/var/log/mind

This is not a post in defense of outsourcing. However every so often I come across a rant like Why Outsourcing Sucks and much as I emotionally connect to such posts which talk about poor software quality, I find the rant and the underlying thoughts a highly misguided exercise. This post attempts to place outsourcing in an overall economics based perspective and explores some of the future trends in how they are likely to impact software quality.

Before attempting to explore and define problems around outsourcing, lets first understand why it exists.

There is something right about outsourcing.

Clearly there has to be something right about outsourcing for it to have come so far. Stating that outsourcing results in crappy code or shitty quality and therefore is wrong questions a collective wisdom of the market, a collective wisdom that while I have reservations about, I will always place above mine. So how does outsourcing help ?

• Outsourcing has supported the wall street model of seeking fiscal efficiencies : Wall street encourages companies to be fiscally responsible and financially competitive. Quality of products is in relative terms an irrelevant parameter. While toplines and bottomlines are to be maximised, quality is meant to be at a level “the market will bear”. For a variety of reasons, including all listed below, outsourcing has helped support better fiscal efficiencies.
• Outsourcing helps reduce costs (in the short to medium term at least) :This is a no brainer. However it is often assumed to be the primary reason for outsourcing, which I am not so sure of.
• Outsourcing helps reduce risk :It allows companies to have lesser people on their rolls, and allows them an ability to ramp up or ramp down under growing or shrinking market scenarios in a much easier way.
• Outsourcing increases a customers negotiability (initially):Anyone who has attempted to get software delivered from an internal development team and an external vendor will most certainly tell you that the negotiating power is much higher at least in initial days with a external vendor than with internal development teams.
• Outsourcing allows ability to service an exploding demand :Lets face it, for all the jobs that outsourcing might have transferred overseas or made redundant, these are a small fraction of the total number of jobs that outsourcing has created. There is only one reason for that - exploding demand for software development and maintenance. If the outsourcing surge had not happened all the participating economies individually would’ve been worse off than they are today (though the extent of the difference is quite different across various economies).
• Outsourcing has relatively little to do with quality :Outsourcing is a fiscal phenomenon. Management is a function of business imperatives. Quality is a result of engineering processes. Business imperatives impact engineering processes far more than outsourcing does. These imperatives are not driven by outsourcing alone, but by many other yardsticks which drive outsourcing itself. If you worry about ways to improve software quality, focus on these business imperatives and not on outsourcing alone. Some of these imperatives are quarterly / annual targets, get it to the market at all costs, we need to get in there first we will fine tune the offering later etc. etc.

Relationship to Software Development.

I shall now explore some of the factors I touched on above in the context of Software Development.

• Cost Reduction : Cost reduction is achieved in many different ways.
  • Transferring jobs to lower paying markets : This is probably the easiest understood mechanism. There’s enough written on this topic for me to add anything more.
  • Transferring jobs to lesser skilled people : If you want to reduce costs, one way is to hire lesser skilled people thus having to pay them less. One particularly nasty way this manifests itself is that under such scenarios, seasoned and experienced personnel either need to work across a larger number of projects simultaneously (architects, consultants etc.) or need to move out of development and into management (a much much more common occurrence at least in India). There are very real economic underpinnings to why 8 or more out of 10 developers in India are likely to say project manager when asked what would they like to be in the next 5 years. Whichever way you look at it, the average skill level deployed on a project in engineering terms does go down.
  • Increasing % utilisation of associates : Higher focus on costs leads to a higher focus on billable utilisation. This reduces the amount of time available to learn, study, research, prototype etc.
  To summarise, cost reduction leads to a quicker movement of senior engineers into management roles, greater breadth of projects for senior engineers who continue to be in software development, and lesser ability to focus on learning and research.
  
  
• Risk Reduction : Since outsourcing allows customers to ramp up or down easily, it increases the onus on the vendors leading to a large number of people “on bench”. This allows project head counts to be increased easily when required. It is sufficiently known that adding 10 people to your project is not going to increase your productivity ten fold of that you would get by adding 1 person. However the ability to ramp up given the bench strengths tempts managers into quickly adding as many people to get the next release out faster. Since people get added in a hurry under situations when the next release is needed quickly, net productivity per person suffers, and the increased difficulty in doing the skill ramp up of all the people rapidly results in quality sliding down.


