Code Monkeyism: Want to Become a Startup CTO?.

If you are one of these technical people you’ll recognize the truth of it straight away. If you are attempting to recruit or manage such people, you need to read it, and believe it, to understand.

Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks.

Via @chris_alexander.

The long lost formula for start-up success. No, really.

Robert Ochtel feels strongly that to concentrate on the business plan solely as a tool to prise out investment is missing the main point. You should do it, but you should do it for yourself and your business.

Today many entrepreneurs complain that their potential investors do not read their business plans. With an average of over 300 hours of effort required to develop a complete business plan, do they have a point? I say no!

Entrepreneurs – Business Plans Are Not Developed For Your Investors « Robert Ochtel’s Blog.

@GeeknRolla – What’s the frequency Kenneth?: The trials of a mobile apps startup.

Jof Arnold of GeekFu.com lays bare the process and the statistics of iPhone app development.

WWDC_Student_Talk.pdf

This is an interesting take on how to choose deployment platforms, and even just reading the slides conveys some of his enthusiasm. I imagine the actual event was very compelling.

I have two main reservations, though. The first is that the idea of developing for specific platforms seems a bit old fashioned in these days of ubiquitous web and mobile convergence, and the second is that the same logic could largely apply to any niche market which has not yet been swamped with free or low-cost options.

Labs are a research division without permanent staff, where people volunteer to participate in labs projects and can take a break from their day-to-day routine by participating in something interesting. Staff in labs rotate so that different people get to play with innovative ideas. Hack-days are intensive coding competitions that are organised to give people a break from their daily duties but also promote innovation and allow new ideas to bubble up.

Read more at: Gojko Adzic » SPA 2009: How to foster innovation in a crisis.

I apologise for any inconvenience. Thanks for your patience.

Historically, there have been a few kinds of responses to this.

• Deny that the problem is as bad as it seems, stretch the test team by a bit, stretch the test time a bit, work a bunch of overtime, then make testing compromises and ship an essentially untested and probably buggy product.
• Admit the problem, and scale back the product vision so that the product is largely testable, but miss out on potential sales and marketing opportunities.
• Dither and refuse both to to reduce the vision or to ship an untested product, until the market window has long passed and nobody wants the product anyway.

Now it appears that there may be a way around this problem. Dionysios G. Synodinos has written an ineresting article at InfoQ about “crowdsourcing” testing of such applications.

InfoQ: Crowdsourcing JavaScript Integration Testing with Test Swarm.

A cynical view might be that this is little more than a formalisation of the approach of releasing an untested product, calling it a “beta”, and waiting for customers to complain. There is a chance, though, that engaging a wide range of people explicitly as testers and providing them with the information they need to test the system thoroughly might result in a better, cheaper, and (most importantly) scalable answer to this kind of problem.