We’re recruiting!

Graduate Software Developer to Join Exciting Company In Central London

KnowledgeMill is an independent software vendor based in central London established in 2009. We specialise in innovative, scalable, content management, knowledge management, and archiving products targeted at the enterprise market.

Although we use a whole variety of the latest supporting technologies, we have strong software development partnerships and alliances with Microsoft (Gold Partner), Oracle (Gold and OEM Partner) and EMC (Velocity OEM & Select Partner).

We are now going through a growth phase and are looking to expand our small successful team. We believe that the best way to do this is to invest in home grown talent which is why we are looking to recruit two technology graduates.

You should have at least a 2.1 degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related discipline. We would also welcome Mathematics graduates with a demonstrable experience of programming (perhaps in your own time, as part of a combined course, or an elective module).  We won’t waste time listing the old cliches of working hard, willingness to learn, strong communications skills etc… it all goes without saying. But ultimately, you should be coming out of University looking to follow a successful career in Software Development, committed to that route over the long term, and looking for something a little bit different from the usual Milk Round organisations.

This is not a graduate scheme, it is an opportunity to work in a highly talented technology team with a combined career history from Oracle, Microsoft, Siebel, IBM, McKinsey, Accenture, Goldman Sachs and many other leading technology and blue chip organisations. We invest in our people with training courses from our partners, but primarily you will learn on the job. With guidance, you will be contributing to real production code from the very start. There’s no better way to learn.

You’ll get exposed to established industry standard technologies and development languages including MS C# .NET, Java, Oracle DB design, and PL/SQL. You’ll also gain skills in more leading edge areas like the development of MS Silverlight, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and MS Office apps. We heavily integrate with many other 3rd party systems including messaging platforms (MS Exchange, MS Communication Server, Lotus Notes) and major ERP systems (Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards). We’re small and agile enough to keep up with the latest technology trends so the possibilities for learning are huge.

You’ll initially start working on development of the server platform and then progress into the various other components and products within our portfolio.

It’s important to understand that you would be joining a start-up company. We work hard, for long hours, but it’s dynamic, fun and without sounding overtly cheesy you have the opportunity to make a real difference to the company’s success.

We’re offering a competitive starting salary of £24,000. Salaries and roles are regularly reviewed inline with commitment, achievements, and experience.

This position is only available to candidates who are already legally authorised to work in the UK. You will be based full time at our offices in central London and should be ready to start work immediately.

Experience Required:

• Recently graduated (within last 18 months) from University
• Minimum 2.1 in Computer Science, Information Technology (or a related discipline) or Mathematics (with demonstrable experience of programming)

Nice-to-have but not essential:

• Development experience of – MS C# .NET, Java, Oracle, PL/SQL, MS Silverlight

Primary Responsibilities:

• All developers contribute and have joint responsibility for the following areas.
• Design and development of future components and products
• Development and advancement of existing components within the product suite
• Bug fixing and maintenance of existing components
• Technical authoring of configuration and installation guides

If you’re interested, please email jobs@knowledgemill.com

To deliver business context-enriched Enterprise Content Management solutions

Hisham Anis, CEO of KnowledgeMill, said, “This alliance will broaden and deepen KnowledgeMill’s capability to deliver to customers full content management solutions based on business context, worldwide. Enterprises are generating unstructured content such as word processing documents, e-mails, presentations, rich-media files, and spreadsheets at unprecedented levels. This reality coupled with the economic conditions places an emphasis on efficient content management solutions that deliver critical information at the right time to help your business make better decisions faster.“

Anis says KnowledgeMill solutions represent an ‘inflective moment’ for the enterprise content management industry, one that necessitates a whole new approach to serving the needs of businesses of all sizes. It’s all about putting the business users at the centre of a content management strategy. “Traditionally customers have focussed on records management, without having a solution that allows the end-user to influence how that content is used and retained,” he says.” By managing and delivering your intellectual assets effectively at the right time to the right business users, and providing a disciplined framework for ensuring your content assets are built and recycled in alignment with your business model, information really does become an asset. Through this alliance, we are able to deliver a solution that leverages the EMC Documentum enterprise content management platform and deliver new business value for customers.

