The Problem

I recently had a situation where I had a comma separated value (CSV) file that I wanted to easily parse within a shell script. Unfortunately the CSV data contained some double quoted strings with embedded commas, for example:

"Adygeya, Republic",RU-AD,21250,RU,Russian Federation

This made parsing the file quite painful, particularly as only the strings with an embedded comma were double quoted like this.

The Solution

I devised a utility script that can parse the data and replace the delimiter with a new character of the users choice, which makes CSV files far easier to work with if you pick a character you know won’t be in your data.

The Script

This script borrows the core CSV parsing from this rather good post on CSV parsing with awk, but I’ve edited it to allow the substitution of the delimiter and ensure it still outputs a single record per line.

#!/bin/bash

input=$1
delimiter=$2

if [ -z "$input" ];
then
	echo "Input file must be passed as an argument!"
	exit 98
fi

if ! [ -f $input ] || ! [ -e $input ];
then
	echo "Input file '"$input"' doesn't exist!"
	exit 99
fi

if [ -z "$delimiter" ];
then
	echo "Delimiter character must be passed as an argument!"
	exit 98
fi

gawk '{
	c=0
	$0=$0","
	while($0) {
		delimiter=""
		if (c++ > 0) # Evaluate and then increment c
		{
			delimiter="'$delimiter'"
		}

		match($0,/ *"[^"]*" *,|[^,]*,/)
		# save what matched in f
		s=substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH)
		# remove extra stuff
		gsub(/^ *"?|"? *,$/,"",s)
		printf (delimiter s)
		# "consume" what matched
		$0=substr($0,RLENGTH+1)
	}
	printf ("\n")
}' $input

Sample Input


$ cat testprovinces.csv
Province,ProvinceCode,CriteriaId,CountryCode,Country
Australian Capital Territory,AU-ACT,20034,AU,Australia
Piaui,BR-PI,20100,BR,Brazil
"Adygeya, Republic",RU-AD,21250,RU,Russian Federation
Bío-Bío,CL-BI,20154,CL,Chile


Sample Output


$ ./change-delimiter testprovinces.csv '^'
Province^ProvinceCode^CriteriaId^CountryCode^Country
Australian Capital Territory^AU-ACT^20034^AU^Australia
Piaui^BR-PI^20100^BR^Brazil
Adygeya, Republic^RU-AD^21250^RU^Russian Federation
Bío-Bío^CL-BI^20154^CL^Chile


(C) D Sharon Pruitt

Many other fields, such as software development, are huge and constantly changing. As a result, it’s very important to keep your skills and knowledge up to date. However, there is far more to know than you can realistically expect to ever learn, and since new things are always emerging, it presents a moving target that you can never catch up with.

This presents a big dilemma: do you try to gain a broad knowledge, or do you accept you’ll never learn everything and make sure that what you do study you learn in detail . In essence, do you choose quantity or quality, breadth or depth?

This is a dilemma where I feel pulled in both directions at once. On the one hand, I like to thoroughly exhaust a topic and gain an in depth knowledge of it, but on the other, there’s so much I’d like to learn about that I feel it’s hard to cover it all even superficially. If I cover as much as I can, then I feel as if I’ll just forget it, whilst if I study it in depth I feel like I’ll never learn enough.

The depth-first approach, for me, means taking good notes (which I record in my knowledge base, but this is very time consuming, and as a result I cover material much more slowly, but on the other hand, once I’ve extracted the information from a source and merged it with what I already have, it will always be there as a reference.

It’s much faster for me to simply read through the material I’m studying. I can cover a much larger amount, but much less of it is committed to long term memory, and I come away feeling as though I haven’t really learnt it well enough.

On reflection, it’s clear to me that neither extreme is optimal, so the question is: what balance of depth and breadth do you choose?

In the past I’ve switched between extremes of depth and breadth because neither are satisfactory for the reasons outlined above, so now I’m committing to try and find a comfortable balance. So, I’ll spend time taking notes and some time simply reading, and I’ll start with a 50:50 ratio and adjust based on my experiences.

I’m aware that this is just my experience, so I’d be interested to know what your experiences are of the Quantity vs Quality dilemma in learning, and how you approached or resolved it in the comments section.

I look forward to reading your thoughts, but in the mean time I’ve got to face my next learning dilemma: where to start

(C) Blake Patterson

“The Birth of a Third Platform” was a talk given by Lawrence Stephenson from Apple UK on the 27 September 2010. It wasn’t entirely clear what the talk would be about or what direction it would go in before it started, but something relating to mobile seemed a safe bet.

Indeed, Lawrence’s talk was about the emergence of the mobile platform and its implications for Higher Education (HE). It struck me as a slightly odd topic because I wasn’t sure how many BCS members have an interest in HE issues, but the impression I got was that Lawrence is some kind of evangelist for mobile technology (specifically Apple’s mobile tech, naturally) in HE.

Fortunately the talk had drawn quite a crowd (easily more than the 40 that the committee had decided to cater for at their previous meeting), and they seemed to mainly be students, so I’m sure there would be something of interest for them.

For this talk, the mobile platform meant smartphones and there were quite a few facts and graphs sprinkled around, some of which Nick Charlton has written up on his blog. Of course, the emergence of mobile as a major platform isn’t limited to HE, and the ideas Lawrence presented can easily be transferred to other domains.

First we were reminded of the progression from large, bulky mainframes to ever smaller devices, then he talked about the increase in mobile use.

