Learning Software Development the Open Source way: A student guide

A book I co-authored with Professor Allen Tucker and Professor Ralph Morelli targeted mainly as a semester course for students was recently published by Chapman and Hall/CRC as part of their innovations in software engineering series and is available on Amazon titled "Software Development: An Open Source Approach"

Background to book and value to students interested in a career in IT
Participating in Open Source is a fantastic way for computer science students to get some hands on experience in a live Software Engineering project, especially before they start a professional career in Information Technology. Participating in an Open Source provides invaluable experiences that closely emulates what they have to face in the real world of professional software engineering, which a pure academic project or simulated mock project cannot offer. Additionally internships with software engineering firms often does not sometimes provide the full range of experiences needed as students are rarely permitted to participate in the critical parts of a billable client project thus their access and exposure is often restricted. Open Source projects however welcome contribution and the sky's the limit in terms of what you can contribute. You are valued more for the quality of what you can do, rather than how many years of experience you have under your belt. Participating in a global Open Source project also is not just about coding, but also about getting exposure to some of the invaluable soft skills needed to becoming a well rounded professional software engineer or architect. This includes interacting with diverse people from developers to users, documenting for those different audiences, understanding software usability, software intellectual property boundaries and learning how to promote your product and yourself. And if the student does well, it also gives them valuable credentials, referenceable experience and a global recognition that could serve to rapidly develop their career. Invaluable not just for students but even professionals who have still not got into Open Source. The book is a hands-on guide for you to get involved and becoming a valuable part of a Open Source community. Hope you enjoy it and do send us feedback for our next edition.

OSI Days, India and Article on the Open Source License Compatibility for the cloud

Recently wrote an article based on my comments at a panel discussion at the OSIDays conference in India. It was also published in the Financial Times. I welcome comments (next blog post)

OSI Days was held in Chennai, India and is an evolution of Linux Asia, re-branded.
Picture is of a panel discussion I participated in on programming languages

The conference schedule was done based on input and it seems that PHP is still the most popular language of choice especially in Chennai. 

 Panel Discussion on Open Source for the Cloud with some of the Open Source Business leaders in India

This picture is with the two project leaders of the two most popular PHP frameworks, Zend Framework and Symphony

Picture with leading Drupal developers and the author of Adminer and PHPMyAdmin alternative.

Why Virtusa supports QA teams volunteering on OLPC?

Virtusa has been applying and contributing to Open Source R&D for quite a long time now, from Apache contributions on Web Services, to the Sahana Disaster Management project in the wake of the Tsunami and most recently to OLPC. In the case of OLPC through with our experience with Open Source, we realized that there is much opportunity to contribute to Quality Assurance (QA) as most often Open Source volunteers are motivated rather by the research and development side of the project and there often is not enough focus on QA. Yet projects like OLPC and Sahana have a global impact and in the latter case needs to be mission critical, thus the quality and stability of the system should be a very important part of the project.

Why OLPC? Well despite the challenges OLPC foundation has had based on their policy for deployment (e.g arrangements only with Govs and not with the private sector for deployment), their mission to empower children is certainly very honorable and something that should be supported by all of us to help bridge the digital divide. It also has to be noted that some people have mis-understood the OLPC. It is supposed to be a tool that will supplement (and not replace) existing education systems and empower especially children in rural communities, who otherwise would not have access to IT or IT teachers for learning, enabling them to learn for themselves. OLPC also has had a much broader indirect impact, as it has been a flagship product that greatly helped bring about the netbook revolution and simply the existence of the OLPC and it’s $100 target has certainly helped drive down costs and have got people thinking about other low-cost solutions for educating children in rural communities. This competition is healthy and it will certainly progress further with the upcoming releases of the OLPC 1.5 and OLPC 2.0 (touch based, iPad like laptop), embodying a lot of lessons from the deployment of the first OLPC 1.0s.

Overall Virtusans volunteers have spent about 40 man months on the project so far delivering about 800 test cases. A good deal of time was spent learning how the system is supposed to work, especially as Open Source projects typically do not have well defined requirement specifications and Use Cases, which are normally used by our teams to derive test cases in client projects. But now we do have sufficient knowledge to quickly nurture new contributors and we presently have volunteers in India and Sri Lanka contributing off our spare QA capacity on the project. One area we are specifically looking at now is test automation on the Redhat based sugar operating system as a mechanism for providing more efficiency for testing new builds.