Jean Claude Broido, Senior Vice President of International Sales, Information Intelligence Group, a division of EMC says, “Managing content across an enterprise, whilst keeping cost down and delivering innovation and value is a major challenge to any business. With EMC Documentum, KnowledgeMill can meet that challenge by not only making content significantly more manageable and controllable, but by embedding content with intelligence and presenting it to the end user in new, meaningful ways.”

KnowledgeMill have already delivered strong results for a Global Law Firm with their first commercially available product. Their E-mail solution ‘Context Store for Exchange’ which organises email data by legal matter, has delivered significant cost reductions, improved business collaboration and empowered the businesses ability to respond to eDiscovery.

Anis has plans to deliver more. KnowledgeMill’s email solution works whether you are hosting your own exchange infrastructure, or hosting it from within the Cloud. This is a pointer of things to come. “Our mission is to become the leading provider of innovative, efficient, context enriched Enterprise Content Management solutions for the legal sector and other industry verticals, both in the Cloud and for traditionally hosted solutions. Through our alliance with EMC, we are well positioned to deliver this.”

KnowledgeMill Context Store for Microsoft Exchange is a Next Generation content management platform for eMail services:

• Business related data definitions from ERP or user defined (context)
• Filing and Collaboration through context
• Business intelligence and analytics
• eDiscovery and Search based on context
• Powerful compression and de-duplication
• Cloud ready

We’re confident that we have email filing features that blow customers minds. We’re also heavily geared up to dealing with the kinds of volumes of emails that lawyers deal with on a daily basis. This is no easy task. But with our background in the legal sector working for magic circle law firms we’re confident we’ve gone a long way to solving this.

This got me thinking so I decided to come up with a list of “must-haves” that need to be included in an email filing solution for it to be successful in a high-volume email environment like the legal sector. So here we go…

1. Dynamically maintain a list of recent matters and favourite matters to make selection of matter an easy task, ideally this should also be linked with the billing system

2. Once an email is filed (e.g. a new email or an email from a client) – all subsequent replies, forwards must be automatically filed – removing the burden on the end user

3. The filing system should automatically suggest where the email should be filed even if a completely new email – ultimately the system should learn patterns of email addresses and content within the emails. This again reduces the filing burden to the end user.

4. The filing process must add value to the end user. This is absolutely key – if there is no added benefit to the Lawyer for filing the email, then even if it’s a compliance requirement, it is unlikely to be adopted. There should be benefits – for example the KnowledgeMill solution helps the lawyer fill out their timesheet based on what they have filed to. It also provides analytical intelligence to within the matter which are useful on a daily basis.

5. The filing process must de-duplicate emails so that when the same email is filed by different lawyers on different email servers, there is only one copy displayed. Traditional document management solutions simply don’t do this. Lawyers are faced with 1000s of duplicates. Our solution does this. A single central source of truth for an email.

6. The underlying filing system must be performant. If the process to view the filed emails is slow – then Lawyers will immediately turn off and reject the platform. The UIs need to be as close to Outlook performance as possible.

7. The filing mechanism must NOT lock up Outlook. The lawyer should be able to file 1000s and 1000s of emails in one go. Many email filing solutions lock and hang for huge periods of time – effectively wasting precious working hours. Our background filing mechanism avoids lock-ups. This is absolutely essential.

This is just a starter for 10, we’d love to hear your ideas or even your frustrations with your existing solutions!

Putting things in context

T: “Lizzzzzzz, what do ye mean by context?” (I ignore the question as I become automatically deaf to people calling me Liz)

T: “Oy!!, bird in red sitting beside MY fireside drinking MY tea, context, what’s that?”.

T is a best bestie mate from the homeland was reading the KnowledgeMill website as our sons lay belly down on his huge living room rug making up the rules of draughts as they went along.

‘What is context’ is one of those questions like ‘what is algebra’. The concept is simple enough but the application of that simple concept can get very complex. Ever since I joined KnowledgeMill, I have read an awful lot of interpretations of context, some of them more awful than the rest. Most make the mistake of over-complicating their answer by describing the usage of context rather than what it is in its simplest form. I mean, if someone asked you what algebra was, you would not answer: “Algebra is the system by which you work out equations like – (If (x)= 2x + 2 and g(x)= x to the power of 2 – 4x +2, what is the exact value(s) for which f(x)=g(x))f”  That is not the wrong answer, it is just over complicated.