One point I take issue with, is the graph comparing the adoption of emerging mobile internet use with the historical adoption of the emerging internet. Whilst I’ll agree that mobile adoption is growing much more quickly than the original internet adoption, I’d argue that the rate of mobile growth is driven by the number of people already online, who are augmenting their internet access with mobile devices, and that the growth of mobile internet use wouldn’t be as rapid if people weren’t already using online services. You can’t appreciate this by looking at the graph, however, and may well lead you to think that mobile is somehow inherently more attractive and would have grown at this rate regardless of other influences. A much more useful graph could show the cumulative internet traffic over time for fixed lines vs mobile access (there are several ways of breaking it down further). Indeed, smartphones have been around for a lot longer than the slides suggested, but, whilst acknowledging how it brought the smartphone into the mainstream, I suppose it suits Apple to ignore any smartphones before the iPhone was released.

Moving onto how to capitalise on that growth in mobile usage, Lawrence outlined three ways of providing content via mobile platforms:

• Media
• Web Applications
• Native Apps

iTunes-U was the example of choice for media via mobile, but of course there are many ways to make media content available via the internet, and the nice thing about producing media is that it can be viewed on most platforms, such as a laptop as well as smartphone, using software (e.g. iTunes) that is tailored to the platform and produced by someone else rather than the content creator.

Web applications leverage existing internet technologies to deliver content to mobile devices. We can be broader than this, however, and talk about websites in general. As with media, web sites and applications are accessible across a variety of platforms using generic software such as web browsers, but there is an added burden because web sites/applications will need to display correctly regardless of what platform they’re accessed from. One of the examples of a web application is the University of Iowa’s LaundryView system for checking what washing machines are available on campus (see it in action).

Finally, native apps are the most intensive to create and maintain, as they are specific to the device they are developed for (such as an iPhone app), but they take full advantage of the device. Some universities have produced suites of apps that give students timetable information, campus maps, directions, and access to student record systems all from their iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch (unfortunately I’ve forgotten the specific example, if you can remember it perhaps you could remind me in the comments?).

Lawrence was able to take a good number of questions, and unsurprisingly there were just as many about Apple’s products in general as there were related to the talk. Although there were quite a few questions that were off-limits or rather coyly responded to, Apple’s culture of secrecy is nothing new, and I expect that was the main reason for Lawrence being so careful with what he said. I also think that’s why the branch couldn’t film the event: at one point Lawrence mentioned that Apple had paid a lot of money for the information on his slides and it was “OK to share with [us], but no to take away”.

Putting aside the limits on what he seemed to be able to say, Lawrence did a fair job of talking about mobile in general, rather than turning the talk into an Apple sales pitch. Overall, the talk was interesting and certainly demonstrated the potential for organisations if they embrace mobile, although I wouldn’t be surprised if most large organisations in HE were still struggling to embrace the potential of the internet in general, let alone the third platform

Following the talk, there was a buffet and networking opportunity, and I was pleased to bump into Chris Hunt and Nick Charlton who are both involved in the University of Plymouth’s Termisoc society, and also to meet György Straub who’s doing cool stuff such as a game development framework called XRhodes at his website, Nuclear Heart Studios.

If you've ever seen this box below your Firefox tabs, then you've encountered Firefox's location aware browsing ((C) Kai Hendry)

You may not have realised it, but the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox include a geolocation feature to enable location aware browsing.
This allows you to give permission to share your location with websites, and is on by default.

Websites will use your location so that they can tailor information to your local area. For example, a high street shop could automatically show you where your nearest branch is.

It works by collecting information about your computers IP address and wireless access points that your computer can see and comparing it to a database to estimate your current position. The default database provider is the Google Location Service, although that can be changed to another geolocation service provider.

Location Aware Browsing is designed to protect your personal information: You have to manually approve each website that requests your location, and all communication with the geolocation service is anonymised and encrypted. However, if you don’t want the feature to be active at all, you can disable it.

You can stop this warning from appearing again, but I smile every time I see it, so I've kept it

First, open a new browser tab in Firefox and type “about:config” into the address bar. This will show a warning because you’re accessing advanced settings, so acknowledge it and continue.

Type “geo.” into the filter box at the top of the page to only show geolocation service options. In Firefox 3.6.8 there are four settings related to geolocation. Find the setting called “geo.enabled” and double click on it so that it’s set to “false”. You have now disabled location aware browsing and can close the about:config tab, but if you ever want to re-enable it, all you need to do is change geo.enabled back to true.

Of the other settings, “geo.wifi.uri” is the most interesting, as it determines the location service provider to access, whilst the other two are used by the Google Location Service.

What do you think of this service? Does it bother you that it’s on by default? Do you have any privacy concerns or are you happy with the steps already taken to protect your privacy? Why not add your thoughts in the comment section.

(C) Paul Downey

This is one of my problem and solution type posts for a nasty little problem I recently encountered with a BT Home Hub 2.0 and my Windows XP Pro x64 laptop that prevented me from successfully browsing the internet, despite having a working internet connection.

I don’t know the underlying reason for this problem, so can’t predict whether or not this will be useful to other people, but just in case it is, I’m detailing it here.

The Problem

I was unable to access the internet via the BT Home Hub 2.0′s wireless network with my laptop, however a different laptop worked fine. Unfortunately I didn’t have an ethernet cable to test the wired connection.

The DNS timeout error as seen in Firefox

I was able to connect to the network, however was unable to access the BT Home Hub following the instructions in the manual (by typing bthomehub.home into the address bar). In fact, whenever I tried to access any web page, the request would time out saying it was unable to connect. By watching the status bar in Firefox (my preferred browser), I could see that my browser was unable to complete a DNS lookup because all it said was “looking up www.google.co.uk”.

The Firefox status bar whilst performing a DNS lookup

(By the way, a DNS lookup is the process to convert a URL, like “http://www.google.com, into the IP address the computer needs to load the web page, such as 209.85.135.147 for Google.com)

Even stranger: Skype could connect and worked fine, however Windows Live Messenger couldn’t! If Skype worked ok, that meant I did have a working connection to the internet, but something else was wrong.