• Increased customer negotiability :While this is definitely helpful in many ways in terms of helping lower costs, there are some serious side effects as well. I would argue that even the best amongst us is unlikely to be unimpacted by a higher negotiating power. The simple law of nature is that more the negotiability, use it. Vendors are of course perfectly aware that vendor negotiability is directly proportional to the time spent on the project and that it will improve over time. When customer negotiability gets used to an extreme, in a competitive scenario, the vendor simply says yes to expectations that may be unlikely to be fulfilled. While questionable, this is a practice which has grown to an extent where quite often customers factor it in and is often defended by if I don’t say yes, my competition will. This sets in motion a negative spiral that only the very brave can even attempt to try to compensate. And as the saying goes fools rush in where angels fear to tread.


• Exploding demand :One of the big reasons why quality has been falling is this. As the demand explodes, it is harder and harder to maintain average skill levels. It is but obvious today that average skill and training levels are far lower today than 5 or 10 or 15 years ago (and they have been continuously falling). The ability to deploy skilled and trained personnel on a consistent basis to the exploding demand is non existent in the current combined planet wide educational systems. Falling quality is as much a function of our educational and training systems to keep pace with demand as with anything else.


• Business Imperatives :In todays economic environment, managers are rewarded much more for meeting the quarterly and annual targets, than 5 year targets. We have created this system and it is likely to be around for quite some time to come. There are good reasons why it exists, it allows for much better fiscal risk management, and results in superior capital investment decisions. For software developers however it creates a conflict, because good software does not get created in a quarter (and if it were to, the target would just get moved by adding much more functionality in the same quarter given the exploding demand). Even if it saddens us deeply, probably the most appropriate way to deal with it is to recognise its merits in fiscal and economic terms and deal with it as a reality that is unchangeable in the short to medium term.

Having said that there is an increasing awareness of the cost of maintaining poor quality software. Customers and Vendors are both finding it increasingly difficult to keep a lid on costs when maintaining and extending such software. For companies where this cost is a high percentage of their total costs, this is threatening their very ability and viability to stay competitive. I think most business managers today understand this and are trying to find a way out of this but only with varying degrees of success.

Why criticism of outsourcing is occasionally misplaced

I have often heard of issues such as differing time zones, cultural mismatches, communication snafus, skill diferences etc. as big issues with outsourcing. These are all indeed solvable problems. It would be a great underestimation of ingenuity of today’s business enterprises if we assume or believe that they are less than capable to do so. I submit that the reason companies haven’t gotten around to working on these issues as much as they could’ve is simply because these problems are not high up on the radar. As I have attempted to explain, managers are concerned with a plethora of issues, software quality being only one of them. If vendors were to find their business drying up, due to poor software quality, some of which is as a result of aspects of outsourcing as listed above, believe me vendors will fix the problem pronto. They have the skills, they have the ingenuity, but the economic drivers are not strong enough today. This is not a problem with outsourcing per se but with relative importance of economic drivers.

Another difficulty is in what is perceived to be quality. There is sometimes a difference in how quality is perceived across the development community and business managers. For a developer poor quality is when the software does not work as requested or as stated or as designed for. For a manager, poor quality is when the customer turns away and declines to offer repeat business due to unhappiness with the software.

Finally this issue about lower skill sets. I completely agree at the risk of making a broad generalisation that the average entry level skills in the software development market are far lower in India than in the United States. But this is a manifestation of the fact that India got into the software act a lot later and when the development demand boomed, it fortunately or unfortunately had the ability to deploy a large number of software developers even though at lesser entry skill levels. (The statement above is likely to hold for other highly developed and developing economies as well). If hypothetically India and other developing countries had not got into this act, I have no hesitation in believing that given the booming demand, average skill levels in the industry would’ve gone down sharply in the developed countries as well. This is again an economic event much more a function of the population levels, wage disparities and output of the educational systems. To blame this on outsourcing is to shoot the messenger.

So whats next

Let me summarise some of the points made so far :

• Businesses will continue to attempt to be more financially prudent :What this means is that while this prudence benefits us in general terms, it will continue to attempt to increase productivity and drive down costs.
• Businesses will continue to be focused on quarterly and annual results :Love it or hate it, this system is here to stay for some time. If we can adjust software development to be in tune with it, probably all of us can be better off. Methodologies such as short iterations and frequent releases, YAGNI, continuous refactoring are likely to be better supportive of this environment.
• Exploding demand for software :This is likely to continue unabated at least for a few more years or a decade. A large part of the world doesn’t yet invest heavily into software development yet but if food and energy demands are any indication, as more countries start consuming more software, this demand growth is likely to accelerate.
• Crappy software is better than no software :This is probably the most difficult and perhaps a most profound thought for many developers. As software demand grows, and as our worldwide ability to keep pace with it shrinks, crappy software is likely to deliver positive economic results compared to lack of software. Combine this with focus on short term results and you will realise that customers are more likely to tolerate buggy software than ever before in times to come, and if customers tolerate it, vendors will find ways to test these tolerance levels.