Before I tell you what I told T (and how hard I slapped him for calling me a bird), can I time-machine you WAAAYYY back to a Maths class? In this class, I was 12 years of age. Our teacher was Miss McGuiness, she of the mad curly hair and madder Belfast accent. On the day of this seminal class, she came in like a small whirlwind of rapidly opened doors and striped clothes to introduce our class to algebra. “Listen to me now” she said “if you have never listed to me before and never listen to me again, it does not matter as long as you listen to me now and understand this simple relationship between letters and numbers”. She then taught our class to understand algebra A-Z and 1-10, most of it within 40 mins. She managed this feat by making the idea of algebra something easy to understand. She started by telling us that the letter in an algebra equation always represented an unknown number. She also taught me that the best way to teach a complicated concept was to start with simplicity and work up from there.

Did I say she was an amazing teacher? No, you’re right, I didn’t, that is because amazing would not have covered it. She was *the teacher* *the one* who made me (and 29 others in various states of nose picking and spot bursting slumber) get *it*. She was the teacher Robin Williams would have portrayed if Dead Poets Society had been called Dead Mathematicians Society and he was playing a charismatic six counties woman with a penchant for multicoloured knitwear.

So how does this relate to context and my answer to my friend with the recently thumped shoulder? Well, T. asked what context was in terms of our (KM’s) contextual tool. Yes, before you ask or wonder, I am the first in line to admit that “contextual tool” does sound like another way of phrasing ‘pedantic idiot’ but there you go. In comparison though, it is not the worst terminology that IT has lumbered the world with. I still have a small internal giggle over ‘dongle’ and ‘CRUD’. Don’t even get me started on how hard I have to bite my lip whenever anyone mentions ‘mounting a drive’ ….

Anyhow, coming back to the subject in hand (ok, ok, I’ll stop now) here was my answer: In IT, Context is a group of information that belongs together.

Expanding out the idea, Context is like a human body with a heart, veins, blood, skin, bones, eyes, teeth and hair. Everything in that context relates to each other, reacts to each other and interacts with each other. However, without the understanding of a person as a common denominator, the purpose of that interaction (the context) will not take place or make sense.

In the real world, the word context is used as a scale of proportion of related issues e.g. Someone closed the door on my hand and it hurt like cresus but taken in context against Ranulph Fiennes who had five fingers die slowly of frostbite, it was a nothing …. barely worth a mention ….

In IT, there is no scale of proportion. There is just the linking of related information. Once you decide on the basis of a link and start adding information to it you have the beginnings of a context. Once you have a piece of information linked, it is contextualised.

The start of the context could be an email, the middle is made up of more emails, forms, tasks, documents, Notes, RSS feeds, journal entries, blog posts, data files, legacy systems documents, IM conversations, Web pages and reports. There, you have your context in all its forms linked together by a common interaction. All you are missing is a way to present them all together for someone who wants to see the information displayed in the same place for simple understanding and complex analysis.

So how do you assemble all the information necessary to create a context? There are two ways – manually and automatically.

The manual method relies on all parties to a context sharing the information they have on that context in a common place like a file share. Obviously this method is subject to all the foibles and forgetfulness of the humans involved. Imagine a company newbie coming into a multi-million dollar project that has 2500 related emails, 1500 related attachments, 2000 project related documents, 1000 RSS feed items …. Also, imagine that that company are relying on human competence to ensure that all this information was saved to where it was expected to be. So in the case where 20 people are party to one email, either 20 copies of the email will be filed or none if everyone is expecting “Mr. Someone Else” (He has an office on the 13th and a half floor) to file it.

The automatic method is based on rules like the solution that KM have developed. You feed our product a call (the rules) on what do with nominated information (file or not file) You tell it how to file the information (which flavour of software to use) You tell it how to treat the information once filed (should it be linked to other relevant information) You tell it when to file the information and where to do it (how you want the information organised) You can also tell it who has access to all this information once it is organised. You also tell the system how long you want that information retained for. The system is also clever enough to de-duplicate all 20 copies of the email in the above scenario so only one copy is saved to the database cutting down 19/20ths of your storage costs for one piece of data alone. Job done. Yes really.