The Solution

I used the other laptop to access the BT Home Hub, and after fiddling around with the Home Hub to eliminate simple things like security causing problems, I put the two clues together:

1. Skype worked, showing I had a working internet connection.
2. My attempts to browse the internet failed because they couldn’t complete the DNS address look up

and added in the fact that, by default, computers will get DNS settings from the router (the BT Home Hub). I decided to try manually setting the DNS servers by copying the settings from the router. This solved the problem first time! Therefore, I believe the problem was that the BT Home Hub was failing to give my laptop the DNS settings it needed.

Unfortunately, because you’re bypassing the Home Hub, you won’t be able to connect to it by typing bthomehub.home into the address bar of your browser. If you can find out the IP address of your Home Hub, you could configure your computer to redirect that URL to the correct IP address (using the HOSTS file on Windows, for example) but I’m not going to go into that here.

Step-by-Step Fix

This step-by-step fix is for Windows XP, but should be broadly similar for other Windows versions. If the instructions don’t seem applicable to your computer, there’s always Google. (Specifically, these instructions were tested on a Windows XP Pro x64 SP2 machine)

The fix has two parts, first you need the settings for some DNS servers you can use, and then you need to configure your computer with those settings. In theory, you should be able to use any valid DNS server, but to avoid any complications I used the same servers as the Home Hub was configured to use.

Find your DNS Settings

To find your DNS settings on a BT Home Hub 2.0, using a computer that can connect to the internet without applying this fix/workaround and open your favourite web browser, then type bthomehub.home into the address bar.

This will open the BT Home Hub’s administration panel. Click on the “Settings” menu item:

Screenshot of the BT Home Hub Home Screen

Select “Advanced Settings” from the Basic Settings sub-menu:

Screenshot of the BT Home Hub basic settings screen

Accept the warning and continue to the Advanced Settings screen:

Screenshot of the BT Home Hub advanced settings dialog screen

Next, select “Broadband” from the Advanced Settings sub-menu:

Screenshot of the BT Home Hub advanced settings screen

Finally, write down the primary and alternate DNS settings:

Screenshot of BT Home Hub internet connection configuration screen

In my case, the Primary and Alternate DNS settings were 194.72.0.98 and 62.6.40.162 respectively, although yours may well be different depending on how BT manage their network.

Manually Configure Your DNS

First, open Network Connections by selecting the option in your Start Menu, or by opening the Control Panel and selecting the Network Connections options.

Screenshot showing the location of the Network Connections shortcut on the Windows XP Start Menu

Then right-click on your wireless adapter and open the “Wireless Network Connection Properties” dialog. Then find and select the “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)” item, and click “Properties”.

Screenshot of the Wireless Network Connection Properties dialog window showing the Internet Connection (TCP/IP) item selected

In the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties dialog window, select the “Use the following DNS server addresses” and enter the preferred and alternate DNS settings you’ve obtained from the BT Home Hub. (Here’s a tip to make entering the settings easier: As you type, you can press space or type the full stop, ., to move to the next section of the DNS fields, and you can press tab to jump to the next field).

Screenshot of the Internet Connection (TCP/IP) Properties dialog window with manually configured DNS settings

Click “OK” in the Internet Connection (TCP/IP) Properties dialog window and “OK” again in the Wireless Network Connection Properties dialog window to save your changes.

Congratulations! You should now be able to browse the internet! (If the settings don’t take effect right away, try reconnecting to your BT Home Hub or rebooting your computer)

(C) Lisamarie Babik

How can extreme programming be implemented successfully in an organisation? Can it be incorporated into a defined software process?

Extreme Programming (XP) has become a popular agile process. This essay will discuss how XP principles and core practices can be implemented in an organisation, and extended into mature and defined software process that satisfies the various Capability Maturity Model (CMM) levels.

XP promotes, from the perspective of traditional approaches, a radical orientation to change that Mateos-Garcia and Sapsed (Adopting Agile and Scrum Practices as Organizational Becoming, 2008) believe can “give rise to new structures for project management” (pp. 2-3)

XP is based on iterative process models and includes the familiar stages of planning, design, coding, and testing, within each stage there are tools and practices. For example, user stories during planning, class responsibility-collaborator (CRC) cards and prototypes during design, developing unit tests prior to coding and pair programming during coding to improve quality, and acceptance tests based on user stories. (Pressman, 2005)

What makes XP so radical is how it “turns conventional software process sideways” (Beck, 1999), which in practice means that the distinct planning, design, coding, and testing phases of the iterative processes, from which XP evolved, merge and are conducted simultaneously.

Beck’s article (Embracing Change with Extreme Programming, 1999), though old, explains XPs core practices and how they can be implemented. The organisation implementing XP should focus on releasing working increments through short iterations.

The features to be included in an iteration are determined by the “planning game” (Beck, 1999) where clients rate the priority and developers estimate the time required for each feature, and the client selects the most important features until all the developer time is used up. Honest and clear communication with the client is essential throughout the project, but particularly during the planning game.

Features are broken down into tasks that are allocated to developers, who then write tests based on client input to determine when a feature is working satisfactorily and then implement the feature to satisfy the tests. This test-driven development helps the organisation rapidly produce working code, and if automated can be used to continuously integrate new code ensuring the latest build of the product is always working.

Coding is done in pairs so that code is reviewed as it is written and refactoring existing code is encouraged. Refactoring is supported by the notion of collective ownership: the idea that each developer is responsible for code across the project and should take opportunities to improve it if such an opportunity arises.

Beck’s “sideways” process is evident in the way that testing, design, and coding are merged as tests are written and executed throughout the development and design by refactoring is conducted during coding.

