MCIT’s ICT Indicators project that has been built by Business Intelligence and web development teams in CompuPharaohs wins UNPSA 2013 [an United Nation (UN) prize]. "The United Nations Public Service Award is the most prestigious international recognition of excellence in public service. It rewards the creative achievements and contributions of public service institutions that lead to a more effective and responsive public administration in countries worldwide. Through an annual competition, the UN Public Service Awards promotes the role, professionalism and visibility of public service." [source: Wikipedia]

The award will be delivered to Egypt in Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain in UN Public Service Day and Awards Cermony in 2013 United Nations Public Service Fourm between 24 - 27 June 2013.

This news was published by Al-Ahram newspaper issued in 17th May, 2013 in its last page.

Ministry of Communications and Information Technology portal posts the news on 19th May, 2013.

The list of winning countries projects is shown below. Click the image to go to the source.

To visit the Unitied Nations Public Service Forum Site, click the image below.

 ALM has been the key driver to the success of many software projects. However, have you ever imagined that it can be an effective part of a nation history-making quest?

The Arab Spring swept across Northern Africa and the Middle East in 2011, bringing about dramatic changes in the governing authorities. In Egypt, the revolution changed the regime, and the Military Council took over to restore order, and to call for a fair election where the nation chooses its new president. The election committee was under pressure to facilitate a system that would support transparent and fair elections.

With only a team of 6, including three developers, a limited budget, and about one month to develop the application that scales up to 55 million eligible electors, the team tried to utilize some important ALM practices that were of a great help. The team knew that the choice of the practices and tools would be critical to the success of the project. Testing the load of the system in an accurate and realistic way, and speeding up the development cycle were the name of the game in this critical mission. The team was particularly concerned about how to build for, and to handle, the load those applications that would experience in a very tight time window. Only one shot was there then, and the world was watching.

In this session, Ahmed will talk in more details about that critical load testing mission, which in its turn derived other Agile practices. How was it planned for? How was it implemented using Visual Studio ALM? What were the practices that were of a great help in achieving the goal? and What were the best lessons learned?

But before jumping into the story, we will go through an essential background of load testing.

Links

Channel 9 video: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/ALM-Summit/ALM-Summit-3/Load-Testing-a-History-Making-System

ALM summit 3: http://www.alm-summit.com/3pr_testing.aspx

The Egyptian Ministry of State for Administrative Development (MSAD) was given the difficult task of creating the software to support transparent Egyptian elections in 2012. MSAD had a tight schedule and limited budget to develop highly scalable applications to support the 50 million eligible voters set to participate in the landmark election process that was watched by the whole world. MSAD chose Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 to ensure the application was ready for the elections and able to handle the millions of voters using it at one time. MSAD is testing Visual Studio 2012 and sees potential to improve developer productivity even more.

You can read the full success story on Microsoft site.