Appendix. CLANDESTINE( 1n 2)

Not to leave my readers in a maze, I have come up with an appendix for my CLANDESTINE series posts:
Vanilla Victimization. Clandestine Begins - Part 1
Information Parasitism. Clandestine GoLive - Part 2

APPENDIX
CLANDESTINE(pet project): It is my love story.
Team Members: My girl friend and I (Grammar rule: Put the donkey last. So its 'I' who ought to be at the last.)
Stakeholders: Our parents and other family members.
Vanilla Model: Arranged Marriages.
Vanilla Victims(VV): People who had their marriages arranged.
Vanilla Maniacs(VM): People who want all the marriages in the world to be arranged.
Integration Model: Love Marriage.
Cross-Platform Integration Model: Now you get what it is, isn't it?
UAT: Struggle for parents' Acceptance.
SIT: Our preparation up to UAT.
Indian Clientele: People of India.
Carriers: Middlemen who carry information given by the IPs to the destined people.
Information Parasites(IP): It is important that you identify them. For the benefit of the reader I describe them as below
1. They cannot keep their mouth shut.
2. They do not mind their business.
3. These people are well-informed about state-of-affairs of the country and are clueless about happenings in their own household.
Though it is apt and called for, I refrain from using expletives and swear words in describing IPs because they are not worth it for spoiling my beloved blog.

CLANDESTINE is no more clandestine, first in spirit and now in letter. Mission Accomplished.

Hip! Hip!! Hurray!!!

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Information Parasitism. Clandestine GoLive - Part 2

...Continued

Unfazed by the fact that first round of UAT(Acceptance Testing) in Vishakapatnam was a fiasco, the project entered SIT phase in Bhubhaneswar. SIT was a tense period as the early UAT phase with limited number of stakeholders bombed at the box office. There was no convincing them that the application would work, so used they were to the Vanilla apps. The system was tested against the test cases that were never part of the design plan. Proven unit test cases were struck down with a comment of irrelevance attached to them.Every functionality was viewed as an issue and bugs were raised at an alarming rate. In fact the number of bugs raised were more than the sum total of unit test cases and functionalities which was ridiculous.If this was a case with few users in UAT then a full blown UAT blowing up the app was as guaranteed as a 3% return on post office deposit.
Tweaking the functionality and presenting the app again was never a solution as the users were never keen on functionality. They were against the application design itself. What at the maximum could be done was to present the application in a different light and highlight the advantages like low overhead and maintenance costs. But the stakeholders, who had seen the app already, never gave a second look at it. As deliberations among team members were on to do this at least with the second set of stakeholders, something unexpected happened.
Here entered an INFORMATION PARASITE. These are the people who thrive on information and religiously bundle it up just like dung beetle rolls up excrement. The comparison ends there. Dung beetles are a benefit to the society as they clean up mess whereas these Information Parasites(IPs) pick up mess and make it messier till it rots and stinks the whole locality. This depraved social condition is called INFORMATION PARASITISM. Information Parasite gathers information that is irrelevant to him/her from anywhere and everywhere. Once they have pieces of information they roll it up as messy balls and attach it to a carrier. Carriers unaware of the parasite's intentions carry this concocted information to the destination and victimize the destined person with it.I pity the carriers as much as I pity the Vanilla Maniacs for their innocence in the whole affair. But I detest the Information Parasites who do not have a business of their own to mind and a spine of their own to stand upright and speak up. Since the reader has a clear vision of Information Parasitism, I would track back into the story from this necessary diversion.
One such information parasite sitting hundreds of miles away, covertly, victimized the second set of stakeholders through an innocent carrier.Once again the project was in UAT before it was in UAT. We were intelligent enough this time to avoid a sudden dash into UAT. Denials of the project's existence calmed down the users for a few months. The inevitable was delayed and SIT was completed with bought time in Bhubhaneswar. As we thought it was the end of SIT, the project ran into Human Resource issues with one of the team members sent to Chennai and the other to Kolkota. This problem was short lived as I got a transfer to Chennai from Kolkota. This was the most satisfying thing apart from the project going live because this location issue was perceived to be a bigger trouble than the project itself. The project entered UAT in Chennai during early 2009. The second set of stakeholders put this project through rigorous testing as they were keen on the functionality rather than the design. The testing revealed some cascading effects on th future apps but we pursued it relentlessly with resolute silence and an occasional argument that a built application cannot be done away with because of imprecations on the future apps. After two years of UAT the second set of stakeholders gave a conditional sign off and this condition was dependent on the first set of stakeholders who were against the integration model all through these years. With this, the fate of the application was back to square one. It was then that I decided to push the application over into production without any sign off and host the Datacenter in Bangalore. This city offered better financing than Chennai and I moved over well in advance to set up the facility. Though this was the case I missed Chennai and visited my girl friend every weekend.
As we were inching close to a sign-off-less go-live something dramatic happened. The second set of stakeholders waved a green in place of the previous yellow. This came as a big relief to the project. Nevertheless the sign-off, these users wanted at least a yellow from the users who tested the application right in college and they wanted me to get this. I was skeptical about my attempt to get a sign-off because all my earlier attempts were incrementally disastrous. Nth attempt failure was worse than the N-1th attempt.
It was Sept 18th, a D-day that could break or make many things irrespective of the fact that the app go-live was sure to happen. I did not have any decks or slides to present because I exhausted all the material in my earlier attempts.This one was going to be an extempore and impromptu. I just had one last thing to do, that was to take my girl friend home. I did that risking the fact that we would be thrown out. My heart beat went abnormally high as I took her into my house. I did not know what I said to my parents after that. I believe I must have said something pleasant because we got a thumbs-up for our marriage. And, only one whom I could credit here is, God who turned around the seemingly impossible. After that day, things changed for better and my girl friend moved to Bangalore. Our parents fixed the date and are more anxious than ourselves for it to happen. We are getting married in December late in the Evening,i.e at 11:40 P.M on December 10th, 2010. And for me this is pleasantest of reasons to love "December Evenings" even more. The CLANDESTINE project is no longer clandestine. It would be deployed as "Lived Happily Ever After" which was its real and only use case. Now, wait is mine for DECEMBER and I long and yearn for you my DECEMBER EVENING.