So will things never improve for software quality ? I think two factors will help, one in the really long term and one in the medium term.

• Software demand will start slowing and productivity improvements and better training will catch up eventually : While it does look very far away, it will happen one day. We are finding ways to create better tools, improved methodologies, offer better training etc. Software demand will peak one day and ability to service it will catch up. Thats when customers will start being intolerant of poor quality software. Thats when vendors will most certainly deliver good quality software.
• SAAS model will help take the load off the demand supply gap :In terms of ability to create an economic impact per developer, the Software as a service - SAAS model works far superior to custom application development. (For the purposes of this discussion a SAAS offering is expected to be simultaneously used by a large number of customers). Development costs are only a small part of the total revenues in case of SAAS. However customer biteback in case of defects is much stronger due to a larger number of customers using the same software instance. Thus SAAS will take some pressure off development cost reduction, focus on a higher quality threshold from day one, and take some pressure off the demand supply gap. This to me is the biggest positive side of things in the days to come from a software quality perspective. However even this will take some time to play itself out. When that does happen, SAAS is likely to be the biggest demand killer in terms of the demand for software developer head counts on a worldwide basis.

If you are a developer or user who is frustrated with the quality of software, there are the following things you can do :

• Recognise that some of the current situations (problems ?) are here to stay and be prepared to deal with them : If you can accept it (and it might be unacceptable for many) it will allow you to deal with the issues in a more rational and non emotional way.
• You can choose to focus on buying / supplying high quality software : There certainly will be some customers and vendors who will go down this path. Try to identify customers / vendors / partners who share this belief system. Even if the entire industry quality levels don’t improve substantially, your individual experiences are likely to be better. However there is an economic impact of this choice and make sure you can absorb that by figuring out a way to offer a compelling value proposition to your customers. Individual developers who are particularly upset about quality levels should be willing to work for companies with a higher commitment levels to quality along with the concomitant adjustments to individual growth path and economic outlook if any.
• Move to SAAS wherever feasible :I am not suggesting this out of any particular fascination for SAAS. There is built in argument in SAAS which is based on sound economics which encourages high quality software development. And while arguments based on emotional or moral merits are tough to win, arguments based on economics win by themselves. Developers wanting to work on high quality software development are better likely to find their needs satisfied with SAAS vendors.

PS : Lest it be misconstrued, let me clarify I am often anguished and occasionally offended by the state of software quality. I do not intend to justify poor quality at all. However I have learnt that that before solving a problem, it is important to frame it correctly. This post is an attempt to frame the current situation appropriately in economic terms and not in either emotional or moral terms since that has to be the first step in dealing with it.

Interesting post in the Agile Journal, “Software Testing in an Agile Environment”. Great article and a reflection on how the software testing function would be influenced in an agile environment. IMHO, the author does a nice job, but perhaps could have gone a little bit further in terms of exploring how the development and testing functions could get merged within the same set of people, and this post attempts to do the same. Some comments I have are as follows.

But, for the QA professional an Agile approach causes discomfort - In the ideal world they would have a ‘finished’ product to verify against a finished specification. To be asked to validate a moving target against a changing backdrop is counterintuitive

This is no different than developers adapting themselves from a situation where they would’ve expected a set of clean requirements and/or design specifications. To be asked to develop a moving target against changing backdrop is counter-intuitive as well.

For some, the role of QA is now questionable citing Test Driven Development (TDD) as the key to testing. But, what is most important is that QA is directly involved in the agile scrums all the way through, to be an integral part of the team designing the tests, at the same time as the requirements and solutions evolve.

Absolutely.

1. “You only need to unit test - TDD testing is sufficient”

For the vast majority of commercial developments this simply isn’t true. Even strong proponents of agile development recognize the need for their armory to include a range of testing techniques.