I am not saying our solution to email filing and contextualisation is the perfect one, far from it. I have read posts before with people claiming that their product was all that and more. These sorts of posts usually make me want to tear out my eyeballs and bounce them off the opposite wall. Our product has its shortcomings. For instance, our resident “geniuses” have yet to work out how to get KMCS to make you a fresh strong coffee when started up. Thinking about it logically, anyone with a huge volume of electronic data to organise needs two things; the software capable of doing the organisation effectively and efficiently and a mug of hot and caffeinated to drink while the software gets on with it.

I have logged a user story pointing this out and boy, am I looking forward to testing that stage of product development. Wonder if I can get mine with Devon cream?

This is a post born out of the fact I had been musing on the sheer amount of friends, relations and ex-colleagues having babies lately. I work as a software tester so am in the habit of creating tenuous links where no sane person would see one existing. Please bear with me.

It occurred to me during this musing that babies are quite like software.

Think about the planning for a prospective project. Ideally the planning for a software development project should always be done during the time that the developers are writing the code, so that once the first iteration of development is completed, the next stage in the project can begin without interruption. Ideally, prospective parents should use their 9 month-ish compilation time to carry out their planning. All chances for planning will be lost after this stage. Once compilation is finished, there is a rapid dramatic release and a new program, wrapped in a blanket, delivered to the tester and the project manager (who has also contributed code to the project)

To further advance my point about babies being like software and help anyone who has recently started the baby software compiler going; here are the reasons babies are like software.

Initial observation of the Baby will reveal the GUI to be very pleasing to the project. This excellent design frequently causes a knock on effect known as staring at the baby in wonder for hours at a time. During these early stages, the project may be still working out their roles. A tester may jokingly tell the PM that as she supervised the first 3 semesters of the build process, he can take over the next 3 semesters of the implementation. However, this will not happen. It takes a wide user base to raise a baby.

Planning is essential as the Baby release will experience noticeable upgrades every few weeks. This rapid growth will require new casing with every increase in disk size so it is inadvisable to stock up on a huge volume of same size casing in advance as the baby will have outgrown it before you have time to take it out of the packaging.

Huge bug: The Baby release does not come with volume control. The only selectable options are on or off and it sometimes feels unusually easy to trigger ON and unfairly complicated to locate OFF. In most (but not all instances) OFF can be triggered by adding hardware or software, depending on how the project is feeding.

For the tester using the software method of feeding, disk damage can occur if the drives are not positioned correctly or over-accessed. Keeping cold cabbages in the freezer is an excellent work-around to this issue. As wonderful as the feeding software, Booble 1.0 and Booble 2.0 is, it is limited to a 1-user per household licence restriction. So if the tester takes on the role of software feeding, it is the role of the non-feeding project manager to make sure that all the best tools are made available so she can carry out her role. These include frequently poured baths, back-rubs, praise, appreciation, chocolates, a few hours off every week and dinner cooked for her whenever possible. This ensures happy working relationship between all parties working on the project.

Sleep mode can be tricky to enter. A newborn baby will be totally unaware of project expectations that darkness triggers slumber and daylight triggers wakefulness. There is no known fix for this issue except the workaround of time. Difficulties entering sleep mode can be characterised by the aforementioned issues with volume control.

Sometimes disks can get dirty. The only appropriate response to this is to implement an emergency change control to replace the disks. Symptoms of this need may be characterised by a rapid change in volume and smell. Never leave the house without fresh supplies of disks. With some babies, catastrophic disk failure can occur, to plan ahead for those instances, the experienced tester and PM will always travel with fresh supplies of casing.

The Baby release can be prone to infection. Their virus is typically characterised by running noses and weepy eyes. This can be frequent in the first year especially during the times of the teeth upgrade. Calpol is the spybot of the baby world.

There are also plenty of manuals available for your new software. The difficulty is selecting the one that is right for you which can be difficult when faced with an industry that is designed to make new parents feel like a failure if they do not use their product. This is exactly how so-called software development methodology gurus can make companies who do not use their processes feel. They both do it for the same contemptible reason, to create a worry that can only be “relieved” by spending money on their services.

