Traditional Business Analyst
nBusiness analyst are suppose to be the requirement definer who will be able to define all the requirement of the project from the starting of the project(s). This is the job of Business analyst in tradition requirement analysis. During the traditional software engineering once documented by business analyst are not going to change atleast not without potential delay and budget overruns. He should communicate properly with the customer and refine the needs of the customer. He should be able to satisfy the customer(s) need.
What is Agile Project Management?
This SE assumes that process required to develop working software in todays economy is not predictable. Requirement may change, technology may change we can predict individual team members efficiency. When the factors that affect engineering are not static we can’t predict the outcome within sufficient tolerance. Instead we need to adjust the outcome and guide them to create desired outcome. Agile project management does this by creating a high level visibility of the project status, frequently inspecting outcome and maintain the ability to adapt the changing requirement.

In Agile collaborative project requirement succeeds. All the team members are from all discipline involved in defining project requirement. Technical team members and Quality Assurance (QA) collaborate with the product owner and the BA to develop the project specifications. So Team members in Agile project management can experience the collaborative business process involved in the product engineering.
Then Who is Agile Business Analyst?
Just as every Agile team does not necessarily need a dedicated Project Manager, not every team will need a dedicated Business Analyst. Many Agile projects rely on team members that can perform more than one role. Following are the skills needed for a Agile Business Analyst.

• Like traditional SE Agile Business analyst facilitate discussion with the product owner.
• Afterwards the business analyst should be able bring tremendous amount of technical knowledge that help him to draw out the high level functional requirement from the product owner.
• BAs can also help translate user needs into more technical language for the developers.
• Coaching and team building.
• Developing a good understanding of software architecture concepts will help to bridge the gap between the development team and the business.
• Agile team dynamics and collaborative decision-making techniques.

As a whole even the project can be deliver even without a Project Manager, the Business analyst facilitate, define, understand the team deliver the project with even admit continuous requirement change. That means the Business Analyst should participate in the whole engineering cycle.

Serious security flaws in latest iPhone software even expose email, text and voice messages to whomever get the device in hand. Clicking emergency call and double-clicking the ‘home’ button brings up the favourites on iPhone 2.0.2, which opens up the address book, the dial keypad and voicemail. Then clicking the blue arrows next to the names give you the access of private information, clicking in the email address will open the mail application. Clicking on the URL in the contact information will open up safari browser and clicking the send text messages can get the whole access to text messaging.

This is a serious security threat that should be avoided by Apple. Engadget says this will be resolved in the next firmware upgrade. iPhone released in India last week but the initial sales was not much promising.

Iamatechie changed its theme. The themes is much user friendly and attractive than before with all web 2.0 features. Please report me suggestions and bugs. Thanks to my friend Sarath who designed the theme.

We will announce a contest to our valuable readers soon. I am waiting for your feedbacks. We are also planning to sell some advertisement box in the site. Anyone are interested please drop me a email @ mail2sanilATgmailDOTcom.

Today I logged in my gmail, my chat list appeared as blank with green icons showing some of buddies are online.

Recently one of my friend got some gmail error showing undefined gmail. I don’t know why gmail applications are showing these kind of errors. I restarted my browser and logged in. The application works well. May be because of some plugins installed in my browser. Last time when undefined gmail problem occurred it was the grease monkey script created the problem.

I guess gmail team need to do some more browser compatibility test with different plugin installed before releasing their new versions.

This is a cool service that allow us to use temporary email address for some registration. I will describe a scenario where this application is useful. Suppose you want to read some information, but for reading you need a registration. When we register they will send confirmation email to email address given. They may use this email address to sent there newsletter/advertisements. Sometimes this may be annoying for us. Situation like this can be avoided by using temporary email service.

10 Minute Mail is such service that allow us a temporary email that will expires in 10 minutes time. The emails sent in 10 minutes time will be received and shown in the page. In the case of registrations the confirmation email will receive are shown in the web page. The process of creating temporary email address is simple as clicking this link, and click on the link labeled “Get my 10 Minute Mail e-mail address” you will get a temporary email address that is valid of 10 minutes.

