Reviewing The Siemens Information And Communications Network Information Technology Essay

Reviewing The Siemens Information And Communications Network Information Technology Essay Siemens Information and Communications Network are composed of several regional development centers around the world. One of those, located in Bangalore, India, was given the tasks of developing two large scale Softwares during the 1990s. The first of those, called ADMOSS (Advanced Multifunctional Operator Service System) was designed to facilitate modern call centers with some 500 features. The second one which followed after five years was called NetManager, it had a user-friendly, and graphics based user interface and some 6,000 features regarding administration and maintenance of EWSD network-nodes and networks. Both of these projects suffered huge deadlines-slippages, faulty design (at least initially), undetected-till-last-stage errors, embarrassment with customers and miscommunications between ICNs Munich headquarter and its Bangalores development center1. The following is an attempt to analyze the issues, their causes and possible avoidances for any similar projects. By the late 1980s Munich has recognized the talented human resource available in India. It was huge, both in terms of head-counts and knowledge. It was cheap, initially available at just 20% cost of a similar German software developer, which later in decade increased to 25%. It also had unmatched performance, in personal computers programming, in which ICN has deficiency in available human resource. Most ICN developers had worked on large systems and had little to no experience of personal computers programming. In contrast, Indian programmers have grown up experimenting with earlier version of desktops and laptops and by 1990s have reached level of expertise in some areas. Capitalizing on this resource, ICN decided to have the two projects done in India, in spite of huge cultural incompatibilities, language problems, physical distance and visa issues. The first project given to Bangalore was in no way any minor thing. It was made for existing and large customers of Siemens that heavily depend on it. It might be a non-optimal decision made by Munich but being risky it also promises huge benefits at end. ADMOSS had to facilitate telemarketing interface with non-Siemens equipment and handle large conference calls for example, among its other tasks. No surprise that at peak, 150 software developers were working on ADMOSS in Bangalore alone, in addition of local and German managers, testers and other supporting staff. The project was managed centrally by Munich, sending specifications for each of the subsystem to a high managerial level in Bangalore. This decision of central management was made perhaps due to initial distrust by Germans on Indians as it was their first encounter with them. In India, each subsystem was managed by a German or Indian manager who works with little co-ordination with each other. Once a subsystem is developed and tested locally is sent to Munich where it is integrated with the rest of the system. This method, though gave high power to Munich and enforced strict quality control has a design flaw, a programmer might be expert and identify flaw in the subsystem he has worked on, but cannot easily identify any integration errors. This method would have worked if Munich had a good size of its own programmers who tackle all the integration errors. The matters became more complicated due to the fact that the requirements of the software were not totally finalized at the start. While programmers are accustomed to run-time wishes made by clients given after the development has started and try their best to accommodate that, in large systems such as ADMOSS which also requires very large scale of precision (99.999% or five nines) its very hard to accommodate that once a system is already in development. While the project was being developed, a ray of emails and faxes kept coming with change requests resulting in inevitable design flaws and test failures. Later on, the developers had to work long hours to wrinkle out those design flaws to ultimately produce highly reliable software. If we try to find who is responsible for that, the blame comes on the marketing team in Munich that may have over-promised and was definitely not documenting and discussing every requirement with client. Some blame also goes to the client, who being a la rge corporation itself and had used software since a long time should know that run-time modifications often corrupt the project and requires heroic efforts by programmers to save the day. On one occasion, work on a billing application was stopped midstream after half a years work because of customers changing needs. Although this type of work interruption involved only 15-20 personnel at Bangalore each year, a