However, extreme programming (XP) may seem at odds with large scale software development and the planning and control such development entails, but the truth is that XP methods can successfully be integrated into organisations using defined software processes.

Implementation of agile principles and XP is largely dependent, as with a project, on the circumstances. There is no silver bullet for development processes; any implementation must be tailored to the context of the project. Mateos-Garcia et al acknowledge this when they conclude “[t]he emphasis on change, flexibility and structural emergence… needs to be balanced with an acceptance of the fact that stability can in some cases be a goal that organisations should strive to”. Studio B provides an example of implementing a balanced approach (Mateos-Garcia & Sapsed, 2008, pp. 11-12) as they have implemented agile practices in a particular area of the product where agility is beneficial (experimental AI) while maintaining stability across the project as a whole. They achieve this by organising the agile element as unit operating within a traditional structure, thus externally the organisation is able to maintain stability, while internally react agilely to changes.

Martinsson (Maturing XP through the CMM, 2003) argues that eXtreme Programming (XP) and the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) are complementary models of software development and can be used together to ensure high quality software products. He believes that the CMM indicates what to do, while XP can suggest how to do it. In spite of this apparent synergy, the CMM already makes suggestions about how to implement its key performance areas (KPAs) (citation needed?), however Martinsson notes it only “suggest[s] possible routes” and “is not mandating how to achieve the associated goals”.

However, when implemented alone, XP’s core practices don’t even meet all the criteria for CMM level 2. The organisation relying purely on XP will not progress beyond the ad-hoc process of CMM level 1. Despite this, core XP practice does fulfil 22 of the 53 CMM goals across 11 of the 18 KPAs. A further 10 goals across 6 KPAs can be fulfilled “either through XP’s values or by using additional common [XP] practices”. (Martinsson, Maturing XP through the CMM, 2003)

To fully integrate XP into a defined software process, driven by the CMM, additional measures are needed to fully address the following KPAs:

• Software Quality Assurance (SQA)
• Organisation Process Focus (OPF)
• Training Program (TP)
• Integrated Software Management (ISM)
• Quantitative Process Management (QPM)
• Software Quality Management (SQM)
• Technology Change Management (TCM)
• Process Change Management (PCM)

Software quality assurance (CMM L2) can be integrated into XP by applying “objective scrutiny” (Martinsson, Maturing XP through the CMM, 2003) and selecting metrics that allow such scrutiny to be applied. In the context of XP, such metrics could be:

• Percentage of successful test cases
• Number of successful acceptance tests
• Individual velocity
• Team velocity
• Actual velocity against estimated velocity

(Martinsson, Maturing XP through the CMM, 2003)

These metrics all support the core XP practices and build on what XP already does to provide suitable data to measure quality. Objectivity should be maintained by ensuring the person responsible for the measurements is not involved in developing for that project. That person is also responsible for communicating the metrics to affected parties and the daily stand up meetings or team notice board are ideal means of doing so in an XP driven project. (Martinsson, Maturing XP through the CMM, 2003)

CMM level 3 is reached by formally establishing the XP process in an organisation process definition and identifying strengths and weaknesses in order to improve, and customising the organisation process definition to the circumstances of each project. Doing so satisfies the Organisation Process Focus (OPF) and Integrated Software Management (ISM) KPAs. To achieve OPF, the CMM suggests a software engineering process group to oversee the management of the process and improvements to it based on regular assessment. ISM is achieved by tailoring the organisation’s standard process to suit individual projects based on feedback from other projects. Process modifications may include altering the iteration length, the frequency of releases, or using different units of estimation for user stories and tasks. (Martinsson, Maturing XP through the CMM, 2003)

Quantitative Process Management (QPM) and Software Quality Management (SQM) are required for CMM level 4. QPM involves using data from past projects to improve the execution of future projects and establish what is possible using that process. For XP to achieve this data from past projects will need to be captured in a format that allows easy comparison. Data that would be relevant would include task estimates and actual implementation times and velocities. The software engineering process group would take responsibility for collecting and analysing this data, supporting their work for the SQA KPA. This then enables much more accurate estimates. (Martinsson, Maturing XP through the CMM, 2003)

SQM requires quantitative measures of software quality in order to ensure customer satisfaction. XP already addresses the issue of customer satisfaction, however it fails to provide quantitative data that can be analysed. Here Martinsson recommends simply doing what the CMM describes: using “surveys, focus groups, and product evaluations to find out the quality needs” and then translating them into XP acceptance tests. The status of these tests can then be used to measure quality throughout the project. (Martinsson, Maturing XP through the CMM, 2003)

The KPAs that need addressing for CMM level 5 are Technology Change Management (TCM) and Process Change Management (PCM). TCM involves constantly reviewing new technologies to see if they can yield an improvement in the process, and accepting that this may mean a shift away from XP as new techniques emerge. TCM would normally be the responsibility of the software engineering process group. PCM, also the responsibility of the software engineering process group, is achieved through training and education in order to involve the every member of the organisation in process improvement by making suggestions to the software engineering process group. (Martinsson, Maturing XP through the CMM, 2003)

Having discussed how to extend core XP practice to achieve a mature and defined process, it is worth noting that both Paulk (Extreme Programming from a CMM Perspective, 2001) and Mateos-Garcia and Sapsed (Adopting Agile and Scrum Practices as Organizational Becoming, 2008) point out that XP is just one methodology, one tool, and not a silver bullet. Process should always be adapted to the project context.

Despite that, this essay has discussed how to implement an XP development process and discussed how to improve upon the core practices to produce a more mature process in line with the CMM view of process quality. To finally answer the original question, it is possible to implement XP successfully into a defined process.

Bibliography

Beck, K. (1999). Embracing Change with Extreme Programming. Computer , 32 (10), 70-77.