Here the assumption is that TDD is in some way meant to constrain itself to unit testing. While most examples of TDD do show unit testing, I haven’t actually come across an opinion which says TDD is limited to unit testing. In fact this is one of the most important aspect to be understood if one needs to place QA in the right perspective in TDD environments.

TDD stands for test driven development. These tests could be white box or black box, unit or integration. Once it sinks in that TDD encompasses all forms of testing, it is easier to work out the workflow for the delivery teams. The most obvious implication is that the QA function needs to work very closely with development in deciding the tests of all types up front (prior to writing code). Given the agile proclivity for executable code and executable tests as the specification for code and unit tests, the same would apply to functional and acceptance tests as well. One issue here is usage of Record and Playback tools. I suspect these can no longer be used in a TDD environment simply because these assume the application under test is completely ready when writing the tests. (Record and Playback tools can be used as supporting tools additionally .. but they cannot meet the expectations of a Test Driven Development workflow). Coming back to executable tests whether these be coded in jUnit or HttpUnit or whatever one’s choice of tools, these can still be coded upfront and checked in before the code gets written to ensure that the code that eventually comes out meets the QA expectations.

Therein to me lies the biggest adaptations that testing functions shall need to adapt to. For most small to medium projects, in a TDD environment, the members (who perform both development and testing roles) write the tests and the code thus obviating the need of a separate testing department. Agile Environments will drive development and testing skills to be merged within the same set of people. While this increases the learning curve, it also substantially increases productivity since the entire communication stream between development team and testing team is largely eliminated, the occasional blame game between the two now just needs to get resolved within one persons mind.

However there are situations where I think classification of members into developers and testers might be called for eg. where a particular product needs to be tested on a v. wide range of hardware / software platforms independently, where writing the executable tests calls for a high level of capability and skill that is of a specialised nature etc. For such teams, their rhythm will now need to adapt. Instead of developers writing code and delivering it to testers, testers shall write tests and deliver these to developers who shall then need to write code to pass them. I believe this is the most important leap that the author of the article wasn’t able to make.

3. “Developers write the tests using open-source tools, so we no longer need testers, or automation tools”

Professional testers fulfill a different and equally valid role from their development colleagues.

Heres the tradeoff . Separating developers and testers has benefits of increased specialisation but levies high costs in terms of communication overheads, resolution of mismatched understandings, and crossing departmental boundaries in some cases. Merging the responsibility into one team member (development + testing) helps reduce all this costs even though the same person now needs to be trained in terms of having both the skillsets. Importantly, it clearly identifies where the buck stops (and eliminates the occasional ping pong between development and testing) resulting in developers verifying their own code with a much higher level of vigour resulting in a higher quality. I would submit there would be a large number of projects out there (but certainly not all) where merging these functions and removing the separation between developers and testers makes sense.

Often, TDD projects have at least as much test code as application code and, therefore, are themselves software applications. This test code needs to be maintained for the life of the target application.

All the more reason why development and testing responsibilities could get merged.

7. “Developers have adequate testing skills”

If testing was easy everybody would do it and we’d deliver perfect code every time. Sadly, many organizations that invest in increasing a developer’s coding skills and provide them with the latest integrated development toolsets, fail to see the need to develop the equivalent testing skills for their QA team, or provide them with the tools to do the job either effectively or efficiently.

Even better option - train team members to do both development and testing and equip them with the appropriate tools.

An independent testing team serves as an objective third-party, able to see “the big picture”, to validate the functionality and quality of the deliverable. While developers tend towards proving the system functions as required, a good tester will be detached enough to ask “what happens if…?” When you include business user testing as well, you are more likely to have a system that is fit for purpose.

Why would you want to have developers who cannot see the big picture. This is a training issue not a separation of function issue. Moreover I have always found it a bit strange that one can trust one person to write the code but not believe in him to be able to think through various combinations. I would argue that it is more cost effective to have the members simultaneously trained in “how to write code …” and “what happens if …” thinking.

10. “Developers and Testers - are like oil and water”

Since the dawn of time there has often been a “them and us” tension between developers and testers. This is usually a healthy symbiotic relationship which, when working correctly, provides a mutually beneficial relationship between the two groups resulting in a higher quality deliverable for the customer.