programmer admitted to feeling de-motivated wondering about the intensity of miscommunication between Bangalore and Munich. This sometimes leads to the problem discussed later, high employee turnover, where programmers attempt to shift to those jobs where requirements are perceived as stable. Finally, there was problem of lack of sufficient attention given by high managers in Munich. In the words of a senior project manager, not all specifications were finished by our Munich office since we ourselves were not given enough time! Finally, when all two million lines of ADMOSS code was compiled together to create an integrated system, many problems surfaced. Major of them are: subsystems were found to be more interdependent on each other than desired, and, test criteria and tools were different in Bangalore and Munich. The first of these appears to be a shortcoming on part of developers in Munich who were responsible for integration of the subsystems and in a significantly smaller way on the subsystems developers in India. The second one, is definitely a management lapse made by Munich headquarter, the same test beds as used in Munich must be provided to Bangalore at the initial stage to ensure local error-testing and removal. That would have saved a lots of monetarily and temporal costs that the company had to finally bare. ADMOSS was finally released to the German customer at the end of 1996. As Hans Hauer, VP of Software RD put it, This was with some embarrassment because as Germans we expect delivery on time and with quality. The system turned out not to be fully stabilized and kept crashing. There were some minor problems too, like the user-interface being unprofessional, as the client commented, flashy and distracting, resembling video game interfaces, too technical style of documentation etc. When we analyze the causes of these problems a few things come up: first, the part of embarrassment due to delay is a fault of Indians but not much because at least six months efforts were lost not by any mistake of programmers but by a huge blunder made by client and sales team (discussed above). Second, the part of embarrassment due to delivery of a low quality product is fault of Munich who delivered a product not fully tested. Third, the inappropriate design of user interface is perhaps due to non-suffici ent communication about its requirements made by managers to the programmers. In absence of any stated and restricted user interface requirements, the programmers made the user interface as they liked it which of course not satisfied the customer. Fourth, Indians attempt to make documentation too technical for customer is perhaps due to language problem and cultural mismatches, which cant be blamed to any party. In spite of all of these issues, with time, the Indo-German team corrected the system faults and delivered a stable, working system to Munich. ADMOSS ended up highly popular with customers. The Bangalore site remained active with after-sales service, eventually correcting over 90% of ongoing faults. The second project given to Bangalore was called NetManager. It would be a user-friendly and graphics-based software product that would offer telecom customers a complete range of facilities for performing all operating, administration and maintenance functions on EWSD nodes and networks (e.g. integration of new telephone subscribers, billing, enable traffic studies to understand customer needs, and provide system surveillance etc among its 6,000 functions). Work at Bangalore commenced in early 1996 with an initial force of 30 programmers. The june 1998 pilot release involved some 300,000 lines of code and proved a hit at the customer test sites. Munich learned from the past project and gave Bangalore the same test-bed it was using so that developer can test the system as they develop it. By November 1999, Bangalore sent its complete NetManager Version 2 to Munich for testing. Typically Munich tested stability (or reliability) of new software installed by launching it on Friday afternoon and hoping to find no errors in the test log on Monday. NetManager Version 2, however, ran only one hour before crashing to a halt. A check of the test logs ultimately revealed a staggering 700 faults hidden at various points along some 600,000 lines of computer programming code, with 100 categorized as serious Level 1 faults. Initial trouble-shooting indicated that each fault could not simply be corrected individually, since each correction could create ripple effects across the entire system. A late November 1999 workshop in Bangalore involving managers from Munich and India tracked down the root cause of quality problems. As it turned out, the Indian group assumed, as in the case of most desktop computing applications, that the system would be shut off at night, and that it was acceptable for a desktop-based