It is only fitting to start the new year mentioning a topic that we have come across over and over again in the old year - project instrumentation.
It is very surprising to find how few of our colleagues and customers practice, what we jokingly call, "safe software". The focus seems to always be on the date and cost of delivering the next milestone and little heed is paid to long term viability and maintenance.
The reasons for these behaviors can be many - invariably, however, if a company or project makes it past the 18th month mark, bad practices become the type of problem that ends up on the CxO's desk and mid-level managers start playing that particular variety of IT musical chairs game, usually known as "CYA".
We would like to offer a simple formula for "doing it right", and as a picture is worth a thousand words - here is an approach that has worked for us on many, many projects and is simple and painless enough to implement, without a major investment of time and money.
And to celebrate 2008 - we are pitching to all of you unsafe software practitioners out-there a $30K / 60-day "special". Call us, an in 8 weeks (or so), at a fixed cost, we will put in place this type of instrumentation and train one of your team to manage it.
We will also extend to you (if you choose) a long-term, low-cost, monthly support agreement, so that you can rest assured that your critical software engineering instrumentation is supported and maintained with patches, backups and all other non-essential, but necessary to-do's.
Here are 3 simple questions you can ask (and experiments to perform) to determine if you are a good candidate for this:
- How long does a new software developer take to be able to build one of your critical projects for the first time and how many hours of hand-holding form one of your experienced staff does it take? If you are in a web/scripting environment: "How long does it take for a new person to add a new "form" to your web UI product?" (This is a good experiment to conduct, actually - be skeptical of what your people will tell you - only a completely new person can really surface the facts here...)
- If everyone on your engineering team got brand new computers tomorrow and was not allowed to retain any old hard drives - how long will it take to be productive again - and how many deadlines would you miss? (With our scheme, you can be sure to be back in business in 24 hours or less!)
- Do you know when the last fully integrated version of your software was completed and can you rebuild form scratch at least one previous version that has "shipped" or has been "deployed". For the colleagues in the SAS space - how difficult is it to "roll back" a version that was just deployed?
We hope to hear from you soon!
Cheers!