There are the methodologies that recommend carrying out project tasks at certain time without variation. Gina Ford, author of ‘The contented baby book’, is the Spiral method in a starched apron. They both advocate defined tasks to be repeated at certain times without deviation in order to attain a fixed goal. The thing I never liked about Gina Ford (and the Spiral method come to think of it) is the idea of repeating a task for the sake of repeating it. This woman recommends getting a baby out of bed at 7.00am every morning, even if the baby is sleeping. Waking a sleeping baby is reliably likely to invoke the issues of volume control discussed earlier. Also, isn’t there a word for an unquestioning adherence to procedure and tasks? In the name of balance I should add that, I am told by those in the know that this is a good methodology by those projects that like a strict and regular routine.

More easygoing parents might prefer the Object-Oriented Model. If they imagine themselves as the user, then they use their experience to improve or add functionality to the application, sorry Baby. Dr. Spock may be thought of as the author of the manual for the OOM parent. The only problem for the new tester, sorry parent, is that it is near-impossible to work this methodology correctly without prior testing (parenting) experience. Without knowing the impact of any implemented change, it is impossible to know the consequences of implementing it. The baby catalogue may say that a £39.99 device to warm nappy wipes is a good idea to save babies from the shock of a cold one. However, it takes an experienced parent to realise that this is complete hokum designed to create a need where none exists. Most nappy wipes tend to be at room temperature anyway.

The V-model, touchy feely, everyone working together, new age, use lots of buzz words, taking references from once-popular culture methodology has its childcare theory equivalent in the Baby Whisperer Tracy Hogg. They are welcome to each other. I believe Mars is vacant this time of year and heartily suggest both methodologies take the one way shuttle there.

Babies, I have found, like so many other things, are best managed using agile methods. Peter Mayle is the man who wrote the manual for the Agile parent, a dependable volume called Baby Taming. Now, I know Agile involves a disciplined project management process. I know there should be frequent inspection and adaptation. I know that there should be a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability. I also know that, if you try to point this out to a sleep deprived woman with sore nipples who is entering her second hour of rocking a teething baby with a heavy cold to sleep in her aching arms, she will tell you to go away using very loud inelegant language. She will also probably make a threat on your life. You should take this seriously and not make the same mistake again.

This is a demonstration, is any were needed that babies, like Agile, are best planned out in advance and not implemented in a panic once the project has already started. It is also a fitting conclusion to my stance that babies, are indeed, like software.

Cartoon by Randall Munroe of the wonderful xkcd.com

 
I am the KnowledgeMill software tester and a Mother of 2 beautiful children. I have nearly 8 years experience of being a Mother and nearly 15 years software testing experience. Yes, I have read all the books mentioned in this article and worked with all the methodologies. My daughter currently has the cold virus and my son the football bug. I am working on testing the desktop suite of KMCS products. I use Agile at home and in work.

I’ve already told you how I described to my Mother, who specialises in growing prize-roses, what I do. This post is about how I describe my role to other people in IT.

The best way that I can do this is in general terms using the sequence of events in a typical software development lifecycle. I hope you enjoy my account and cannot relate to it too much in your everyday working life.

The role of a tester is to identify what is wrong, analyse the impact and flag that issue to be fixed. However, sometimes the problem is not something that is as straightforward as a software bug but rather a company wide policy that infects a small part of the company workflow. This can be frustrating for the tester whose role in a company is too small to be able to do anything other than point out the problem and vow, that when they rule the world things will be different.

The examples given below are the most extreme of circumstances seen in companies I worked for in the past and is not to be taken as a measure of quality control in those otherwise excellent organisations. The names and the numbers have been changed to protect the guilty.

It is worth pointing out that now that I am big chief testing dogsbody here at KnowledgeMill with my own whip, nothing like this happens at all. Ever. It is a very very big whip. 

In any new software project, the ideal time for testers to first get involved is at the end of the project documentation stage. In most companies they tend get involved before this phase is complete with the result they began putting the testing plan together without all the software functionality or business requirements detailed for them. There are exceptions to this practice. Back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, I went to work for a company who very proudly announced to the testing team that they had produced a full set of software specificatons and put the lot into the repository of the first release of software product we were testing. Then no-one could find the docs. Like a modern-day keystone cops episode, six testers and not one document could we find. That was my first bug logged with that company.