computer system to crash once a week. This assumption was further reinforced by an understanding that operation of the EWSD switch itself would not depend on NetManager. Furthermore, the Indian team underestimated system usage by an entire order of magnitude. We were ignorant! admitted an Indian programmer, we didnt think of asking what loads to test with, but Munich were also at fault for not telling us! Some of these erroneous assumptions could ultimately be traced to different work schedules. In the crucial summer months, many Germans went ahead with their several weeks-long pre-booked family vacations, often without leaving contact information, stranding the Indians. During crisis periods, Indian programmers, in contrast, typically took only personal leaves of two or three days, and worked 70-80 hours per week or even more. Balanced against this, however the ongoing high attrition rate was in Bangalore. As we analyze the issues and their causes, it is found that although the requirements were stable this time, which was a huge accomplishment on part of marketing team and upper management, it was not fully communicated to developers. This can be traced to faults of middle and lower management. As was in the user interface design of ADMOSS, since requirements were not explicitly stated the programmers made their own assumptions which (like in previous project) didnt match the requirements of the company or the customer. Another cause was often unavailability of appropriate personnel at Munich for communication because at the most crucial summer season of development they are out on long vacations. They do so often without any means of communication left. In that case, a developer would either have to wait for the person to return (which was of course unacceptable) or make his or her own assumptions to continue with the development. The solution is either to reschedule the vacations time period to some less crucial months (lets say spring) or the person keep in contact with ICN through a phone. In case of a vacation trip to very remote location where telephone is unavailable, the person should call to company as soon as he reaches a near city or village with a telephone line. This lack of professionalism on part of Germans resulted in Indians taking no annual vacations, working double hours a week than they are paid for and taking the pain of late modifications in design and code. On part of Indians, the high turnover was a very big issue. Once a developer hop to a better paying job, almost entire computer code written by him or her immediately becomes useless for sometime until some other programmer decrypt it and in some cases even rewrite it. This may have resulted in delays and design flaws when somebody try to modify an already made design in his or her own way not thought by the original designer no longer in company. In January 2000, the NetManager was finally demonstrated to the client. Lots of errors came up. They were traced down to two root causes. First, the German testers presenting the software to the client were not well-prepared. Second, the test-bed provided to Bangalore by Munich in 1996 had gone outdated by now and was not the same test-bed Munich now uses or was used in the demonstration to client. Both of these causes can be easily traced to the faults on part of Germans. The testers had no acceptable reason for unpreparedness. The high management responsible for updating Bangalore with test-bed was ignorant towards this duty. We can conclude that, having worked together for well over half a decade the cultural differences between the two countries were handled well. With time Indians understood what is expected from them and Germans spent substantial time and money training its people to decode Indian communications. A German spent 3 years in Bangalore becoming expert in South Indian English accent and understanding of local culture and hidden meanings of phrases etc. But there is a limit to what humans can accomplish, the physical distance between Munich and Bangalore remained a reality, advent of faxes, telephone calls, emails and even video calls can never substitute face-to-face communication. Two developers working together on the same computer (as in Extreme Programming2) cannot be substituted with two developers chatting on an Instant Messenger (such as hotmail or yahoo) even if through Remote Desktop Sharing they can actually view each others computer screen and run actions on it. It is also learn ed that human conflicts in most cases can only be solved with real, face-to-face communication. In absence of hyper-fast physical transportation (such as one that reduce travel time between the two cities to less than one hour) and no visa restrictions the problems faced by ICN in development of ADMOSS and NetManager are very likely to raise its ugly head time and again.