Martinsson, J. (2002, October). Maturing extreme programming through the CMM. Lund: Department of Computer Science, Lund University.

Martinsson, J. (2003). Maturing XP through the CMM. (M. Marchesi, & G. Succi, Eds.) Lecture Notes in Computer Science (2675), 80-87.

Mateos-Garcia, J., & Sapsed, J. (2008). Adopting Agile and Scrum Practices as Organizational Becoming. British Academy of Management Annual Conference. Harrogate, UK: British Academy of Management.

Paulk, M. C. (2001). Extreme Programming from a CMM Perspective. IEEE Software , 18 (6), 19-26.

Pressman, R. S. (2005). Chapter 4: An Agile View of Process. In Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach (6th Edition ed., pp. 110-113). New York, US: McGraw-Hill.

(c) Tracy O

On June 2nd I went up to Nottingham for NottTuesday. The topic was “Get Funded!” and there were 3 speakers: Mark Chandler (Relationship Manager at Lloyds TSB) discussing bank finance, Chris Scarth (co-founder and commercial director of Prime Principle) sharing his experiences of angel investment, and Robert Cawdron (Fund Manager at E-Synergy) talking about venture capital.

Mark kicked off by discussion by explaining bank’s place in start up funding. He put in it wonderfully simple terms: banks exist to lend money, move money around, and make money doing it. The bank’s focus is when will repayment occur, as this is when they make money, and they are looking for reassurance that repayment will be made. This means the bank isn’t looking to make risky long-term investments in the business, which means they won’t buy equity in the business, but they will grant loans for relatively low-risk purposes where they can feel sure they will be repaid.

They will grant loans for business expansion where the money is being invested in assets or will grant a loan to fund the fulfilment of sales. In both cases, what the bank wants to know is, if they give you some money, when will they get their money back? If the loan is for an asset, then they expect to be repaid within the lifetime of that asset, and similarly if the loan is to help fulfil an order, the bank would expect to be repaid when the order is complete.

This approach contrasts with angel investors and venture capitalists, because angels and VCs are looking to make investments to fuel growth and make a bigger profit which entails a larger risk.

Chris Scarth, talking about angel investors, gave us an overview of his company, Prime Principle, and recollected how Tony Hillary (founder of Hillarys Blinds) came to invest in the business. They had already met through networking events and so when Prime Principle approached Tony they had some common ground to start a conversation. What I found particularly interesting was hearing about how Prime Principle grew from a dissertation project into a business, started by two graduates. It’s quite an inspiring story for me, as I find myself in a similar situation considering how to start my own business. If I can emulate the success of Prime Principle, then I’ll be very pleased!

Lastly, but by no means least, Robert Cawdron discussed his role with E-Synergy and talked about venture capital. Unlike banks, VCs are looking to make an investment in a growing business in order to sell their share a few years later for a profit. Additionally, VCs will often provide expertise as well as money, which banks do not do. These investments are riskier and as a result VCs maintain a portfolio of investments to spread the risk. Discussing how businesses get VC funding, Robert said that out of 100 applications, a VC would end up making less than 5 investments, and for every 10 investments only 2 would provide the big returns that VCs are looking for.

On 20th May 2010, the South West branch of the BCS hosted by Jon Tilt and Richard Coppen from IBM who gave a lecture called “Agile software testing’ – A practical view of testing in a large scale agile development environment”. Jon and Richard work as Chief Test Architect and Test Architect respectively and shared their experiences of testing and agile testing in large projects.

They started by discussing testing in general, including the problems with leaving testing activities to the end of the development cycle where the cost to fix defects rises exponentially. Then they discussed exhaustive and targeted testing, and how, since testing is a risk reducing activity, targeted testing can deliver the same confidence in a product far quicker than exhaustive testing, which is almost never practical. They talked about how framing testing activities in terms of increasing confidence, and demonstrating how the same level of confidence can be achieved, can gain managerial buy-in to agile testing philosophies. Finally they considered the importance of presenting the results of testing activities in a manner that allows project managers to understand them and their implications.

Despite joining the BCS in December, this was the first event I’ve been able to attend, due to being in the wrong city whenever events were scheduled. So when there are events in the South West, I’ve usually been in Leicester, and vice versa. Naturally I wasn’t sure what to expect, so was relieved when I found it to be a welcoming and friendly atmosphere. Hopefully, now I’m at the end of my degree, I’ll be able to attend more events in the future.

The workshop itself was part-lecture, part-coaching. Doug’s lecture was based around twelve questions you need to be able to answer to grow a successful business. For me, these questions could easily be used to put together a good business plan and then used throughout the life of the business to ensure its growth. The coaching part consisted of entrepreneurs from the audience volunteering themselves to step into Doug’s spotlight so he could advise them on how to approach their business challenges, which was great to see how an entrepreneur picks apart the problems and opportunities they face.

Doug delivered a very natural presentation, as you may well expect of a seasoned entrepreneur, without relying on any obvious notes or prompts. The slides were light on information, but related to what Doug was saying, so they focussed attention on his words. The workshop was enriched by Doug’s various anecdotal examples, illustrations, and humour, as well as light hearted delivery style.

Walking away from the event I reflected the most valuable thing to be gained from an event like this is being able to get inside the head of a successful entrepreneur and learn a little about their mindset and perspective on the world. If you’re able to practise that you can start making similar insights into the challenges in your life and spotting opportunities others may miss.

I think I can summarise the event by saying that growing a successful business is a matter of asking the right questions, finding the answers, and acting on them. I definitely enjoyed it, and will be looking out for future School4Startups events and live webcasts.