Most testers begin asking lots of questions from the business right about this time. They don’t really expect answers. It is just amusing to watch as everyone on a new project shunting emails from one person to another in order to avoid actually having to do the work involved in answering queries. I once got an email forwarded 27 times but this was with a company with 60 project manager-types in one office alone. My testing team used to have competitions to see who could have the longest forwarded mail trail. With any luck, the average experienced tester can keep this going for about a month and earn themselves the time to get on with some real work like writing the test plan and fleshing out the framework for the testcases they are going to write and run.

From very early on, it is essential to establish a good working relationship with the developers working on the product. A good tester will kick-start this by plonking themselves on the developer’s desk and sharing any dirt they have on the project manager. With any luck, the developer might also talk about the product they are writing so a tester can get enough information to make a start on the testcases. Two jobs done in one. A big part of being an effective tester is multi-tasking in this way. Listening to people talk complete rubbish without interrupting them with an act of physical violence on their person is also another good skill to have. When I came back to work after being on maternity leave, I sat in a meeting and listened to someone tell me that testers should not do any exploratory testing. Since all functionality was scripted, they claimed, it was a waste of time. I felt the old trottling fantasy return and smiled. Any worries that Motherhood has softened me as a tester were gone but I digress …

Eventually though, it is conceivable that the project will deliver you some specification documents. This leads to the next stage of the project:

• Making sense of the project technical and functional specs.

A degree in jabbwockey and telepathic abilities are a necessity at this point. These documents are sometimes written by the developers to wind up the business or by the business to make the developers cry.  At least that is the way it looks to the poor testers caught in the middle.

Around this time, you will get the first cut of the product. So this involves a lengthy (“You have an hour”) phase of:

• Learning the product.

If any other department wants to hold on to their hardware, it is advised that they use nail guns and superglue to attach them to their person otherwise they are fair game for appropriation as far as a tester is concerned. No matter how many times I warn people about this, they never listen. I tried wearing a t-shirt that warned: “Testers heart hardware” but had to stop wearing it. I got a letter from the HR department telling me to.

Next comes my least favourite part of the process. Finding out from the business what they want from the product. Some faffy business types give the impression that they would accept a fish tank held together with a packet of band-aids as long as it looked like it might hold water long enough for them to be transferred to another project. This phase is also known as:

• Learning the expectations of the environment or customers the product is being developed for.

There are several approaches to this stage. A very ill-advised one is to just pretend you are carrying out this assessment. It would be wrong of you to conclude that this pretense is a good one. Just because the business managers appear to make up their expectations willy-nilly as the project goes along, that is no reason for you to sink to this level. If you will insist on taking this path of no return, then you must remember to include a few generalised claims about assessment of risk, managing expectations and functional complexity in all your communications.

Remember, this is not something I recommend.

Finally, you have completed your test plan. You have formatted a nice index, put in headers and footers, signed your name to this thing and done everything but wrap it in a soft yellow blanket. This stage is known as:

• Submitting the test approach

When a newborn baby is taken from its Mother in the hospital, it is checked for heart and lung function, cleaned up a bit and generally handed back the proud parent with all its limbs intact. Not so with a test plan. The test plan that is conceived in version 1 is a drastically different beast to version 9 which will be altered drastically due to the constrains in time / money and a general all-prevailing lack of sanity characteristic in every business person who reviews it.

Now the test plan has been amputated, I mean agreed. The big writing body of work will start. This is:

• Writing the testcases

It is not enough that testcases now prove functionality. They now have to prove business logic and/or the drunken claims of the project sponsor in the pub. There is no advice I can give you on this one except to always keep copies of what you write for the day some moron wipes the entire testcase database. It happened to me, it will happen to you too.

So now you have established all your relationships, done all the research, got your testplan accepted, written all the testcases. What happens next? Oh yes, everything changes. This is the stage when the project decides to:

• Change the methodology used in the software development lifecycle

This will happen as new project management systems become fashionable. Don’t worry if you do not like the new process, it will be re-organised, re-thought, re-named and spring up in a reincarnated for with its own cult of disciples within a few years. Waterfall anyone? Keep all the documents that you write proving how you have altered your processes to make them work with the new methodology, you may be re-cycling them with great frequency.