My Freshmen Year Essay

My freshmen year ?My freshmen year gives an objective look into the ideal freshmen year of college experienced by anthropologist Rebekah Nathan. From this? experience Nathan wrote about her first year as a college student. Nathan’s story attempts to show the social and academic expectancy of a student entering college. Nathan gave her personal accounts of freshmen life by? communicating her experience in the dorm, study habits, general? student interactions, and demographic. When comparing student life at Albion to that depicted in Nathan’s account, I could make generalizations but as Nathan also found, no student or campus is alike. To start, Albion College is a small college with a small student? body while the school Nathan attended was very large, so one would guess? there will be differences in what an Albion student would experience? and what Nathan experienced. Nathan had the disadvantage of being an? older women in a world of young adults that were at the least thirty years her junior. Nathan found it difficult at first to be accepted by other freshmen. Many thought she was a parent or just someone who did not belong. Although I didn’t experience this my freshmen year at Albion College, Nathan’s account of college dorms seemed to be similar to that of most freshmen in colleges today. The halls in freshmen dorms tend to be decorated in the personality of the occupants. One thing I noticed was outward decorations of a person’s room often reflects the occupant’s study habits, an area explored by Nathan. Nathan found generally students with busy class schedules do what is important first and the lesser important work tends to wait until they â€Å"find the time†. I would say this action is common among the majority students. As the workload increases for the student, things are pushed to the side for reasons such as personal relationships, exhaustion, or other more pending assignments. I’d like to point out that Nathan, as a professor, had her pick of classes which most freshmen do not and made a schedule that worked best for her own interest. In most cases, college freshmen choose classes from what is leftover and most often have to squeeze unwanted classes into a challenging class schedule. Void of a troubling class schedule, Nathan used her time for? Nathan’s interactions with international students, she found a slight alienation of that demographic of students. The complaints were that American students often show little interest in the international students and they are often left to explore the new country on their own. During Nathan’s initial experience in the freshmen dorm she noticed that friendships are made within the first week of classes, then it is hard to penetrate a new group of friends. Therefore with a possible, language barriers, difference of customs, or just awkwardness of different upbringings, may be the cause for this alienation. I would say there is a higher percentage of international? individuals that experience this at Albion College because of the? demographic of students here. Albion College students, for? the most part, are upper middle class white kids. Bigger schools tend to have a wider demographic of race and class, which often makes a melting pot of mingling people. Making friends is the ability to find common? interests with others. Therefore, someone from another country may find it? hard to make a connection with someone a different nationality due to? customary differences. Nathan’s depiction of the typical college student gives the picture that students often are â€Å"goof offs† and use college as a social club instead of a place that is meant to promote intellectual growth. Where this may be the norm at larger institutions, I would have to disagree with making this generalization for all schools. Albion College students take their education more serious than those from other state colleges. Many students at Albion are focused to continue on to a higher-ranking graduate school or job and? realize that taking school with a serious attitude is the way to do? hat. Nathan’s account of freshman life is realistic because it is her own? experience but it is not typical in some aspects for an Albion student.

Exploring the Meaning of Blood, Nature, and Rationality in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Through the course of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the play’s protagonists plague themselves over the fight between blood and nature among many other things. Blood, be it the kind shed upon ones death or the kind that carries entitlement and stature, parallels and collides with the most basic ideas of nature, and what is natural for a human being. Throughout the play, blood, nature, and rationality are equivocated to highlight Macbeth’s underlying irrationality, justifications, 1 and deeply seeded desires.The issue presented by nature is one that is vital to this play. Macbeth goes against the nature of a human when he slays Duncan, and doesn’t allow him to die in the way that nature intended. Macbeth further defies nature, when he hired the murderers to kill Banquo, because fears of â€Å"[Banquo’s] royalty of nature† (3. 1. 51) have Macbeth convinced that if he doesn’t murder Banquo, it is â€Å"for Banquo’s issue have [he] filed [his] mind† (3. 1. 