This essay will consider strategy in the context of the computer game Civilisation IV (Civ4 as it’s commonly abbreviated and shall hereon be referred to as) and will attempt to address issues surrounding the definition of strategy, applicability of strategic theory, and how Civ4 and strategy in general relate to the real world. We shall do this by describing and comparing Mintzberg and Porter’s views on strategy, considering Ghoshal’s criticism of management theory, and then attempting to apply Baudrillard’s postmodern theories of simulacra to Civ4.

Defining Strategy

Before we can discuss the applicability of the term “strategy” to a game such as Civ4, we must first attempt to define strategy. Chambers Dictionary gives two definitions:

1. The process of, or skill in, planning and conducting a military campaign.
2. A long-term plan for future success or development.

One is the process of planning and carrying out a military campaign, whilst the other is the plan itself. Chambers excludes the process of planning for non-military activities, and that gives a hint to the word’s roots. According to Chambers, the word strategy is derived from the 17th century French word strategie, which itself is derived from the Greek strategia that is formed by combining stratos (army) and agein (to lead). So historically strategy has a strong military flavour and perhaps even now carries connotations of conflict and leadership, and yet we find strategy in businesses and boardrooms; places where war, in the literally sense at least, has never been waged. However, the second definition hints at some universally applicable definition of strategy that may be relevant to war, business, and even Civ4.

Defining what makes something “strategic” is also problematic. Mintzberg (1987, pp. 13-14) notes that notions of strategy are very subjective, depending on your perspective and on time: “what seems tactical today may prove strategic tomorrow” (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 14) He then goes on to suggest we treat strategy less as a category and more as a scale “and simply refer to issues as more or less ‘strategic’” (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 14), acknowledging that this strategic value can change with time and circumstances.

Mintzberg’s Definition of Strategy

Mintzberg (The Strategy Concept I: Five Ps For Strategy, 1987) also describes five different views that each emphasise different aspects of strategy:

• Plan
• Ploy
• Pattern
• Position
• Perspective

Mintzberg’s concept of strategy as plan (Mintzberg, 1987, pp. 11-12) is characterised by formulation “in advance of the action to which they apply, and they are developed consciously and purposefully”. In Civ4, the game is “won” by achieving one of a number of criteria. The criteria are defined by the games creators: they have provided several alternative ways of “winning” the game. These “victory conditions” are:

• Time Victory: highest scoring player after a set number of turns, normally when the game year reaches 2050AD;
• Conquest Victory: eliminating all rivals by destroying or capturing their cities;
• Domination Victory: control two thirds of available land and have a population 25% greater than any of your rivals;
• Cultural Victory: player controls three cities with Legendary Culture status;
• Space Race: building a space ship and successfully sending it to Alpha Centuri;
• Diplomatic Victory: winning the vote for the Diplomatic Victory Resolution in the United Nations. This requires the United Nations building to be built and the player elected Secretary-General to propose the Diplomatic Victory Resolution.

(2K Games, 2005, pp. 105 – 106)
A player can create a plan to achieve one of these conditions by deciding in advance what actions they will take throughout the game to enable them to meet the criteria.

One can even plan to deceive, perhaps by pretending to pursue a particular victory condition when that isn’t the intention. However, according to Mintzberg a ploy, or act of deception, is a form of strategy in itself, but Mintzberg also describes ploy as “really just a specific ‘maneuver’” and refers to “the real strategy” as the “plan… the real intention” (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 12), and if the strategic ploy is really a plan to deceive, it would seem that the strategy is not the ploy, but the plan to misdirect. Hence, the inclusion of ploy in Mintzberg’s list can be debated, and Mintzberg perhaps realises the concept of ploy is not as important as the other Ps, as he only gave it two paragraphs at the end his discussion of plan (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 12). Mintzberg goes on to contrast plan and intended with emergent and realised strategy in terms of pattern.

Pattern is defined as “consistency in action, whether or not intended” (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 12). Whereas plan depends on an intention, pattern does not: “plans may go unrealized, while patterns may appear without preconception” (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 13). This allows us to differentiate between intended (plan) and emergent (unplanned pattern) strategies, both of which combine to create a realized strategy as depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Deliberate and Emergent Strategy (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 14)

This is instantly familiar, as games of Civ4 take a long time and as circumstances change one is forced to adapt to new situations, creating a realised strategy that is a blend of intended and emergent strategies. This may mean that a player adopts a new strategic position within the game as the game progresses.

Mintzberg’s idea of position owes a lot to strategy’s military roots. He describes position as “a means of locating an organization in… an environment” (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 15) which is comparable with military ideas about locating an army in its environment: one of Sun Tzu’s five governing factors of war was Earth, which “comprises distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passages; the chances of life and death” (Tzu, p. 1) or the ground upon which an army fights. Although, Mintzberg discusses position in terms of niches and product-market domains (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 15), the interpretation of environment can be broader than the organisation’s product positioning. For example, the PEST framework breaks an organisation’s environment down into political, economic, social, and technological contexts that can explore an organisation’s place in an environment beyond product positioning (Rollinson, 2008, pp. 34-41). Within Civ4 the geographic sense of positioning is most obvious, but it can also be used to describe what strategic niche a player occupies, such as do they focus on technological advantages, sheer size of territory and quantity of cities, or military power. In the case of military power as a strategic niche or position, this should not be confused with an aggressive perspective.

An aggressive perspective that informs a player’s actions is an example of strategy as perspective. Strategic perspective encompasses the idea of vision or “an ingrained way of perceiving the world” (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 16), but more than that: it is “shared by the members of an organisation” so they are “united by common thinking and/or behaviour” (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 17). Naturally, this common thinking will inform decisions that are taken and so can lead to strategy as plan (and ploy), position, and pattern.

