Testing… Testing… Testing….

I mentioned in the last post that I have been very busy with work related issues for the past week or so, and I have been, so involved mentally, that for the first time in nearly a year it was all my small brain could handle.

Several of the projects I’m involved with are moving, or have moved, into user and pre-production testing.

This has been an interesting experience for me. Believe it or not, throughout the course of my 20+ year career, I’ve never worked anywhere that the attention to detail and pre-production testing was so well organized.

One of the steps we’re taking is to actually ‘hand off’ the processes to an individual who has had no involvement at all in the project, or the processes, up until now.

While my inclination is to develop discrete modules that can be deployed and run by anyone, this project has had many twists, turns and rework items along the way. It turned out fine as last evening about 5:30 or so he called and let me know that everything had runs as expected, once a couple of ‘authority’ issues were addressed earlier in the day.

This company also has a very secure system, from the PC at the desktop, through the mid-tier Sun systems and all the way through to the mainframe. Every file has associated read, insert, update and overwrite ‘authorities’ attached, if any of these are not set exactly right, you simply can not even ‘see’ the file let alone open or change it.

It turns out that the three of us who’ve been primary in the development on this project all had things ready for hand off, and things went exactly as planned with only a couple of small glitches.

I’m convinced at this point, that this process, this pre-production “hand-off” is an excellent way to uncover not only any incomplete components, but, maybe more importantly, to sever that ‘ownership’ many of us developers tend to feel with our applications.

It’s no wonder then that this organization is tops in its field, has some of the most state of the art applications in any industry, and continues to grow in a very stable market.

Someone should do a case study on this operation, their operations and practices, as a guide to how IS/IT should be run, can be run, profitably and without the ‘in production’ problems so often associated with software development.

If you recall, the company is the electronic ‘hub’ of an industry, much like Sabre is the electronic hub of the airline industry. Having worked for both of these companies, I can tell you that everything here, from the initial rough project specifications through the final steps to take the application to production are an order of magnitude more detailed and complete here.

Prior to this experience, I’d felt that Sabre was the standard, before Sabre it was a place called NDC in Brentwood, TN… If I’m lucky, I’ll find someone even better somewhere else along the way. On the other hand, maybe, if I’m really lucky, I’ll get to stay here and be able to contribute to their efforts to continually improve their processes.

Why am I telling you all this? Primarily because it’s on my mind.

The other reason though, is that for many of us, we live in a work environment where speed is the focus. Getting it done sooner, faster, that “I needed it done a week before I asked for it” mentality, is very prevalent in the workplace today.

Companies are always looking to get it done faster, cheaper and with less resources that ever before.

I’m telling you that on this project, for the most part there were two primary developers, late in the project they brought in a Web (Java) developer to create some web pages for the new tables and accesses we’d created. Then, about two weeks ago, in preparation for the other primary person being assigned to a new start-up project a third developer was brought on to take over the finalization of her in progress work.

The rest of the team consisted of users and a product manager, my development partner and I simply took their needs and bought them into being, against the project timelines, the project manager keeping us apprized of upcoming deadlines and seeking our input for any risks we saw in meeting those deadlines.

I’ve often said that when it comes to almost anything in life you desire, you can have it two of three possible ways, Fast, Cheap and Right. You can never have all three, attempts to achieve all three usually result in none of the three being accomplished.

I’d say, in this project, we’ve achieved Fast and Right, due to the number of people involved, it certainly wasn’t ‘Cheap’, it was however, cheap in terms of IS resources. I’ve seen much smaller projects, involve many more developers, many fewer users, with far less satisfying results.

I’ll be thinking more about this development process, and how it differs dramatically from the “Run, Crash, Debug” cycle I’ve seen at nearly every other gig I’ve had. I thought, at one time, that this CRD cycle was the lot in life of the developer. This experience has changed my thoughts on that radically.

So, whatever ‘rut’ you find yourself in at the moment, take a moment, think about it, and realize that out there somewhere is a company who’s figured out that there’s a better way. Now, all you have to do, is find them!

Once again, to all of you who took the time to drop me a line and ask if everything at my end was ok, THANK YOU!!! Despite the hectic pace of the past week or so… it was very nice to know y’all were thinking about me!! I promise I’ll be by your place(s), as soon as I can!

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