Virtusa and Virtusans will continue to help OLPC achieve their goals by supporting the team with QA contributions as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility in a initiative we call Tech Reach.

Related Articles:

CSR Wire
 http://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/30163--Virtusa-supports-One-Laptop-per-Child-Program
Andhra Business
http://andhrabusiness.com/NewsDesc.aspx?NewsId=Virtusa-to-back-one-laptop-per-child-programme.html
ITVarNews
http://www.itvarnews.net/news/11238/Virtusa-Supports-One-Laptop-per-Child-Program.html
ITPro
http://www.itpro.lk/node/2058

Virtusa donates to Rehabilitation Efforts

I have been involved in a Virtusa CSR initiative to support the rehabilitation efforts in Sri Lanka for the Commissioner General Rehabilitation's Office. There are a lot of rehabilitates who are interested in a vocation in ITES/BPO and thus Virtusa was invited to help guide a program that would help meet those aspirations. Virtusa decided to make a significant donation at this critical post-civil war period to help the rehabilitation efforts. The donation included a computer lab with 30 computers (running Ubuntu) in Vavuniya, support for defining a program for those interested in a vocation in ITES/BPO and the development of a software solution to help better manage the training and rehabilitation efforts. The lab was opened on the 1st week of April by the President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapakse and it was a great honor to be part of that ceremony.

A further1300+ ex-combatants were released that day to their families and it was a heartwarming sight to see those who have suffered so much due to the civil war being reunited with their families with a fresh outlook for a peaceful future. Some of these kids are so talented and it is sad to see that they wasted so much of their lives being trained instead as lethal weapons. We hope they will have a better future in peaceful Sri Lanka.

The event also gave me another opportunity to observe the President quite close and I continue to be impressed with his charisma and down-to-earth nature with people, especially in this environment, where he was surrounded by ex-combatants, who not too long ago would have taken every opportunity to do him harm (as mandated by their previous commanders).

I was also very proud of our Virtusa team and leadership that gave their full backing for this initiative, given it's relevance to peace building post-civil war. I also had to opportunity to work with the Sri Lanka Army these past few months (from end of last year) on this initiative and I consistently found that everyone I met was very professional, ethical in their approach and disciplined on delivery. It was a pleasure and a honor to work with them and  we would not have been able to contribute on our CSR goals without their vision for rehabilitation and encouraging support of our contributions.

There is still a lot of work to do and you still find remnants of the war scattered around, yet you can see the progress being made on the ground. We hope and pray for a peaceful and prosperous Sri Lanka of the future.

Ushahidi and Sahana will work closely together in disaster response

I had an opportunity to meet Juliana Rotich, Co-Founder and Program Director of Ushahidi during the III Congress in Spain and we had a great discussion on how Sahana and Ushahidi could collaborate more moving forward building from our strengths and partnering on disaster response. We had been collaborating recently during the Haiti Response. The way Ushahidi and Sahana organizes itself as projects are very similar based on Free and Open Source Source principles and we also even share the technology stack (PHP), thus integration would be quite easy. We have also arranged for our development teams to meet for an integration hackerton. Juliana also became a good friend and here we posing for that "formal" landmark handshake between Ushahidi and Sahana to pledge work closely together in disaster response.:-)

Speaker and RT participant at III International Congress, Spain

I had the opportunity to represent Sahana and Sri Lanka at III International Congress event in Gijon, Spain. The event was about building better corporation between “north” and “south” countries and for learning about the innovation in ICT that was coming up from the south. The audience was represented by policy makers in Europe and the UN and innovators from Africa and Asia. I was invited to speak as well as be a round table participant and I took that opportunity to talk about Sahana, H-FOSS and also brought some awareness to the ICT industry in South Asia. In the Round Table discussions keep points I mentioned was that innovation from the south too often get’s tagged with an ICT4D banner for novelty and this hides it’s true potential to be applicable as an globally applicable innovation in its own right. I also am not a fan of the "North/South" term and any demarcation that creates artificial barriers for collaboration. In cyberspace at least we are all equal and social networking is working to eliminate such divides as it no longer matter where you live. Overall I met some great people and made good friends amongst the participants and speakers and look forward to further collaboration with them. Notable for Sahana we made some good links to collaborate with Ushahadi, TachicalTech and UNDP.