One continual task is to work on the communication channels that you have opened. Working relations are like eating, they are something you have to do everyday. This is known as:

• Maintaining good relationships with developers

This is why coffee, doughnuts and beers were invented. They really help.

There is also the relationship with the business to be considered:

• Maintaining good relationships with project managers

As a very general statement, the most important action here is not to frequently put your hands around the PM’s neck and try to strangle them. You may feel tempted to do this if they are the types who ask for the one thing 18 different ways, one of which appears to be written in ancient Aramaic. The doughnuts and the beers are best applied to the tester at this stage.

Next we get to the reason d’etre of the tester, the point which we battle through glue-thick mudstorms and are editing taskcases until 3am. It’s time for:

• The actual testing itself.

Heaven forbid that is forgotten in the general melee of doing everything else. To the casual observer, the sounds coming from the tester will vary between wild shreiking laughter and dark tormented cries from the depths of hell. During this phase, they are best left alone.

Then the last stage, project completion where the tester will watch is despair as defect after defect are marked as known issues in order to make the software pass the exit criteria of no open issues logged against the product. Then they are expected to write a report which says the product has passed testing.

• The test exit report

How each tester phrases this varies from person to person and I am not with the school of thought that refers to this stage as downright lying.

My own personal favourite test exit report was written by a colleague in a company I worked for many moons ago. It was a heartfully expressed piece of poetry which I have committed to my eternal memory. Unfortunately it was so expletive ridden that the only parts of it that I can repeat here are: To the bunch of, concerns, listening, you, off. I quit.

This method of test reporting is also something that I do not recommend, no matter how much fun it is.

I’m Elizabeth and I am the KnowledgeMill tester.

This is a role easily understood by those who know and appreciate what a tester does. Most people do not understand what a tester does and everyone else does not appreciate what a tester does.

My son J (aged 7) recently filled in a survey from school about the jobs his immediate family did, so he put down:

Uncle B: Makes iPods

Uncle H: Makes money

Uncle O: Is taking a break from work (I said he was an unemployed bum but in a rare fit of diplomacy, perhaps brought on my fear of his teacher, J refused to write this down)

Auntie A: Looks after children

Daddy: Network Engineer

Mummy: Checks web pages are there

This follows on from a conversation with my Mother last Christmas when I was home:  (Ok, this is a liberal translation and some segments have been enhanced for the purposes of entertainment but it is not too far from the truth)

I suspect that the same conversation takes places on an hourly basis between the IT-employed off-spring of parents with very little knowledge or interest in the dark arts of computer-ing.

Mother: So what do you actually do?

Daughter: I am a software tester

Mother: What does that mean? (Unsaid subtext, you have a degree in Classics – why the hell are you not using that to earn a crust?)

Daughter: It means that I find the faults in the software. Sometimes the faults are written into the software by the developer and sometimes they are the result of the environment the software is installed into …

Mother: Blank glazed look, barely stifles a yawn

Daughter: It’s like a fuse. Sometimes a used fuse is put back into a plug instead of the full one. That is a mistake that is integral to the fuse. Sometimes a 60amp fuse is put into a 40amp socket and this causes problem in the circuit. This is a problem with the environment the fuse is put into.

Mother: So you put fuses into computers?

Daughter: No I test the software that is installed on the computer. I make sure that works. (Unsaid subtext, oh God, I should have become a hairdresser, no-one ever asks if you put fuses into scissors as a living)

Mother: So what if the software doesn’t work?

Daughter: I take a deep breath and brace myself for battle. I find whiskey helps at this point.

Mother: Eh? (Yes I know this sounds like a sound a Scooby Doo character might make but it was the best I could come up with)

Daughter: Well not everyone wants to know that something they have written or paid loads of money for has faults. (Present company excluded of course)

Mother: So they pay you to find things that are wrong and then don’t like it when you tell them what is wrong? (Mum is starting to look like she needs a drink at this point)

Daughter … erm…. yes.

Mother: So how do you find the things that are wrong? (Unsaid subtext: please use words I can understand)

Daughter: I … I …I input, I erm…. I use the keyboard to tell the computer to do things and then check it has done them.

Mother: (In a very relieved voice) So you press buttons.

Daughter: (In a very relieved voice) Yes, I press buttons.

