Nishant Verma

Have we ever noticed how excited we are when we start anything? But it’s a sad fact that 70% of people abandon what they have started with so much energy and love. It could be as small as building a hobby or starting a pet project or even an activity or a side learning we started. “ Well begun is half done .” Aristotle did say this but we are judged for how we have finished something. You separate yourself fro m  the masses when you choose to give that task a finish.  The first quality is finishing off what you started and it helps develop mental stamina or willpower.   It builds confidence and inculcates as a habit in a long run. You don’t need to sign up for the mammoth activity to build this habit, even finishing mundane day-to-day routine tasks will help. Diligence — the quality of working carefully and with a lot of effort Diligence is a quality that almost never will get unnoticed. It’s one of the underlying traits of grea...

  The truth is when you are an entrepreneur there is no weekend and it’s not by any compulsion but because of the passion, you have for your startup. The majority of the entrepreneurs would echo this line of thought. If you are an entrepreneur and taking the weekend off then maybe you are just in a glorified job with no boss to report to. All days are the same! For entrepreneurs, work is their passion, their life, their baby. It’s for a reason you have left a few things behind to venture and create it. In fact, work is not really a work per se, it’s their passion. When you initially started, all days are the same, there is no Sunday or a Monday, all are just the same. You put in innumerable hours to read, to enhance, think, and discuss the plan, and execute. So practically there is no work-life balance for entrepreneurs. It’s just about the idea and execution. Entrepreneurs have a vision in front of them and you chase it with all your passion and ene...

The hardest part of any process is “ improvisation ”. A couple of days back I was pairing with my son (4 years old) on his school homework and there were a couple of realizations or new learning for me.  While I was telling him what is right and how to do it rightly, he was less willing to hear and was kind of sure that what he knew was right.  It made me think that taking feedback doesn’t come naturally .  Read more here ...   https://medium.com/@nishuverma/feedback-the-key-to-improvisation-1a0c8dd36166

It’s been a little more than 9 months on this entrepreneurship journey and I thought of sharing the two most important learning of this journey. 9 months back when we started this venture, we looked into the happy side of it and was excited with the answers of these questions - what we could do, what impact we will be able to make, what kind of satisfaction it will give us, how empowered we will feel when we have a group of like minded people working towards one goal and blah blah. Probably if you ever thought of being an entrepreneur you might have got these questions in mind and once you get an answer to these questions you will feel the kick within to go out and try. Read complete blog here ...  https://goo.gl/65NPkR

Some context - Now that we have seen and did some homework a little bit for a little more than over 6 months, spoken to bunch of people and feel we can expand a little on our terms and conditions. So we are looking at hiring folks now ! Folks who are like us, a little like mindedness and good aptitude skill mostly ! Where are we right now - So once we decided we have to hire, I am looking into recruitment and have filtered lots of resume ! Honestly I haven't gone through these many resumes in my career when working for someone! It's little overwhelming !  So we narrowed down to some resumes and then the next job is talking to these folks. What do you talk about -   So what do you talk to people about? Since no one knows us, it takes a little long to explain ourselves, to explain who we are, why we are doing it, and then we come down to what position it is about. So this is mostly your make or break time ! And after having made at least 50 calls, with the pause in the ca...

Today I was having a discussion with one of my long time friend who is in a senior role in an IT industry. We touched upon a lot of topic but one thing which makes me write this blog is Culture, Quality (by quality I mean the quality of people) and Growth.  For once it does look like 3 different topics but it's actually interrelated and bringing up one invokes other. So you can't have discussion on Culture in silo or for that matter either Quality or Growth. Relating from my experience of hiring in one of the companies I worked with, had three rounds of interview with two people evaluating the person in each round. So if a candidate has gone through all rounds there would be six different opinions and a higher chance that people might have mixed opinions. The only situations where all six of them would have readily agreed was when the candidate is really poor in knowledge (mostly they wouldn't reach next round ) or really outstanding where in people reach consen...

It's been 4.5 years I spent in ThoughtWorks learning technologies and management aspects from some of the best industry practitioners. I was enjoying my time in ThoughtWorks and then one fine day I decided to move on and try something of my own with few friends at ThoughtWorks. Actually it was in discussion from quite some time which I had in some corner of my mind. But it took considerable amount of time for my irrational sense to dominate the rationality of my mind. Yeah the rational brain of mine was adamant that it's all going good in ThoughtWorks work wise, money wise, career wise, learning wise. But then it was a desire in me which was making me un-satisfied somewhere with what I had in life. Someone told me once "if you always do what you did, you will always get what you got" and this is stuck in my mind since then. Once I was telling my friend find out the reason why you are working, and they were telling reasons which wasn't able to convince themselv...