References:

• III Congress Coop 2.0 Event: http://encuentro2010.fundacionctic.org/en/ponentes/
• Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/cooperacionarroba/evolution-of-the-sahana-open-source-project
• Newspaper article: http://www.lne.es/gijon/2010/03/02/creamos-software-libre-sri-lanka-gestion-desastres-tsunami/880526.html
• Newspaper article 2: http://www.europapress.es/asturias/innova-00297/noticia-innova-fundacion-sahana-presentara-cooperacion-20-herramienta-gestion-ayuda-desastres-20100123120539.html
• Newspaper article 3: http://mas.lne.es/siasturias/etiquetas/iii-congreso-internacional-de-tic-en-cooperacion-al-desarrollo/

10 questions to ask when selecting open source products for your enterprise

Was recently invited to write an article to TechRepublic on their "10 things" articles on 10 questions to ask when selecting open source products for your enterprise. This is also based on the research I am doing at Virtusa on Open Source maturity models and governance. I wrote this as a brief guide for enterprises when selecting Open Source products and it basically covers 10 checks you should make on an Open Source project to better assure you are realizing the benefits that have been promoted by Open Source. By no means is it supposed to be comprehensive, but here are my personal tips as somewhat of an Open Source insider on how you can select between suitable Open Source products.

Ref: TechRepublic

ApacheCon Asia 2009 Roadshow was a success!

The ApacheCon Asia Roadshow which was a dual event this time between China and Sri Lanka went off quite well. We had about 200 participants for the two days, which was followed by a unconference on the beach! Prof Mohan Munasinghe, a Noble Peace price winner gave a compelling talk on climate change and I had an opportunity to chat with him after. Also we had some facinating conversations with the current president of Apache Foundation, Justin Erenkrantz and long standing director and x-Chairman, Greg Stein. Virtusa was sponsor for this event and my role was as a moderator of the panel discussion, apart from being in the organizing team. Checkout the pics.

Sri Lankan President Launches OLPC program

I was invited to the Sri Lankan President's residence at temple trees today for the launch of the OLPC program in Sri Lankan. 1300 laptops are to be distributed to 13 rural schools. A lot of partners were involved in getting this off the ground including many members of the FOSS community. Virtusa specifically sponsored the server machines for the schools as part of their CSR "digital reach" effort. We wish the Ministry of Education, who is at the center of this effort the best success as it certainly will do wonders for kids in rural areas. I remember the amount of keen curiosity and interest the kids had when we did our field tests in the schools. Apart from that, it was an great opportunity to see the president up close, as he was sitting just two chairs just in front of me. I am generally a fan of our president as whatever said and done, he lead this country out of a devastating civil war, the magnitude of problem, militarily, economically, socially and politically (particularly international politics), which no other president before had to face or ever had firm a resolve to overcome. All our kids have a chance for a future in this country because of the end of this war, that deteriorated our nation for decades. So the president can rest on his laurels as far as I am concerned at least for now, as he delivered on this important promise to his fellow Citizens only just few months ago. Now it is time for all of us to contribute to heal the wounds left behind after the civil war and ensure that the reason for the civil war does not rise again.

Ref Article: http://blog.laptop.org/2009/12/10/sri-lankan-president-launches-a-national-xo-program/

Sahana at Relief 02 at Camp Roberts, California

We had a fantastic two weeks at Camp Roberts and accomplished a great deal for Sahana. This included the use of a $400 (two years ago price) eeePC/Netbook as our primary data collection server, pulling WMS layers from mosaiced and geo-referenced UAV and satellite imagery of the Camp Roberts experiment site, configured an SMS gateway running on a Windows-based server using Cygwin and SMSTools and a Nokia 3220 phone to send and receive SMS messages from Sahana, an Android application to send in structured SMS messages to Sahana with embedded GPS coordinates, exporting of a KML feed from Sahana to Google earth to name a few of the new functionality we added.

The new SMS capabilities which I worked on gives Sahana the ability to serve as an incredibly powerful crowdsourcing and disaster situation awareness application. New SMS functionality included:

• A new format for a structured SMS message to be sent from any cell phone to Sahana.
• The ability to register a user name to a cellphone number.
• The mapping of the SMS messages to a DHS symbolset of incident information based on feature class reported by the Android and SMS message.
• We developed the ability to poll the Sahana server and pull information about the last known location of a registered Sahana user
• Or the search of the last know report based on a keyword

This all was applied in an integrated field experiment and was also present to some key representatives from organizations such as FEMA and DHS

You can find the full details and pictures on Mark's talksahana post here:

http://talksahana.com/?p=303