3 questions on startup

Basic questions yet too often forgotten. Taken from http://feefighters.com/blog/3-questions-for-vetting-potential-startup-ideas/

1) Does it solve a real problem?
2) How does it make money?
3) Will you be passionate about it 5 years from now? 

Pricing: irrational and rational mixing it up under the curve

I found this article title You're Pricing it Wrong: Software Princing Demystified

Being who I am, I never thought beyond the Demand Curve:

The sweet point is where the intersection forms the largest rectangle. This rectangle represents the calculation of sales × price, and the biggest rectangle represents the biggest revenue.

 The rest of the article allowed me to think a bit less rationally and find a bit of relevance for marketing.

Release Management

This is a short article that needs to be read: http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/answer/What-tools-are-required-for-effective-release-management

What, then, are the must-haves in a technology-based, modern release management system?

• Visibility: We need to know real-time, what the status of the releases are. We need a release calendar that lets us see when things are happening so we can balance the release workload. 
• Control: Every stakeholder must be able to give their electronic signature to approve, and it needs to be reportable and auditable. 
• Reporting: We need to track our performance against our KPI’s and SLA’s, and we need early warning when we are out of range on these numbers. 
• Vault: This should contain the master code that is destined for production: no more developers each having their own path to production, no more developers with root access. 
• Deployment automation: We need a repeatable and predictable technology that consistently deploys our code and backs it out automatically if things go wrong.

 Taken from: http://www.impacsystems.com/blogengine/post/PLM-is-still-not-Mainstream.aspx

The Aberdeen Group says that adoption of PLM is far from universal.  Maybe only 1 in 5 companies have fully implemented a PLM solution.[...]

Without a data management solution, engineers will spend about 25% of their time looking for information.  A PLM solution will give them back that time – time that can be used to engineer a better product, improve quality, etc. 

PLM Basics

Taken from: http://www.impacsystems.com/blogengine/post/PLM-Basics.aspx

When talking to companies about PLM, I end up doing a lot of educating.  I am constantly looking for ways to simplify the explanation.  My current thinking is that I can put the over 100 features in two buckets:  Control and Visibility.  What follows is overly abbreviated…