However, there is a subtler interaction of these different views on strategy. An order can be placed on these concepts, that perspective leads to plan, which leads to pattern, which leads to position, for example, but Mintzberg claims that “ while various relationships exist between the different definitions, no one relationship, nor any single definition for that matter, takes precedence over the others” (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 20). That is, there is no single way approaching or establishing strategy, that, for example, a plan can establish pattern just as easily as pattern can inform a plan. In this respect, Mintzberg’s Five Ps theory resembles Porter’s views on strategic position as an integrated system.

Porter’s Definition of Strategy

Porter’s idea of strategy is very easy to apply to Civ4. He argues that strategy isn’t so much a plan as a system of interrelated and complementary activities that form a position within a market: “Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities” (Porter, 1996, p. 68), however he first discusses what strategy is not.

Porter argues that operational effectiveness is distinct from strategy (Porter, 1996, pp. 61 – 64), and this is mirrored in Civ4: the speed at which a player’s cities can construct buildings and units does confer a strategic advantage and is necessary to compete with rivals, but in itself does not bring the player closer to victory. Instead it is how the player decides to use this advantage, what positioning they use it to adopt, that determines their strategy.

In Civ4, operational effectiveness can be measured in terms of the amount of production units a city produces. Efficiency can be viewed as maximising the production output of a city. A city’s output can be increased through the construction of buildings that yield bonuses, tile improvements, or fine tuning the tiles the city’s workers are using for maximum effect (rather than trusting the computer). Rivals can also achieve similar levels of operational effectiveness by researching the same technologies, building the same buildings, and maximising city tile usage and it is for this reason that Porter argues operational effectiveness is not strategy, because efficiency can be easily matched and in the long term offers no real strategic advantage as a result.

Civ4 offers a number of different approaches allowing for players to adopt different strategic positions. The approaches are the victory conditions, which each encourage a different strategic position to be adopted. (2K Games, 2005, pp. 105 – 106) The means to achieve these victory conditions can be split into three major areas: military, culture, and technology, and how the player balances each of these areas helps strategically differentiate that player from rivals.

In Porter’s view, the strategy is the system of unique activities chosen to support the key strategic themes that define the position (Porter, 1996, pp. 64 – 65). Creating this activity system requires tradeoffs: “Tradeoffs occur when activities are incompatible. Simply put, a trade-off means that more of one thing necessitates less of another.” (Porter, 1996, p. 68) Thus the only activities to be undertaken are those that support the strategic position, and Porter suggests that deciding what not to do is just as crucial as deciding what activities to pursue. (Porter, 1996, pp. 68 – 70) The benefit that tradeoffs give to the organisation is fit. Fit is the self reinforcing and complementing nature of closely linked activity systems that creates the strategic advantage and “locks out imitators by creating a chain that is strong as its strongest link” (Porter, 1996, p. 70).

Tradeoffs, and a strong fit, make a position harder to imitate because rivals may be unwilling or unable to make the same tradeoffs. Research in Civ4 is a good example, because it takes time to research new technologies. If a player wants to imitate a rivals position by copying their technology it will be very hard, if not impossible, to do so because to achieve that position the rival made tradeoffs when deciding what technology to research. The imitating player did not make the same tradeoffs, and the end result is that the imitating player will never be able to catch up with the rival, because the tradeoffs mean the rival has a head start on the imitating player that can easily be maintained.

So Porter, in summary, defines strategy as a series of interlinking activities that when taken as a whole support a market position and defy imitation by virtue of the tradeoffs required to achieve a strong fit.

It may seem that Mintzberg and Porter have differing views on strategy, but in fact there are many similarities. Porter’s argument that strategy is essentially a position is obviously compatible with Mintzberg’s own view of position, but the similarity goes further. The system of activities is an example of strategy through pattern, consistent action, and, as Porter suggests a process of actively decided what activities to pursue, this suggests a deliberate plan as well. In a general sense, Porter’s approach works best when everyone in the organisation shares the vision for the strategic position, or when, in Mintzberg’s words, they share “common thinking and/or behaviour” (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 17) and the same perspective. Therefore, we can say that Porter’s view of strategy and Mintzberg’s definitions support each other.

It can be tempting then, to suggest this may be a correct view of strategy, and that they are relevant to the practice of business.

Theory and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Ghoshal discusses the effect of theory on practice, and argues that theory is negatively affecting practice. He reasons this is because management theory avoids issues of ethics and morality, is based on negative assumptions drawn from a particular ideology (liberalism), and has attempted to adopt the scientific model of investigation and “since morality, or ethics, is inseparable from human intentionality, a precondition for making business studies a science has been the denial of any moral or ethical considerations in our theories” (Ghoshal, 2005, pp. 76-77)

He argues that, as it’s a social science, management theories and practice cannot be untangled because “a management theory – if it gains sufficient currency – changes the behaviour of managers who start acting in accordance with the theory” (Ghoshal, 2005, p. 77) and so bad theories become true, even if they were initially wrong, by virtue of the self-fulfilling prophecies they encourage (see Figure 2).

For example, if a theory encourages a manager to distrust his employees, this will affect the way the manager interacts with his employees; the employees will pick up on the manager’s expectations from behavioural cues and respond accordingly, leading to validation of the original assumption, even if it was incorrect.

Figure 2 Model of the self-fulfilling prophecy effect (Rollinson, 2008, p.119)

The result is a set of amoral theories that relieve managers of any moral or ethical obligation and place them in a position where they compete with internal and external stakeholders: “In strategy courses, we have presented the “five forces” framework to suggest that companies must compete not only with their competitors but also with their suppliers, customer, employees, and regulators” (Ghoshal, 2005, p. 75).

