"Your life today is the result of your attitudes and choices in the past…"

I haven't written this article myself, but came across it on net. Its an amazing must read.........

"Your life today is the result of your attitudes and choices in the past…"
This is a story of an elderly carpenter who had been working for a contractor for the past 53 years. He had built many beautiful houses but now as he was getting old, he wanted to retire and lead a leisurely life with his family. So, he goes to the contractor and tells him about his plan of retiring. The contractor feels sad at the prospect of losing a good worker but agrees to the plan because the carpenter had indeed become too fragile for the tough building work. But as a last request, he asks the old carpenter to construct just one last house.
The old man agrees and starts working but his heart was not in his work anymore. He had lost the motivation towards work. So, he resorted to shoddy workmanship and constructed the house half-heartedly. After the house was built, the contractor came to visit his employee's last piece of work. After inspecting the house, he handed over the front door keys to the carpenter and said, "This is your new house. My gift to you." The carpenter was shocked and upset. Had he known that he was building his own house, he would have done a better job!".
Think of ourselves as the carpenter. Though we work hard every day, we put our least to some work, which we don't like and get shocked at a situation we have created for ourselves and try to figure out why we didn't do it differently.
Learn to enjoy your responsibilities with pleasure and not with pain. "Life is a do-it-yourself project". Do your job enthusiastically and with devotion, a positive output and a pleasing life will certainly be on your way.

Feature list of information management tool

Few days back, our technology excellence group gave me a Cognos 8 features list to review.
I had to review the features supported by cognos 8 .
After reviewing it I got to know some new features of Cognos 8.

I also came across some features that were not directly supported by Cognos 8 but could be implemented indirectly.
There were certain features which we never knew existed in Cognos because I did not get a chance to implement those in the Project that I am working.
Having a knowledge of these features certainly helped me understand the tool better.
I can now use this feature list to compare Cognos 8 with various information management tools in the market so as to give informed consultancy to my clients.

Below is the link to Cognos 8 feature list

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rCcMS5fI3RE-z560jsqEo7A&output=html

Business rule documentation embedding in report

When I first started working on Cognos the first task assigned to me was to prepare report specification document. This document gives an idea about the design of a report as well as business rules implemented in the Report. It took me around 3 Days to deliver that document.
We then had a brain storming session where we discussed how we make documentation process simpler.
As a team (Cognos pool) we came up with certain points and finally decided to create one documentation page in the report itself.
This documentation page should not visible to users and developers only would have access to it.
The separate report page mentions all the business rules as well as additional information about the objects in report.
Ram created template which contains one documentation page. Now whenever we start building a new report we use the same template.
Embedding the documentation in application made our documentation simpler. It has worked for us. Do you think it can work for you??

Cognos8 automated documentation

I have been hearing since the time I worked with cognos series 7 that there needs to be a way to automatically documents the Specifications of the Framework Model
Thanks to Cognos 8 now we have an automated framework model specification generation technique.

Create Model Documentation

After you model the metadata, you can create an HTML or XML representation of the model that can be customized and printed.

When you create model documentation, you can document the entire model or you can select a subset of the model.
















To document the entire model, you click the top-level namespace. The model documentation shows the selected object and all the properties and children of that object.

















You can view, save, or print the report in HTML or XML format.

Steps
1. Click the object that you want to document.
Tip: Click the top-level namespace to document the entire model.
2. From the Tools menu, click Model Report.
The model report appears.
You can save, print, or change the format of the report.


But what if some one still using cognos series 7,
Dont worry there is java code available on googlecode to generate model specification doc.
http://code.google.com/p/cognos-documentation/

I hope this will save some efforts for documentation.

SVN Structure is it important?

As we started a new phase in our project there was a discussion on whether to create a seprate SVN structure or continue using the old one for storing Project Artifacts. Finally we decided to create a seprate structure and kept both new svn and old one in a same directory folder with proper naming convention and contact information in comments feature of SVN.
Then we created a template of how we will keep our SVN folder structure.
For example whether to keep documents release specific or sprint specific.
Thanks to our scrum master we got certain valuable suggestions.
We uploaded that template as well in SVN folder. This template will help new team members know about the location of a specific document .
Are you following the same practice?