The 4 reasons why we DIDN’T choose Oslo

Eli Lopian    Marketing    

I have just come back from a really successful and fun kickoff of our partnership program (web-site up soon). But everyone is asking me:

Why Oslo?

Well the reason is not because of the fresh fish that can be found in Norway, even though I love salmon.

It is not because of the great people, who are well mannered, exciting, smiling and smart, even though I had a great time meeting them

It is not because of the great hospitality that we received being guests in Norway, even though I was helped when we got completely mixed up with the local and express trains

It is not because of the social system that they have their, even though I would love to see such a system back home

The best way to convey why we chose Norway, probably comes from their Viking heritage, and while in the hotel I picked up the following postcard:

Did you notice: “Be versatile and AGILE”

So being Agile is actually a Viking thing, and that is probably why, in the end, we chose Norway to start our partnership program.
There is a higher percent of developers unit testing in Norway then in any other country, The number of customers and partners in Norway is way above average and they really understand and embrace Unit Testing.

It seems to have been the correct choice, the consultants I met are superb, they are open to idea, very technical but business minded too, and they also know to have a good time.

Continue to “Be Brave”

Testing my LinkedIn Network

Eli Lopian    Marketing    

I have a LinkedIn account for ages, and I have been connecting to friends and colleges, although not actively for quite some time. I have decided that it is about time I used my network.

We are growing and we need to recruit an Online Marketing Wizard, just as we only get the best people for our development team, we have to get the best people for our marketing.

I found out that the best developers where ones that came from our networks, friends of friends, so I am going to try to use my LinkedIn network to find our wizard.

I posted the job description in a few groups that I follow, and I send a message to 50 of my connections asking them to help me find the marketing wizard. I hope that they will forward the message.

So far I already received 3 CV’s from the group job posts.

Just in case you know someone here is the job description:

Online Marketing Wizard

• Knows Marketing
• Experience in internet presence + online marketing activities (at least 2 years)
• Experience in marketing internationally (at least 2 years)
• Some knowledge in offline and general marketing strategies.
• Knows how to define and establish marketing strategies & campaigns – advantage
• Team player and the ability to lead, encourage and motivate people.
• Creative mind
• Specialize in:
  o SEO
  o SEM
  o SMM (social media marketing).
  o Online Traffic Reporting and Analytics services
  o Google AdWords and PPC Services (Pay per Click)
• Experience in working with out-source suppliers
• English Mother tongue – advantage

2009 retrospect

Eli Lopian    Marketing, Unit Tests    

Its my birthday, which is normally a time for self reflection and lot of fun, alcohol and friends.

As a present my friends gave me a Tandem skydiving, I am waiting for good weather to see why my friends want me to jump out of a flying plane 4 km in the air.

My birthday always falls close to the end of the year, so it is also a good time to see what happen in Typemock last year.

Typemock in 2009

We have had 4 new babes in Typemock from Roy Osherove, Doron Peretz, Shalhevet Segal and Dror Helper. Congrats, First timers: Welcome to parenthood

We have welcomed 4 new employees this year.

We have invested over 15,000 hours in our products and we now  have 6 great products to make unit testing easy

• Isolator
• Isolator for SharePoint
• Isolator for ASP.NET
• Isolator for Silverlight
• Racer
• Tracker

The development team has made a breakthrough with Intellitest, to guide developers into writing good tests easily.

We have started This Week in Testing podcast.

The company has a FedEx day, once every 2 weeks, in which developers can work on their pet project.

Our development process has evolved and is a hybrid between scrum and ToC.

We sold over 100% more licenses, showing us that more developers are jumping on the unit-testing wagon.

Our sales team has managed to help developers successfully implement unit testing in their company. Our site has received a facelift and we have a new coffee machine.

In short, we have had a breakthrough year in our development, our products, our sales and there is much more to come.

To reach these result I have to thank the Typemock team, they are a great team and our amazing customers and partners who made this happen.

Best wishes and a happy new year.
Eli

Crossing the Chasm – Is it still true?

Eli Lopian    Marketing    

I picked up Crossing the Chasm (Geoffery Moore) again while thinking about our marketing strategy.

This brings up a few questions.

Q1: Is this strategy still true? With the speed that information travels and web 2.0 communities?

Q2: Is unit testing a disruptive innovation?

Q3: If it is true, what is the state of unit tests. Have we reached the chasm? I like Tara Hunt’s illustration of this:

Q4: Suppose that unit tests are at the chasm, as Eric Sink says we have to act our age and find a sub-segment group within the software development. This group must communicate between themselves and have a big pain that unit test will solve. What is this segment?

I would be happy to hear your answers, here are mine:

Q1: I think that the strategy is still true.
The other day I went shopping in the local food market in the early morning looking for chestnuts that I had to buy the team for a bet that I lost. There where many empty stalls but one stall was full of people, my instinct was to go to the crowded stall. I chose without looking at the price or quality, but I looked at what the market is doing. This I think is the basic issue of crossing the chasm – having a group of people do the same good thing without needing to spend time on research.

Q2: Last year I thought that unit testing is not a disruptive innovation, but I changed my mind. I think that it is disruptive. Most developers are under pressure and are happy to pass QA to other people. I have seen many teams shun at the idea of changing their habits and spend even more time doing unit tests, even though it will save loads of time in the end.

Q3: The early adopters are 15% of the the market, so do 15% of the developers unit test? Telerik (2008) says that 27% do unit tests, while Methods and Tools (2006) says around 15% (image from Ed Gibbs)

From our surveys, many developers call different activities unit testing. We also found less then 10% actually do unit testing. But combining these surveys together with the fact that we are seeing early majority type of questions in the community (If unit testing is so great, why aren’t more companies doing it?) I think that we are at the chasm.

Q4. This is the question that I don’t have an answer for yet. I do know that there are segments. For example, did you know that the avionics have a standard called DO-178B, that requires a 100% unit test coverage. So when it comes to human lives and the cost of a bug is high, management makes sure that all software has unit tests. But this standard has not made it into other industries. 

Do you know of other developer sub groups/communities?