I would submit that this has been a high cost separation. Probably at least half (and perhaps many more) of the projects out there would benefit from these responsibilities getting merged in terms of increased productivity and quality. A small project should only have customers (or their representatives or proxies if not available directly) for specifying what is needed and conducting acceptance testing, and members (who have abilities to develop and test) who service these needs. Larger projects may choose to have a more classified team (domain experts, developers, tool builders, graphic designers, testers etc.), however such classification does and will make them lesser agile (as in the english word, not the methodology) to some extent.

A lot of posts talk about how caching can improve performance and how one can use tools such as memcached for the same. It is a great tool, and I am certain it does wonders, but I do wonder if it and its usage is getting too much press at the cost of other caching options.

This post talks about the various dimensions that should be carefully examined before deciding upon the caching strategy. I would like to argue that the most difficult part of caching is not necessarily learning or selecting the caching tool but the detailed analysis of the application, its architecture and its data flow, that actually precedes the caching tool selection. I also submit that once this analysis is conducted and the various dimensions as described below well understood, the actual cache design then becomes a relatively simpler and lesser risky activity. Before getting into the dimensions of cache design, there is some important groundwork to be done.

Note : I am referring to data caching. I am not referring to optimisation of opcodes / byte codes / instruction sets etc. which is a different class of caching.

Know your application well :

Let me emphasise this. If you want to decide on the most appropriate caching strategy, you need to have a sufficiently good understanding of your application. This is relatively easy if you are enhancing the caching capabilities in an existing application or are rebuilding an existing application. But if you are building a completely new application, some of the data listed below may not be easily available and you may need to project a little bit after understanding the requirements and a high level data / logic flow. One of the things you really need to have either a clear understanding or at least some reasonable projection of, are the various data elements in the application, how frequently will they be accessed and modified and given the processing flow, which elements make sense to be cached. You will also need to have a good understanding of how critical is it to have the most current data (eg will a 1 min. stale data be acceptable) and the transactional semantics around the data processing (are strict ACID semantics a must ?).

Note that for the rest of this post when I mention data, I shall be referring to cachable data.

Know your performance targets :

Unless you are clear about your performance targets, it will be quite difficult to work out the appropriate strategy. I would suggest you should have clear targets defined (for a specified hardware) before proceeding down this path. Some times the target specifies very ambitious hardware which you may not have access to in early stages of the development. Try to convert these targets into appropriate targets for the hardware you shall be working with (with some reasonable margin of safety).

Know your architectural guidelines / preferences :

Will you be using a single server or multiple ? When handling future growth would you prefer to scale up or scale out ? What languages will you be using ? Would you prefer to use a single database instance or would you want to create vertically partitioned shards ? As we shall see, these are extremely important considerations before getting into cache design. Sometimes the decision making is not sequential, so you may end up revisiting these topics once you get into your cache design.

Dimensions

We shall now explore some of the various dimensions that influence cache design.
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Just realised, have been blogging for more than 6 months now (actually I had started another blog ages ago .. but that tapered off soon then). Over this period, I believe I learnt or adopted a few practices. Just sharing them here. Feel free to comment. YMMV.

1. Treat your readers like a jury not as customers :By jury, I mean a jury as in a academic thesis not as in a court. Whats the difference ?
   • With customers you sell, with a jury you defend your perspective. You may think you are selling your views, but a jury doesn’t shell out any money to buy them. This makes a typical sales process a much more harder and onerous task than just defending. Most readers aren’t out to buy, they are out to learn more and interact more.
   • With customers you assume they may not know all about your product, so you focus on educating them in general towards making a pitch. With a jury you assume they already know far more than you do in general, but you attempt to educate them and draw them into a discussion into something specific that you have spent your time on, on something specific that you are presenting.
   • In a defense, the onus is on you to provide credible backing evidence. In a sales pitch the onus is on the customer to verify your pitch. Most readers would prefer to not carry the additional overhead of having to verify your statements. If you have provided the rationale for your statements clearly and supported it with available evidence if relevant, you have made the readers job much easier. You have increased the chances of the reader wanting to come back to your blog.
   