Whilst Ghoshal focuses on morality, in doing so he highlights the wider issue of theory that does not reflect reality, which in Ghoshal’s view is a result of incorrect and unchallenged assumptions. This gives us a stepping stone to question the relevance of strategic theory at all. After all, assuming the purpose of theory is to improve our understanding or how effective we are, what is the value of theory if it makes organisations perform worse rather than better?

The Irrelevance of Theory

Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation, 1995) offers some insight that helps us address the relevance of theory. He argues that we are living in a hyperreal age, where we mistake simulation for reality. He describes simulacra, which are representations of real things, and describes three orders of simulacra:

1. An accurate representation of something real; a placeholder for it
2. An imitation of something real that replaces the original and real; A copy of something real
3. A representation that is detached from the original and the real; the absence of anything real; An imitation of reality that is mistaken for reality itself

(Baudrillard, 1995, p. 6)

Baudrillard presents Disneyland as “a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra” (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 12). It is a “play of illusions and phantasms” that is taken at face value rather than recognising the “excessive number of gadgets necessary to create the … effect” (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 12). However, Disneyland is not the simulation, it merely “functions as cover for a simulation of the third order” (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 12). In fact, Disneyland is a “deterrence machine set up to rejuvenate the fiction of the real” (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 12). That is, the juxtaposition of something that is acknowledged to be fake (Disneyland) with the simulation (American culture), so that in comparison the simulation seems real and natural.

Crogan (Remembering (Forgetting) Baudrillard, 2007) suggests a “consideration of games in term of Baudrillard’s notion of the deterrence machine” (Crogan, 2007, p. 409) so that we can examine their assumptions and in what way they distort the reality they dissimulate. This leads us to a comparison between Disneyland and America and Civ4 and strategy theory. Thus, we can suggest that Civ4 is a deterrence engine, a simulation acknowledged to be false in order to be juxtaposed and contrasted against the real practice of strategy, which is in actual fact hyperreal! A simulation that has no bearing on the real, but is nevertheless unquestioningly accepted as the real.

As Mintzberg says, “It is important to remember that no-one has ever seen a strategy or touched one” (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 16), and Grandy and Mills (2004) support this hypothesis. They argue that the “perceived ‘control’ of…organizations is a movement into the third phase of simulation” (Grandy & Mills, 2004, p. 1162) and that strategy discourse masks the absence of any form of reality in the representation: “the acceptance and unquestioning of its existence and significance masks the absence of reality” (Grandy & Mills, 2004, p. 1163).

Grandy and Mills (2004, pp. 1161-1162) argue that the simulation of strategy start with the first-order simulacra of the “organisational” and “corporate” worlds, which are imperfect representations of the natural world as they differ “from the entirety of the natural world” and are used “as a way of viewing the world” (Grandy & Mills, 2004, p. 1162). They then argue that “models of these first-order simulacra are second-order simulacra” (Grandy & Mills, 2004, p. 1162) that simplify reality by suggesting that “organizational life can be understood through strategy and strategic management”. In Baudrillard’s view it is an “evil appearance” (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 6) because it oversimplifies reality, thus distorting it. “Attempts to prescribe ‘generic’ strategies to firms are exemplary of the world-wide application of second-order simulacra” (Grandy & Mills, 2004, p. 1162), for example, frameworks such as PEST, SWOT, and the Five Forces are all second-order simulacra because they grossly oversimplify reality. Finally, we arrive at the third-order simulacra, already described, as discourse about the models, second order simulacra, emerges severing the link to reality in the process and becoming hyperreal.

Strategy and Civilisation IV

So to conclude, strategy is a problematic term to describe having a multitude of possible meanings that we explored using Mintzberg’s Five Ps and Porter’s ideas on strategic positioning. Ghoshal suggests that such theories can be damaging as they propagate incorrect assumptions leading to negative self-fulfilling prophecies in practice, which leads us to Baudrillard who we use to help us examine the relevance of strategy to the real or natural world. We also drawing on Crogan’s discussion of Baudrillard and video games and Grandy and Mills discussion of strategy as simulacra. Thus, we are lead to conclude that Civ4, which fits the theories we examined, is a simulation of strategy, as per Baudrillard, but also a deterrence machine that helps to reaffirm the hyperreal discourse of strategy in business. Finally, having established the hyperreality of strategy, we are left with a final question, which we leave to the reader to answer: Is it worth studying strategy, and if not have we just wasted a semester studying it?

Bibliography

2K Games. (2005, October 25). Civilisation 4 Manual. 2K Games. Retrieved January 10, 2010, from http://steampowered.com/Manuals/3900/manual.pdf

Baudrillard, J. (1995). Simulacra and Simulation. (S. F. Glaser, Trans.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Crogan, P. (2007). Remembering (Forgetting) Baudrillard. Games and Culture , 2 (4), 405-413.

Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices. Academent of Management Learning and Education , 4 (1), 75 – 91.

Grandy, G., & Mills, A. J. (2004). Strategy as Simulacra? A Radical Reflexive Look at the Discpline and Practice of Strategy. Journal of Management Studies , 41 (7), 1153-1170.

Mintzberg, H. (1987). The Strategy Concept I: Five Ps For Strategy. California Management Review , 30 (1), 11-24.

Porter, M. E. (1996). What Is Strategy? Harvard Business Review , 74 (6), 61 – 78.

Rollinson, D. (2008). Organisational Behaviour and Analysis: An Integrated Approach (4th ed.). Harlow, Essex, United Kingdom: Pearson Education.

Tzu, S. (n.d.). The Art of War. Retrieved January 24, 2010, from http://www.artofwarsuntzu.com/Art%20of%20War%20PDF.pdf”

Table of Figures

Figure 1 Deliberate and Emergent Strategy (Mintzberg, 1987, p. 14)

Figure 2 Model of the self-fulfilling prophecy effect (Rollinson, 2008, p.119)