PS: Vanilla Models are not all that bad and it differs on a case to case basis. However, what I can say is one solution does not fit all, and imitations could cause chaos.
Have a look at the APPENDIX if there is a word that you do not understand.

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Vanilla Victimization. Clandestine Begins - Part 1

Whatever happened to me, I became an infrequent visitor to my own blog. Before today, September 19th was the only time I attempted to key in something here though in vain. I failed that day, rather miserably, to articulate my emotions and thoughts and as a consequence this space ran barren for a two month period. So what was it that challenged my expression. Was it a Shakespeare's drama or Wordsworth's verse that denied my blog what was due to it. I would say neither, but it is inferior compared to either.
My pet project, CLANDESTINE, that started during my graduation got sign-off from all the stakeholders and it is all set to 'Go Live' in December. This was a small, zero budget, two member team project to begin with. Project was small but stakes involved were huge right from the very first day. Though the dimensions of the project like budget( mostly self-financing at later stages), deadlines and sizing changed over time what remained constant throughout was its core team members and the stakes. None of the stakeholders were informed about the project inception. If they had known, the project would have been forcefully scrapped in the requirement phase due to lots of negative vibes. The decision to keep the stakeholders unaware till the system was stable and ready for UAT( User Acceptance Testing or simply Acceptance Testing) stemmed from the fact that stakeholders always wanted the project to be done in a risk free Vanilla J2EE fashion.
The problem with the Vanilla applications is they are dull, boring, uninteresting and utterly dysfunctional from inside but screamingly good from outside.I call this VANILLA VICTIMIZATION.Sometimes the condition of Vanilla victims degenerates into an acute and chronic state where in a victim becomes a maniac and this condition is called VANILLA SYNDROME. These Vanilla maniacs have a singular, fatalistic goal of victimizing the world with Vanilla affect. And in this state the maniacs are as much a disservice to themselves as to people around which they never realize.Well-informed of this age old, dreadful phenomenon- VANILLA VICTIMIZATION and its after affects - our team wanted to implement an advanced cross-platform integration solution. Cross-platform solutions never fit the bill, smoothly, for most of the Indian clientele, and in particular our clients spend sleepless nights at the very thought of a simple integration solution.God save CLANDESTINE and its team. To the readers: If a term called m-a-r-k-e-t-i-n-g tries to show up even remotely in your head, let me tell you these clients of mine buy no gold if they perceive it as crap. Since you got the context right let us move ahead.
As the SIT(System Integration Testing) dates neared, we were excited,restless and tensed. More often than not, the thought of few more months to UAT and then the glow sign board "lived happily ever after", made us ecstatic. Every project has its share of people who wish its failure and ours being a college project had a bunch of them. I would call them the Vanilla Maniacs or the VM team. I pity them. Their only problem was they were VVs and they wanted the world to be full of VVs.I troubled these VVs enough on all possible occasions and never gave them a chance to retort except for this. They pounced to clutch this opportunity in two hands and needless to say the Vanilla maniacs blew the whistle as hard as a PT teacher who runs after a troublesome student to peal his skin off. The whistle sound set my parents ears agog and the project CLANDESTINE remained no longer clandestine. Everything was wide in open. The project stakeholders themselves being advocates of Vanilla Victimization gave in readily to the VMs word and tug-of war began. With Stakeholders trying to convince the team members to drop the project and in turn team members pleading the stakeholders to accept the already half completed CLANDESTINE, the project entered UAT even before it entered SIT.
Continued in ..
Information Parasitism. Clandestine GoLive - Part2
Have a look at the APPENDIX if there is a word that you do not understand.

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