   
   
2. Make a strong statement. Avoid taking strong positions : Allow me to define this. By position I mean making absolutist statements without providing a sufficient context or a frame of reference or assuming ones own frame of reference as the only valid one. There is a wide diversity of readers out there. Some are into client side, some into server side. Some are into high usability, some into high speed processing. Some are doing graphics algorithms, some others are into CRUD and business validations. A large majority of your readers are likely to have a different frame of reference than yours. If they can’t understand where you are coming from, they will assume you are coming from the same context that they do. And they are likely to feel confused when what you say doesn’t end up matching their world view. A statement like “I found X more suitable than Y under a context Z” rather than a position like “X is better than Y” is more helpful since :
   • You get to describe your context. Your statement is a statement within a context. It is not treated as a blanket position. Readers with different contexts and divergent views can sometimes trace the differences to the context. Such readers can still suggest alternative views within other contexts easily without appearing to contradict you. Readers with similar contexts and divergent views can still choose to take you on.
   • You have lesser chances of being misinterpreted. You don’t want to get caught in an interview a year down the road when you are changing your job from writing a forms based application to one where you might be required to build say a graphics processing engine, where your interviewer might have just read your blog, and your posts actually do not make sense in the newer context.
   • When you make a strong statement without taking a strong position, readers record their agreement / disagreement with the post rather than you or your blog in general. I personally find that a much more comforting thought than readers choosing to agree / disagree with the blog in general.



3. Be prepared to update your blog soon :There is a large number of smart people out there, often a lot smarter than us, or having a difference experience set than us. As the comments start coming in, you start learning things you wish you knew before you wrote the post. If the comments indicate something useful and relevant to the post that you would’ve wanted to include in the post had you known about it earlier - go ahead, add it into the post. A convention I have seen is that all non trivial changes after the initial posting should be prefixed with the word “Update:” or “Updates:” so that readers can make out you’ve changed something after your initial post. A comment or two may be especially relevant. It helps to be able to review the comments regularly and update the post if relevant soon. If you are going to be traveling soon, either submit your post a little earlier or post it a little later - but post it when you know you will be able to review the comments and will have the flexibility to take 5 to 10 minutes off your regular work to update the blog if necessary.



4. Be prepared for surprises : Even if you write carefully you will end up making a small set of readers either happy or disappointed with you in a manner that will leave you puzzled. However hard you try there is a good likelihood someone is going to misquote you or take you on strongly in an unanticipated way. Some of this may be unavoidable and needs to be factored into your assumptions. However some of it will be avoidable, and do follow up such incidents to figure out if there are any learnings that you can apply the next time. A great way to do so is to write a mail back to the commenter or to the blogger who may have linked to your post and get a better understanding of his/her viewpoint.



5. Don’t title spam your readers : Every so often I come across a post with a provocative title, but which does not live up to the title at all. I prefer call this title spamming, since lot of the spam I receive has a provocative title, but often irrelevant content. Title is important. It influences readership strongly. But if you title spam regularly, it might help you get 2-3 posts higher readership, but its going to hurt in the longer run.



6. Understand how blog aggregators and networks work :It is important to understand the demographics of different blog aggregators. If you would like your blog to be read by larger number of people, be clear in your mind which demographics you are targeting when writing your post. Some aggregators like javablogs.com and artima.com will target specific programming languages and work off an RSS feed. Explore your blogging software and see if it offers category / tag based feeds. If it does use the categories / tags to ensure your rss feed registered with these aggregators sends only relevant posts to them. I use wordpress and it supports tag / category based RSS feeds. Networks like dzone.com, news.ycombinator.com, reddit.com, slashdot.org, digg.com have very different demographics. Don’t blanket post to all networks. Register your post with those networks where the readers are likely to find your post helpful. I have occasionally come across people wondering whether one should register one’s own posts to a network. My opinion is that it is an acceptable activity.



7. Ensure you have blog analytics enabled : Over a longer period of time you will start gleaning useful information about your readers. eg. what part of the world do they come from, which links do they come from (eg. you can get statistical information about the referrers such as google reader (RSS), blog aggregators, blog networks etc.). You can also get information about what searches led the search engines to your blog. I prefer wordpress.com stats plugin for wordpress and google analytics. The former is better at providing more immediate feedback, whereas the latter is more comprehensive.



8. Pay attention to search engines as well :Most blog aggregators and networks will drive substantial traffic to your blog for the first 24-48 hours. Search engines will send a small trickle initially. However there is a big difference. Traffic from aggregators and networks will dry up after a few days for any post. But traffic from search engines will keep on coming. Over a sustained period of time, search engines can start driving a substantial traffic to your blog. Read up about Search Engine Optimisation and see if you can help your blog. I would recommend however that you use such optimisation fairly and only to the extent that it is not misleading.

I presented this last week at the Session @ Java Meet organised by IndicThreads. Have attempted to look at the contrast from the points of view of developers, architects and managers.