick time to market. They are hosting cloud in-house  or renting an instance on public cloud to meet the need of operational, product and service offerings.With all these wind of change coming to technology industry question quite often come to mind is where does quality fit into this picture?

From my point of view, one of the important factors is quality and its management,keeping up with quality goals and objective,cost of product and infrastructure availability for the smooth operation of a company’s day-to-day business.

Many of the questions listed below must be answered when infrastructure and products are hosted outside of your control limit:

• What happens when server loses the connectivity? Who will be first point of contact ?Cloud provider or in-house tech support ?
• How does Service level Agreement with Cloud provider will impact companies ?What happens to Service Level Agreement with customer?
• How do we intend to protect the IP.In the order of priority actions must be taken to smoothly transition to Cloud?
• What actions are required to secure your application from cyber attack?
• What kind of control is required for the supplier management?
• Do you have formal Risk Management in place?
• How to protect the application,infrastructure from external attack ,such as data spoofing,denial of service attack etc?

To address the concerns above, the following actions can be taken:

Plan:This is one of the important steps to take. One must spent enough time to plan for migration, deployment of new product,timeline,resources required,training requirement,risk and mitigation,identify stakeholders, rollback strategy in-case migration or new deployment to cloud fail.

Quality Metrics: Identify the quantitative metrics which will help you to track the progress of cloud initiatives. Some of the Key Performance Indicators could be number of applications to be migrated,planned vs complete,number of new deployments plan vs complete,

incident and defect by type,severity and priority.Analysis of most common issues and actions taken to address those.

Alignment with standards: These are company specific requirements. Many companies comply with ISO standard,CMMI or internally established standard. Cloud migration or deployment needs to make sure move is in accordance with these standard and any deviation is properly signed off by Leadership or Management.

Risk Management: All risks must be identified and documented as and when they are identified and must have a mitigation plan in place to address the risk. Acceptance,Transfer,Avoidance are few of the risk response type which companies can use to stay on top of the risks.A proper Risk Management Tool such as Risk Log,Risk Matrix,will help in tracking these risks to closure in timely manner.

Supplier Management: Since cloud providers are an external vendor supplier management process must be established and suppliers should be audited to make sure they are

in compliance with standards and requirements mandated by the receiving organization.Quality should be clearly outlined in contract with supplier in accordance with overall quality goals and objective of the company.

Hardening the Cloud hosting:When you put infrastructure or application on the cloud, you are susceptible for external hacking,spoofing,data loss and interception during data transfers.This can be alleviated  through proactive measure of setting up the Intrusion Detection System,diverting the attackers from real data.Public Key Infrastructure establish certificates and digital signatures with pre-set validity period.

I am all for latest technology usage however change must be controlled,success and quality  must be measurable to validate the objective of Cloud initiative.At the end I would like to mention that though Cloud seems like you  are transitioning the company’s operations and infrastructure management to some third party at the end of it Quality,Customer Satisfaction,Security and IP protection is sole responsibility of companies providing the product,services or infrastructure.

References:

What Is the ISO 9000 Standards Series? http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/iso-9000/overview/overview.html

Manual or Automated testing

I have done several years of Quality Assurance of Enterprise software and have experienced all common or not so common blocker in software development life cycle.I often encounter a question how much testing we can automate and how much can be done manually.Automated and manual has their own advantage and disadvantage.Automated testing are really helpful to make regression cycle shorter when used for mature product however they can't be used in the product which still going through frequent development process.Automated testing helps to avoid human error and omission .Manual testing are really helpful when used in testing new feature or functionality in a software,however in manual testing a tester or QA person can skip or forget the test step which may generate false positive test defect.

In my opinion automated and manual testing compliment each other they are not mutually exclusive to each other.

Data protection

I read a news article at http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/080826/world/britain_us_banking_internet_company_rbs_ebay_data_1.These kind of articles are making headline and reminding us that we need to handle our Information Technology infrastructure with more care and strong policies. After reading the complete article, I think it is high time we should review Information Technology Best practices regarding the acquisition and access of assets till its disposal. In today’s world when we are storing everything in computer, which includes but not limited to source code for s/w program, customers demographic details, personal details, trade secrets, business model, its security should be first priority for every company. When we dispose off our computers/servers/hard disk special care about data erase should be mandatory. When we don't need computers/servers/hard disk, data should be backed up to the active server (Data retention Policy) and data should be cleaned from the computer asset we are going to dispose. A strict policy regarding asset disposal and handling should be in place in every organization to avoid the mistakes like this in future.Not doing so is like giving our home key to intruder.

