Novell News

I’m in the middle of a blog series on Product Quality—of critical importance to all our stakeholders. I need to interrupt this series to comment on an exciting development.

Last week we announced one of our most innovative and impactful projects—Novell Pulse. My interruption is to explain why we are exhilirated with this. Be assured, we will get back to Product Quality promptly.

Novell Pulse—Description and Background

Novell Pulse is the product name for our project Cockpit. As I mentioned at the time, it was funded earlier in 2009 as part of our breakout move initiative. I’m excited not only because it is great technology, not only because it solves a big customer problem—but also because it shows Novell’s innovation, and demonstrates the entrepeneurial spirit of our team to get new projects brought quickly to market.

Since I outlined the project a few months ago, I will not repeat the description.

Google Wave

As we developed Pulse, Google announced their Wave project. We were stimulated by the possibilities. In the emerging real-time collaboration market there is a need for multiple providers and they need to federate. Google announced their Wave Federation Protocol (WFP) as an open approach to addressing this need. We asked—why not federate? Open is key to Novell’s value proposition! So we approached the Google team and they agreed! From this began a rapid embrace and technology collaboration to show two companies interoperating with different but related visions.

Mixing the “New” with Enterprise Needs

There are many exciting features in Pulse; focused on real-time communications and social networking. That is where we find the greatest amount of pure technical excitement.

The function will appeal to many stakeholders. Service providers will provide Pulse’s real-time communications to their customers. Enterprises will leverage this as their new communications paradigm.

Additionally, Novell has a unique platform to introduce this. This is the existing platform of enterprise communications. We have a large group of customers with our GroupWise and OES products. Pulse adds value to this customer base—bringing them into new paradigms of collaboration. In fact, we learn a great deal from our customer base in terms of enterprise requirements for cloud-based real-time communications.

This is what is truly unique about Pulse. It is secure. It is managed. Identity management. Provisioning. It is not only cool. And social. Real-time. Chat speed. Easy-to-use. But it will be a product that appeals to the enterprise.

Federation

Google got it right by developing an open federation protocol. After all, there is such an explosion of collaboration paradigms—no single company will handle them all. And different users will want to experience them differently. We’ve already discussed the explosion of communications paradigms. We all need to work together. All companies that participate in WFP will carve out their specialty. For Novell, we are focused on getting the emerging real-time communications paradigm to fit enterprise needs.

By far, the major obsession of Novell’s engineering team is to deliver products with the enterprise level quality that customers demand and deserve for mission-critical usage.

It is useful to review our comprehensive approach to quality. Quality is not a single process. It is baked into everything we do: before and during development; after products are shipped in the field; with maintenance provided to customers well after products have been shipped. Due to this breadth I will “fishbone” our activities and address this topic over several postings.

In this posting we define quality, provide key tenets, and outline future posts.

Quality Defined

There are numerous definitions of quality—the most general being “the degree to which the product meets customer expectations”. This can be interpreted as—choosing the right features to meet market needs—and in the past I have described our Integrated Product Development (IPD) process that has that goal. By the way, we are broadening IPD to include a new Requirements Management System which allows customers and partners to directly input their needs to Novell’s product management. But, that is a story for a different day.

Colloquially, when people talk about product quality however, they refer to product defects or bugs. We address bugs throughout the lifecycle of a product by preventing defects in the first place, testing and debugging to remove them, and patching and fixing problems in customer installations. This definition is akin to a classical Six Sigma focus on defects and this is the aspect of product quality that I will discuss.

Philosophy

Herein are basic tenets or beliefs about product quality. Many of these are common in the industry; some are unique to Novell.

1. We are in business to provide mission critical software. Accordingly, we hold ourselves to high standards for initial product quality and strive to correct defects found by our customers.
2. Quality must be built in prior to customer shipment. The cost for Novell and our customers alike grows exponentially the later in the deployment process one finds a bug.
3. The practice of software development has not been perfected. There is no such thing as bug free software. We strive for excellence, but recognize that defects will occur.
4. The response to these defects is modulated by severity. Critical defects found in a customer’s production environment get the most immediate attention.
5. We make mistakes. And we fix them. If a defect occurs, we patch it. If a product has too many bugs, we redouble our efforts to restore quality to that product as soon as possible.
6. Consequence of 5—we try really hard not to make the same mistake twice!
7. Our employees respond to management’s attention. Hence we carefully measure our quality, review it on a regular basis, and won’t ship products that do not hit quality criteria. This ensures that we will build quality in.
8. There are different methodologies for developing software including agile, waterfall, and open source (community). Our customers expect and deserve equal quality regardless of the methodology.
9. Consequence of 8—although there might be different methods to develop software; the software quality metrics and release criteria must be the same.
10. Quality is a continuous learning process. Time is set aside for our engineers to continue to grow and learn to improve their skills.

The Fishbone

This is a broad topic and it is already running a bit long. Let me summarize my intentions by listing the key aspects that I will discuss in future blog entries:

• Building in quality from the ground up: In the development of a product, how do we build with as few defects as possible. For agile, waterfall, and open source.
• Metrics: What are the common metrics we track to ensure that we release with quality.
• Testing tools: Methodologies, laboratories, cross-product testing, defect management process.
• Product introduction: How do we manage that very challenging time when a new product is first introduced into the field. Readiness criteria.
• Continuous improvement: Engineering Excellence Steering Committee. Learning Initiative.
• Cadence between product development and Novell services: How we work together and hold each other accountable within Novell to take care of our customers.

We’ve been talking about security and access control management—most recently as part of “securing the cloud“. Securing the cloud is based on technology that Novell has developed for securing the enterprise. As we design for the future of securing the cloud—today’s enterprises also require continued enhancement to secure their enterprise.

Some recent notes.

SAP Partnership for IT Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Programs

For enterprise needs our recent focus has been on the creation of a compliance platform. Compliance has emerged as a key customer issue. IT systems are the window into how businesses are governed. Much of our attention is on integrating with partners; such as our April announcement to certify to SAP’s NetWeaver platform.

We took this to the next level with today’s tight announcement with SAP. SAP’s Business Objects GRC solutions are outstanding, and by integrating with Novell’s compliance and identity management capabilities we add to the value proposition for customers. Specifically, the integration improves performance, automation of controls, simplification, and risk reduction. Overall, it makes it easy for customers to manage security and compliance policies.

Novell Secure Login

Customers require Enterprise Single-Sign On for enterprise applications. Earlier this year, we intensified our focus in this critical area, so we acquired some technology from ActiveIdentity.

Last month, we strengthened what customers can achieve with Novell SecureLogin. Two major focus areas: Interoperability and Scripting. The interoperability enhancements ensure that customers can use our solution irrespective of their compute platforms. The automated Scripting is more critical than ever. As access control, security, and compliance play a deeper role in enterprises, Single-Sign On needs to be integrated across a broader set of applications. The Scripting enhancements automate a customers’ ability to use Novell SecureLogin.

Recognition

It is not only Novell that touts the importance of this product. Novell SecureLogin was recognized in Gartner Inc.’s 2008 ESSO Magic Quadrant report. Last month, Gartner released their MarketScope for Enterprise Single Sign-On and gave our product a Strong Positive rating.

NYC

On a personal note, I was born and bred in New York. While I now live in Massachusetts—once a New Yorker; always a New Yorker.

So I was delighted to see that New York City has recently announced adoption of Novell’s Compliance Management Platform. I enjoyed seeing that my hometown was leveraging Novell’s technology depth, automation, ease-of-use, and interoperability in the Security and Compliance area—to simplify access to city services and better integrate across city departments.