66). Shakespeare uses very specific language here when he uses â€Å"filed† instead of a word with less, almost intrusive intensity.A word like â€Å"filed,† which is a shorter version of defiled, creates the idea that Macbeth has truly done something horrible to the nature of his being (his brain)2. By corrupting nature and its course, Macbeth changes his own nature, and we see this change often coupled with blood, and the spilling of blood. Blood, another common theme throughout the play, has a double meaning, or is equivocated. One of Macbeth’s primary issues in his soliloquy is that Banquo is going to pass on royal blood to his sons that will become kings.Furthermore, if Macbeth allows Banquo to live, it is for Banquo that Macbeth has â€Å"put rancours in the vessel of [his] peace. † Again, Shakespeare combines blood and nature to highlight the severity of Macbeth’s condition3. In order to justify Duncan’ s murder, Macbeth has to resort to more bloodshed, (the literal interpretation of blood)4, go against nature by killing another being, all in the pursuit of the royal blood that brings power when in courses through ones veins. Nature and blood parallel each other throughout this scene, and they shed light on the consequences of going against them via Macbeth.Additionally, Macbeth uses blood as well as nature to justify the killings of those around him, perpetuating the circle of guilt and remorse that he has already started. First, Macbeth comments on how Banquo â€Å"chid the sisters† and â€Å"bade them to speak to him† (3. 1. 58-60). His tone is very childish in the sense that he sees Banquo’s curiosity in the weird sisters as a threat, and almost instantly assumes that Banquo is trying to steal whatever prophecy the sisters bestowed unto him, similarly5 to how a child would suspect a playmate of stealing his crayons.Also, the sounds made by the words Macbeth uses are very strong and curt, â€Å"chid,† â€Å"bade,† â€Å"speak. † These sounds demonstrate the shortness and irrationality of Macbeth’s thoughts, which follow a similar pattern to those of a child, starting with a slow and long sound and then stopping abruptly with a hard sound. These words help show how Macbeth truly is being taken over by his insatiable quest for power, and is driven to the point where he can’t stop what he has started.Macbeth realizes, 6 too little too late, that he is trapped in this cycle; he interrupts nature and the natural balance of things by killing everyone to obtain power, spills innocent blood, and then later feels the emotional and psychological affects of his actions. If Macbeth were to see this pattern before he had Banquo killed, maybe he and Lady Macbeth would have been spared the hysteria and paranoia. However, despite Macbeth’s undeniable acts of evil and bloodshed, there is this sense of guilt and sorrow in this soliloquy.Although he did kill Duncan, he understands that if he doesn’t fulfill his task of killing Banquo that Duncan’s murder would have meant nothing, and that would add to his inner turmoil. Macbeth captures this idea when he refers to Duncan as â€Å"gracious† (3. 1. 67), which implies that he did feel some sort of affection towards Duncan, which would then lead to the idea that Macbeth was thirsty enough to kill someone as gracious as Duncan in order to be king, and that it was justifiable in some way7

The Witches By William Shakespeare - 942 Words

Man contains desires and longings, inevitable at the least. A lust for power, control, and supreme governance in the heart of an individual proves insignificant, even undisruptive upon first glance. However, whoever’s mind rebellious and natural ideals find themselves present in act in accordance, eventual harm and detriment resulting from their subsequent actions. In the seventeenth century tragedy Macbeth, William Shakespeare emphasizes, through the use of the witches, how society and curiosity in society influences an individual’s decisions, often in a negative manner, and amplifies the seed of evil naturally found in one, as present at birth. Thus, the natural and raw desires present in an individual remain unavoidable; however, only through societal influence do those ideas amplify into actions. Desire for control and a longing for power find themselves present in the hearts of all individuals. Regardless of the knowledge of the presence of lust in man, other envir onmental factors and unique conditions grow passion and further develop the severity of the thoughts one possesses. The presence and constant appearance of the witches bearing prophecies reflects society and its influential control over all individuals, regardless of other opposing factors. Curiosity also present and prevalent in man brings one to a further degree of susceptibility to influence and the continuous development of harmful thoughts, thus leading him to further self-destruction. When firstShow MoreRelatedWitches in Macbeth by William Shakespeare Essay1766 Words   |  8 PagesWitches in Macbeth by William Shakespeare People that lived during the Elizabethan period were very superstitious. They feared the power of witches the most. The hate stemmed mostly from the . . . supposed satanic beliefs of the witches and their heretical partnership with the Devil (Papp and Kirkland 43). 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However, what really catches my attention is the way Shakespeare uses language and unique style to create a distinct mood, and reveal characters’ inner thoughts. In the play Macbeth written by William Shakespeare, Macbeth had came back from battle where heRead More What is drama? The Collins dictionary describes drama as a serious1360 Words   |  6 Pageshave to purchase tickets and go to the theatre for all their entertainment needs. Today technology has helped drama mature. The public is able to view their favourite soap opera or comedy program on the television or on the Internet. William Shakespeare was and still today is believed to be the greatest playwright of all time. He had the ability to pack the theatre every night when he was performing in one of his 37 plays of comedies, histories and tragedies. Baz Ulhrman described him