It's been quite some time that I am involved in a project, which involves distributed agile team. There is a lot I have learned being the project manager on the team and I would want to share here. The project is distributed across Bangalore and Cincinnati. By the way a distributed team is the one, which is constrained from collaborating in person or face-to-face. Typical set up I am in is, smaller team onshore and a larger team offshore. Smaller team, which is onshore, has the advantage of being closer to Product Owner. This post is mostly to share my experiences and learning from managing such a team and helping the team to deliver. One thing for sure is it's not easy to implement, it has its own challenges. Below are some of the items, which we need to take care a lot in a distributed agile mode: Communication : As I mentioned earlier that there is a small team, which is present at onsite gets the advantage of sitting next to Product Owners. A...

Folks we have written a tutorial for aspiring test automation engineers who wants to learn Webdriver and looking for Test Automation Framework creation knowledge. The project contains a bunch of chapters right from " writing your first Selenium test " to " how to implement Page Object Pattern ".  We have hosted the sample framework in Github and is for illustration purpose.  Link:  https://github.com/nishantverma/cleartriptests It will demo the implementation of Java with WebDriver (aka Selenium 2) and how to write automated tests. The chapters are created in a evolving manner where the first chapter tests are very simple enough (how a beginner would write) and then slowly they have been evolved (how a professional would write). Who's the Target Audience: To work, interact and make the best out of the project a person is required to have a basic knowledge of Java, Selenium API, TestNG and GIT. Just to clear this tutorial is not meant to teach you Jav...

How do we claim "What we know" ? Knowing - Is it something that we have heard of ? Or Is it something which we have read about and almost forgotten it so I have just a little (almost no idea) idea about that? Or is it something which we know almost everything about?  Most of the time what we actually know is a fraction of our perceived notion of "knowing". This is described as illusion of explanatory depth . So what happens is we generally form a circle around things and claim that we "know" it. This prevents us from actually knowing it and let us remain in that "complacency" that we know it. So what I have learnt over a period of time is "admit frankly what you don't know", it will help you extend your knowledge.  Next time when someone brings up some topic which you claim to know but actually don't know then make a entry in your learning diary about that word. When you reach home/office, search it on web or talk ...

There are different kinds of person and obviously different kinds of problem solving strategy. So where is this blog coming from? This is based on my latest project assignment. A team which has some process in place (not the best though, but people admit it and want to move to next level), some problems as perceived by me because of me being new to the team and not yet saturated with things around. So how do you go about tackling it? Take some time in understanding why there are certain things dealt in a certain way, understand what people values and what not, what is important to them, why they do certain things in a certain way? Based on your previous experience or theoretical team (which you would have read in blogs or some books) chart out what things are already in and what else you want to get in. Discuss with your team members and get their feel on that stuff. Chart out a plan with time line attached to it and go for it. Analyzing this way and having spend some time you w...

On Friday, I just finished "Group Feedback" session. Well I don't want to blog about what happened in that feedback. This post is more from the point of view of "Why we need feedback?". What is " feedback "? Wikipedia defines feedback as Feedback  describes the situation when output from (or  information  about the result of) an event or  phenomenon  in the past will influence an occurrence or occurrences of the same (i.e. same defined) event / phenomenon (or the continuation / development of the original phenomenon) in the present or future. When an event is part of a  chain  of  cause-and-effect  that forms a circuit or loop, then the event is said to  "feed back"  into itself.  We work in team and the team is made up of "Individuals". The behavior of individuals influence the outcome of team , may be in a positive manner or negative! A team is constituted to achieve a certain goal and so the team members beh...

Conducting a workshop on Testing tool is not new for me. In past I have given the same for QTP and other tools in my previous organization. How was this different ? What’s new for me ? I noticed that these kind of sessions mostly revolves around tool. Those sessions were mostly like Feature drill down from Day-1 to last day nothing but just features. During my QTP days, I used to prepare a Power point presentation of features and snapshot of screen flows to illustrate it. What’s different in conducting Twist session. I actually thought of experimenting. I listed down all the critical features which I thought of discussing and then finalized on the application (which was Mingle , a Project Management Tool from ThoughtWorks Studios). I started session with a persona of a QA on a testing team of Mingle (AUT) who will be involved in writing test cases, testing Story acceptance criteria and finally automating it. So it was easy for me to map the requirements of a Tester with the feat...