Cut to next scene of Mother and Daughter contentedly spreading horse-poo on prize winning roses to save them from the frost.

Just when you thought you couldn’t take the pain of reading another blog entry around cloud computing, here comes another one. Please bear with it – I promise it’s not the same as the rest – and could hopefully save you a few pennies by avoiding a costly mistake.

Many companies are considering a move to a cloud-based service (or in reality a hosted-service) for their messaging platforms. For those companies with the correct risk profile this can make a lot of sense. It can significantly reduce cost and for a lot of organizations, particularly smaller ones with limited in-house IT, they are likely to see a significantly improved service. Notably in terms of uptime, reliability, performance, and value-add services such as spam filtering and virus scrubbing.

Microsoft are doing extremely well in this area with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) as part of their Online Services portfolio. We’re big fans and we even use BPOS internally here at KnowledgeMill. BPOS as you would expect is based on Microsoft Exchange. As most of us in the industry would agree, Exchange is a great messaging platform. However, it is exactly what it says on the tin, a “messaging” platform. Kept within the correct limits and guidelines Exchange does a fantastic job, hence it is the world’s most popular collaboration platform for businesses. However, Exchange is not designed to store massively huge numbers of emails, never ending mailboxes, and massive outlook folders. Nor is it designed to meet your records management, email filing, or compliance rules that are specific to your industry. Putting your email service in the cloud does not solve these problems – and can often make it more complicated.

This is exactly why the supporting systems that sit around your mail platform e.g. your archiving system, records management system, email filing solution, or integrated document management solution (you will inevitably still need these), must be designed to work with cloud hosted solutions. Pretty much all cloud providers will prohibit the installation of 3rd party products against their servers – this means that supporting systems are very much likely to be incompatible.

Our products at KnowledgeMill are different and are designed from the outset to work with on-site, hosted, and cloud email services. This is because our core email management product for Exchange – known as Exchange Warehouse uses a unique agent-based approach. The agent which moves emails from Exchange into the ContextStore (our secure and scalable repository) can run both as a desktop service or as a server service. This means you can archive and file emails simply by installing a tiny piece of software on your desktop with no server-side exchange integration at all. We run this internally and it’s fully certified and tested against Microsoft BPOS.

The other really cool thing is that the KnowledgeMill ContextStore can live anywhere you desire – on-site in your own data center, hosted with a hosting partner, in a private cloud or out on a public cloud such as Amazon EC2, Go-Grid or MS Azure. As you can see, we’re ready for the cloud right now or when you decide the time is right for your business.

We’re half way through the KnowledgeMill code camp for this year. An annual event that sees us take the development and testing teams off-site for 3 days in order to get away from it all, think of wacky innovative ideas that we can deliver into the product suite. This year we’re down in Rock in Cornwall. It’s off-season down here – but it’s an amazing place to be. The weather has been fantastic and the monstrous house we’ve hired is pretty spectacular with a huge terrace overlooking the Camel Estuary.

This year we’re focussing on some awesome document management features that should wow our customer base, mainly because of how easy it makes the process for end users. We’ll be prototyping these features during the code camp and delivering a demo back to the rest of KM on our return to HQ.

It’s not all work though, the bottle bank has already seen two visits, and the local pasties are beginning to have an effect on the waist line. Report back soon with some pics from the event.

There’s a fantastic buzz in the office today here at KnowledgeMill – we’ve just learned that we’ve been made a Microsoft Certified Partner. We’ve been working with Microsoft since the beginning through the BizSpark programme. BizSpark has been massively helpful, giving us unparalleled exposure to technology and business resources. By moving to a fully certified status, we continue this journey with Microsoft providing innovative products and solutions that enable customers to drive increased value from their MS investments.

The fully certified status comes with a huge number benefits for a company like ours. The obvious benefits are large amounts of free and discounted licensing, but the real benefit is the access to technical resources that will enable us to make our products even better for our customers. It keeps us at the forefront of the MS stack, and facilitates the innovation that we thrive on. It also provides some really interesting combined sales and marketing opportunities.

We’re only a few points away from Gold status – so we’ll keep you updated. This combined with the existing relationships we have with some of the other major tech firms (including Oracle, EMC, Fujitsu, Computacenter) makes for a really interesting time.