In my earlier post I mentioned about iPhone clones. Here is the popular clone for iPhone, Meizo M8. The phone is feature rich which is packed with tweaked Windows CE OS.

• quad-band GSM/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
• 802.11b/g WiFi
• 3.4-inch 720 x 480 capacitive touch LTPS TFT-LCD
• 3 megapixel autofocus camera
• 667MHz ARM11 processor
• WinCE 6.0 based Meizu OS
• H/W encoder/decoder
• 107 x 59 x 11.9-mm
• 8GB of 16GB of flash NAND
• TV-out
• phone, music, video, camera, internet browser
• automatic backlight and display orientation adjustment

Meizu upgrades till now.

The price is very much attractive $310 for 4GB version and $399 for 8GB version. This phone can definitely tap some market of iPhone where the cost affordability is major factor. On a single look we can’t even distinguish iPhone and Meizu.

iPhone is going to roll out in India from Friday(22/08/2008) onwards. Leading telecom majors Airtel and Vodafone are distributing iPhone in India. Both companies announced their price which are identical. The rates start from 31K INR for 8GB model with GPS and 36.1INR for 16GB version. The current price of iPhone 3G is 8.5K in US. So the price is surprising.

Even today I got an SMS from Airtel saying book your iPhone from nearby Airtel store by paying an 5KINR, exploiting consumers .

iPhone even lacks a lot in its features. So I don’t know how Indian consumers are going to treat iPhone. The price is little bit high when we compare its features with high end other phones. Here is the list iPhone lacks.

> MP3/AAC ringtones
> Video recording
> MMS

These all are main features that lacks with other phones, moreover lot of applications are missing in iPhone. Considering the price tag of iPhone, I guess this is the right time for iPhone clones to capture Indian markets. Phones like P168, meizu iphone, LG PRADA, Hi Phone, HTC touch dual etc. I will write about the iPhone clones soon in my blog. Keep watching my blog.

Its shame that iPhone doesn’t support functionality of copy and paste to clipboard (copy and paste between different applications). But the solution is here using Openclip. This application is open source, that support cross application copy paste (copy and paste between different applications).

Openclip make use of shared space on the iPhone that is accessible to developers to make the clipboard feature working that doesn’t break the SDK agreement. But I don’t think application will be live in Apple store. Check out this video to understand how openclip works?

Cut and Paste for iPhone from Cali Lewis on Vimeo.

Google recently started a small interesting game. The game is Google Image Labeler.

How does the game work?

The game is like you can select a nickname or it will be guest. You are randomly paired with partner who is online playing the same game. You can play game for a period of 2 minutes time. During the time both the partners will see same image. We can suggest relevant labels. You will get point if your partner type the same label. We will fail if we type the label which Google already labeled. You are about to gain maximum points within 2 minutes. Number of points you receive will be depend upon the how descriptive your label is? If your pair type the same descriptive label(If your figure is Car. Pair will get more points if he/she type specific car name say for instance Honda Civic instead of Car as label) you will receive good points. Top pairs will be listed at top right corners of the application.

After the game you can see the images you labeled and site in which images resides and its labels.

What is the intention behind?

The original intention behind the game is to label all the images to show better image search results. If you logged using the your Google account, Google will track the points.

All of us are using SMS in our day to day life for communication. Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) is high speed interactive communication service available in GSM network. This is similar to SMS but with the absence of store and forward mechanism(that is no SMSC involved for transaction). The USSD can even maintain a interactive session, which is the major advantage of USSD with SMS.

An example of service is bill status on your mobile. In Airtel mobile when we dial *121# the balance or bill will be displayed as a flash sms.

We can develop lots of applications using USSD. Lot of companies already developed application using USSD. Mobile payment solutions are one among them. Another application is availability checking of varies service like railway tickets, air tickets etc. The main advantage of using USSD is it will work in all GSM phones.