First thing: what compelled me to write this was “ Send Feedback ” feature on Google + . I assume you would be knowing a little about Bug Logging/Tracking tool. I have used quite few too. Pretty much all of them seems to work in isolation. Isolation as in you have a application to test and you found a bug. So you launch the Bug logging application and do a bunch of things: 1. Write the best describing short and concise Title. 2. Write the Steps: (How to reproduce this? What was expected? What really happened?) 3. Take a relevant screenshot and highlight the problem in that (A Picture speaks thousand words !) 4. Set Feature, Priority, Risk etc. I felt I found a bug in Google + and I thought of sending it to them. I clicked on the “Send Feedback” link, so my whole page greys out and a small UI is popped up in right. By default “Highlight” is selected. So you just have to select a relevant portion of the UI where you think the Bug is and describe the issue in the tex...

I am not a big Facebook fan but used to spend quite some time on it by looking into some scraps, some videos, laughing on comments, liking some comments (remember the Like button). Got the news of Google + . Requested few colleagues to invite me so that I can join the Google + league ( which is not yet opened publicly ). Reaction in first few minutes: wow what a neat application . No UI frills as you can see below. Default landing is on Home page, next icon is for Photos (Photos from your circles),next is your Profile, and the last one is most talked about Circles. Clicking on Circle will show you People in your circle, People who’ve added you, People you can find and invite. Circle is quite an innovation in Google +. Not everyone I have in my Facebook friend list are at same proximity. Some are college friends, some are colleagues, some are friend’s friend and many more like this. I feel Google +has understood it properly and they have created Circles as a solution. It helps...

Every morning I get up, I generally prefer to pick up the news paper ( Times of India ) and want to read something good. Good about the country, good about what we as people are doing, good about what government is doing for the country, some good articles in the speaking tree section, some good international news and some good financial news. Ahhhh… this seems like as if I am into some dream land and very much optimistic about everything. Well I am a little optimistic, in fact a little more than all of us (I feel). I open the news paper and I read “ Life in Tihar: Tea with jail official, chatting with pals ”, “ CBI books babu for Rs. 400 cr. loss ”, “ HC stays tree cutting along Sankey Road ”, “ Maria Susairaj set to walk free ”, “ Stray canines maul baby to death in city ”. Well these are headlines of a national daily newspaper. My first instant reaction : Bloody hell ! Why do people bend in front of politicians, why shouldn’t they be treated as other criminals are. Next reaction: ...

Though there are many things I wish I could write and share with you all (what I learn at IIM), but I found this really worth and couldn’t resist. I am thinking of sharing some learning with you all going forward. Today I had a class on subject “Management of Tech Products” and Professor suggested a book “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey A. Moore . Probably if you are associated with Product development and Management, this book would be a great source of knowledge and insight into product management. I would definitely recommend this! As per the book mentioned above, there is something called “ Technology Adoption Lifecycle “ model and it actually shows that a product marketer should focus one user group at a time. These are 5 different user segments who actually uses the product at different stages. Below attached is the picture of the same. Leaving you with this so that you feel like knowing more about it ! (Food for thought)

Project: re-writing a legacy application; and building Outlook Add-in and web application (in Silverlight) . Completed 15 months in a project and today rolling off for another new beginning in a different project.  I was involved in  close to 50 stories as a QA owner and have written over  more than 100 test cases and logged over more than  350 defects. I joined in a 7 member QA team and day –1 was like sitting in a room “Nalanda” and doing regression while going through the test scenarios. There were quite some number of test scenarios at that time itself and the application was buggy. Initially I thought I will start reading the narratives to get a hold of the application. But ask me it’s tough in a project which is older than 6 months. You can’t do it and you will have to find a better way. So what next, I started doing Exploratory testing and that increased my confidence. While you get to know the feature implemented and how actually system is behaving rat...

Why 160 why not more? Have we ever asked ourselves why SMS length is fixed to 160 characters only? SMS is the oldest application to be used in GSM phones. Currently it has more than 3 billion active users. It’s an age old application but we are hardly seeing any modification/up gradation with the advent of new technology. Yes we did see the upcoming of MMS but SMS remained the same. Ever wondered why 160 characters? One day while going through some bookmarks in Delicious , I found an article on the same. I found it irresistible to share and go this way… Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in fewer than 160 characters. That became Hillebrand's magic number -- and set the standard for one of...

“What happen when we move in a new situation” or for the sake of simplicity of understanding let’s say what you feel when you join a new team. You as an “individual” bring in your learning, your individuality to the whole team. You get acquainted with the processes prevailing in the team. Some of these processes you would have experienced before, some you would have never heard of. Things which are new are tough to digest and practice. We react to it: we start questioning, we feel little uncomfortable towards the new things. We start influencing the process by “trying to modify” the existing process. That is the “individuality” you bring on to the team, which should be highly respected. Some of these processes are good, efficient, valuable etc. Some has room for modification, replacement. During the initial phase of settling down we feel strongly about these processes. Given a chance we would want to change it or replace it. This feeling of bringing change lasts from starting few d...