Virtualization

Virtualization is a new buzz word in the technology industry. It helps in the full utilization of the current hardware resources, with the help of virtual software; single machine can host number of virtual machine. Virtual machines have their own OS, Software environment etc and don’t interfere with other Virtual Machine on the Host server. Virtualization is advantageous especially in software testing and development environment. A backup copy of production server environment can be maintained on Virtual Machines to make system up and running fast in case of disaster recovery. In virtualization if virtual machine stops working it can be restarted or fixed without affecting other Virtual Machine on the Server. However if server hosting Virtual Machine crashes its fix is more involved. However Virtual machines can’t be relied upon for mission critical and production data’s.

IP Address crisis- IPv6 comes to the rescue

IPv4 is a 4 bytes or 32 bit internet address,which is widely used today.IPv6 is a 16 bytes or 128 bit internet address,which is going to be standard for next generation IP addresses.Given the increase in the use of mobile devices,sensor devices,internet enabled devices and services we need more and more IP addresses.According to a report published by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development we have already used up 85 percent of IPv4 address,and by 2011 we are going to run out of IPv4 address.,some countries like Japan,USA,Europe have already taken an initiative to make their network IPv6 compatible.Its about time to move to IPv6 to make your business competitive and current in technology.However some organization are still reluctant to deploy IPv6 given the cost involved in deployment.

What is social engineering ?

Social engineering is an unauthorized gathering of personal information from peoples which later on used by social engineers for their own benefit.Like what they do,where they work,date of birth etc.Due to lack of security awareness people fall victim of identity theft.People should restrict themselves from disclosing any personal information over the telephone,internet or email.Telephone,email and website are frequently use tool in social engineering.

Fiber Optic Cable

Fiber optic cables are networking cables which uses small strand of glasses.It uses light pulses to send the data from one point to other,so it also immune from Electro Magnetic Interference. It is nearly impossible to interpret the data traveling through fiber optic cable.However they are not the inexpensive option when setting up network of computers.Although some companies have started moving from typical copper wires to fiber optic cable,its an expensive choice.It is very prone to twist turns and run over.They can't be repaired only available option is there replacement.They are best choice when it comes to bandwidth,speed,resistance and speed.There are two types of fiber optic cable,single mode and multi mode.Single mode fiber cable can be used when sending data over long distance.Multi mode fiber cable can be used when sending data over shorter distance.

Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID)

RAID is a technology which uses two or more disk for storage,reliability,availability,fault tolerance. They can have a disk range from minimum of 2 to maximum of 32.Raid are of several level of RAID based on the specifications and configurations.RAID 0 writes data on striped volume,it writes the data into small chunks across all the volume.Reading and writing on RAID 0 devices is faster.However striped volumes are not fault tolerant,that means if one disk fail it would be impossible to recover the data stored on the volumes.RAID 1 is also known as disk duplexing,there is no striping of data,read performance is better since data can be read from any of the disk and it also fault tolerant.RAID 2 is rarely used ,it writes the the across the disk with parity error information.RAID 3 dedicates one disk to store the parity information for data recovery in case of disk failure.RAID 4 writes data in blocks with dedicated parity.RAID 5 uses block level striping with distributed parity,which can be used to regenerate the data in case of disk failure.Usually RAID devices use SCSI interface with multi-pins to connect to server.

Data Storage

We are experiencing explosive growth in digital media.Storage cost and data management cost is increasing day by day.Our home computers are filled with different file types such as .jpgs, mpeg,.mov,.doc etc.Our office computers are filled with.ppt,.doc.xls and several othe file type.Different company uses different software as their standard software.Main problem we are dealing with is the management of different files and their backup on reliable media or device.We need to store our datas for several reasons,ranging from compliance to companies policies to keep a record of digital files.DVDs,CDs even hard drives have limited timespan.Cds, DVDs if not properly kept,they are prone to scratches and thermal effects,which can make data stored on them unreadable.Hard drives have sensitive magnetic surfaces where it store the data's.Magnetic field is prone to thermal effects,means increased temperature can make hard drive to fail.Best device to backup your data are RAID(Redundant Array of Independent Disk) devices,NAS (Network Attached storage),while SAN is expensive data storage option.SAN is used in big enterprises,and falling SAN prices may make small to mid size enterprises business to start using it.In my next blog I will be explaining why the before mentioned devices are best to use as a storage device.

My first blog

This is my first blog. In this blog I would try to cover interesting topics. Some of the areas I am interested in are Software testing, Technical writing, Project Management and Business administration. Right now I am also working towards my M.B.A.